Ed-Tech list members,
I am at the Florida Educational Technology Conference (FETC) in Orlando. This is a K-12 conference, so I don’t attend the sessions, but the exhibit hall is filled with products that cross over to higher education. That is where I spend my time. Here is a report of what I found and thought about today.
Moodlerooms (http://www.moodlerooms.com) – Moodle (http://moodle.org) is an open-source (free) learning management system (LMS). Blackboard is a commercial LMS. Moodle is designed by an educator, so it has some really nice features. Since it is extensible (you can add things on to it) there is little that you cannot do with it. But some people are worried about moving to it, since they would not have any support. Moodlerooms provides that support and hosts the LMS on their machines, for $1 per student per year. They have a number of institutions that have moved from Blackboard to Moodle with their help. One example is LSU. The LMS cost at UM would drop from $300,000 per year to $30,000 per year. Of course there are lots of issues in changing platforms, particularly the effect on faculty who will have to learn a new system and move materials to it. I continue to be intrigued by Moodle, and moodlerooms solves one of the impediments to adopting it.
SMART Technologies makes the Sympodium writing tablets that we installed in the new classrooms. They have a new model out. It is the same size as our current tablets, but they are not touch sensitive. Our current tablets are supposed to use the pen when it is removed from its tray, and be touch sensitive when the pen is in the tray. The new model only uses the pen. That loses a capability but simplifies the system. If our tablets don’t work correctly, they are always touch sensitive. That means that they sense your hand when you write with the pen, or they read the wire attached to the pen if it brushes against the screen. So maybe we would be better off with the pen only versions. I need to ask people whether they use the touch screen with their fingers.
SMART Technologies also makes a personal response system (PRS) called Senteo. (These are often referred to as clickers.) UM currently has at least three versions of clickers in use: Interwrite PRS (http://www.interwritelearning.com/), iClicker (http://www.iclicker.com/), and Turning Point (http://www.turningtechnologies.com/). UM will be standardizing on one system, either one of these or some other, to place in the general purpose classrooms and to support with training and assistance. SMART’s Senteo has some limitations, the primary one being that it only works from within the SMART Notebook software. It is interesting to look at all the alternatives and analyzing their differences.
Intel, the chip maker, has material at http://www.intel.com/education for teacher training, engineering students, and more. All free.
Computrace LoJack for Laptops (http://www.lojackforlaptops.com/) by Absolute (http://www.absolute.com/) had a booth, promoting their system to return or erase lost/stolen notebook computers. UM has some software to encrypt the hard disk on a portable that everyone can get for free. LoJack costs about $50/year or $100 for three years, but provides a different capability.
nComputing (http://www.ncomputing.com) is a small company that makes an interesting device to reduce the cost of computers in a lab or classroom. Rather than buying 4 individual computers, you buy one tower computer, a bit more powerful than you might have normally purchased. Then you buy three more monitors, keyboards, and mice, and attach each set to an nComputing box. The reduction in computer costs and maintenance time is significant. A number of schools in Florida are moving to this solution in their labs, according to the people at the booth. It would be interesting to have someone at UM test this solution. They will provide free equipment to try it out.
Interlink makes a number of different remote control presentation controllers (http://www.smklink.com/index.php?id=Mzky). In supporting the renovated classrooms, we know that faculty want the ability to walk around the room and control the computer. We went with the Gyration air mouse (http://www.gyration.com/). There are alternatives, such as the Interlink, that we should probably review at UM.
Polycom (http://www.polycom.com) had a booth and I talked with them about the use of video conferencing to bring guests into a classroom or to allow students in other location to watch and listen to the class. UM has a lot of Polycom equipment, but access for faculty could be better, in my opinion.
StoreVault (http://www.storevault.com) makes a networked backup system that is interesting. I need the capability to back up all of our computers in the IAC so that we can completely restore any computer onto a new hard drive, should the original hard drive fail. This includes the data, the applications, and the operating system. I use Acronis True Image Home to back up my computer to an external hard drive. I can’t afford to take a week to reconfigure my computer after a major problem, I need to get everything running almost immediately, and I would expect that all faculty members need that same capability. Anyway, I will be looking carefully at the StoreVault solutions to see if they meet our needs in the IAC.
MozyPro (http://www.mozy.com/) is an on-line backup service. I am going to also look into this backup solution, since it provides the safety of physically separating the original media and backup media. If you backup to a hard drive that is next to your computer, and someone steals everything, you didn’t really have a backup. Ask Francis Ford Coppola (http://tinyurl.com/2w4ep6). In researching this tonight, I came across ADrive (http://www.adrive.com/) which offers 50GB of free on-line storage. For many people that would be MORE than enough to store their pictures, music files, and probably their complete My Documents folder. Note that there may be problems putting UM files on an on-line storage system like these.
Wimba (http://www.winba.com/) makes of the voice tools add-on to Blackboard that we have at UM. This is heavily used in our modern language courses. We have been working on getting a license signed since last summer. It looks like the final session to work out the details will be tomorrow.
Learning Objects (http://www.learningobjects.com/) makes the blog, wiki, and podcast tools that we have added to Blackboard at UM. It is always a pleasure to talk with them about the many capabilities they add to Blackboard. They recently added some features to their web sites, including a knowledgebase and use cases. The use cases (http://www.learningobjects.com/usageguide.jsp) can help faculty think about how the blog and wiki tools might be incorporated in their courses.
Centurion Technologies (http://www.centuriontech.com/) makes the Cornerstone product that we have installed in all the new classroom computers. This software allows anything to be done to the computer, but instantly restores it to the original condition on a reboot. It also has a control center that allows us to unprotect the computers early each morning so that Symantec Anti-Virus and Microsoft Updates can be processed, with no intervention on our part. I met one of the support people that has been of great help to us as we got things configured this year. By the way, UM has a license for 1,000 copies of the Cornerstone product. They can be obtained from IT on request. If there are public computers that sometimes get messed up and need to be maintained, I strongly endorse this solution.
I covered eight of the fifteen aisles today. Back tomorrow for the remaining seven.
Bill Vilberg
