There is no box

thinking out loud about technology, education and life

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K-12 Superintendent, reformed IT guy, educator, 1:1 evangelist, life long learner, father, husband, geek, ex self-propelled field artillery turret mechanic, GCT, CCTO, INFP

  • VDI Hell

    I sat down to write a post about storage solutions and my recent decision to purchase a Nimble Storage Array however I wanted to properly address why I was looking for new storage to begin with and didn’t want a simple post to turn into an 8,000 word greek tragedy. So let me set the stage with the (multi-part) backstory and I’ll write the storage post a bit later.

    Almost 10 months ago today I stepped into a new district and inherited a VDI infrastructure that on paper most IT people dream about. Lots of Dell chassis and blades, big iron SANs, VMWare View, redundancy. The whole nine yards. At least on paper. You see the district, back in 2009, decided to be an early adopter to VDI. Rather than pilot a few dozen users and scale up, they went all in and cut over every user in the district virtually over night. And they did it with a Vendor that had never implemented VDI on such a scale. To be fair I don’t think very many had back then. Suffice it to say, there were issues. Upon my arrival I found a system suffering from major performance problems with many different causes.

    The traditional SAN storage, which pretty much everyone now acknowledges as being critical for running VDI desktop environments was an obvious bottle neck. The system was also suffering from a major case of VM sprawl. More and more client machines had been added without consideration for server side capacity. After all, adding VMs was so easy in the new View environment. Additionally, to the school sites adding clients became a cheap proposition in the case of sub $400 Wyse thin clients or free in the case of donated desktops running thin client software (we are using DevonIT VDI Blaster).

    As if all that were not enough, in planning for the initial hardware resources, the absolute bare minimum requirements for memory and hard drive space were used. The Guest VMs were setup to run with 512MB of RAM and 8GB HDD for Windows XP SP3. As you can imagine this caused Operating System performance issues inside the VMs in addition to the external storage performance issues with the SAN. In a perfect world, we would simply allocate more resources to each VM, however an insufficient lack of forward planning meant that the original hardware purchased was just enough to meet the initial VM Guest requirements  We did not have enough Host memory or SAN space to provide additional system resources to the Windows XP clients, forget about trying to do an upgrade to Windows 7.

    A cost saving decision that haunts us to this day (and there were others) was to re-use old computer hardware. Those machines are now anywhere from 8-12 years old. Not only do we see hardware failures among these systems present themselves as intermittent connection and stability problems but many of them can only run the RDP protocol. Audio/Video playback, something that has become critical to classroom instruction over the last few years, is painful if not downright impossible under RDP. This severely limits the options teachers and students have for accessing 21st Century learning resources.

    There are also many moving parts with the VDI system. There is a SQL Server Database Server hosting the databases for VCenter and View. I have had to dust off my rusty Database server skills to fix major downtime causing issues both with the the SQL Server and the individual Databases. There are also two connection servers which provide the View connection brokering. There have been several issues with both of these. The most interesting was a corruption with the local ADAM database which caused all kinds of odd behavior with our View Desktop Pools. The single VCenter server is managing both ESX server hosts and View hosts and often appears to “pause” under the heavy task load of serving up 1400+ available VMs with over 800 active connections. After a particularly bad power outage, when all the systems went down hard, two View hosts appeared perfectly fine but when active in their respective clusters caused all kinds of havoc with desktop provisioning. Active Directory and networking also play a pivotal role in the system and on more than one occasion both have thrown a wrench into the system in one way or another.

    By now you may be thinking, “What’s the big deal, IT department spends lots of time keeping VDI running. Isn’t that what the IT department should be doing?” No. We should not. Not with a staff of three including me.  After attending the VMWorld conference this summer I was struck by how often I heard “Storage Team”, “Server Team” and “Database Team” in conversations about supporting VDI. These were people talking about 200-500 desktop deployments. There I was with 1200 (at the time) VMs thinking, “Teams? I’ve got me, a network engineer and a desktop tech. There are no Teams!”. With the limited staff available to me and the many moving parts, complex enterprise moving parts I might add, keeping the system running was an exercise in extreme firefighting. We had no time to be proactive and when the system hiccuped, every user in the district was affected. It was an untenable situation to find oneself in but that is where I was after coming back from VMWorld. Hit with the realization that I had a hugely complex system that had not been setup well and was failing on many levels.

    What was I to do? The answer, perhaps, to come later in Part 2.

  • Standby

    In the continuing saga of my iPad mini v. Nexus 7 use, I’ve come up against another issue. Standby time. I’m using both devices daily now. The Nexus 7 is my breakfast table news reader. I spend about 25 minutes in the morning on Flipboard reading the headlines before I set it down for the day. I’m using the iPad mini at night for watching Video (most recently the Ray Mears Bushcraft series on YouTube) which I do for about an hour. I then put it in my backpack where it usually spends the day at work.

     

    Battery

     

    What I’ve found is that in these use cases, the Nexus 7 runs out of juice within two days, even with minimal use, while the iPad mini can go for three to four days without requiring a charge. In fact I constantly find myself picking up the Nexus 7 in the morning and getting the 13% battery notice or on a few occasions, find that it has turned itself off and when I power it on, it immediately shuts down again. I’ve yet to have that experience with the iPad mini. Even when I get down to 20% and then 10% I can still make it through a video before plugging it in for the night.

    A few weeks ago I took the kids skiing in wireless no man’s land and left the iPad on the dresser with around 60% battery. When we came home after being away for 3 days, it still had over 50% left. The Nexus 7, which was half charged as well, was completely dead. I’m also seeing the same thing with my kid’s iPad, she’s using it for 20-30 minutes daily and we’re only having to charge it maybe once a week.

    Standby time is one of those things I’m really starting to appreciate in daily use of these tablets and Apple seems to be doing it better than anyone else at the moment.

  • ELA And The Common Core – Notes From Today’s #clstech13 Keynote

    Today was day one of the California League of Schools (CLS) K-12 Common Core, English Learners & Technology Conference in Monterey, CA. This is my second year (maybe third, it’s late ok?) attending as a presenter and unlike other EdTech conferences, the focus here is not as “tech heavy” as others. Today’s Keynote by Dr. Kate Kinsella is a perfect example. None of the strategies or topics presented required technology to implement. However that did not stop my mind from going into overdrive thinking about all the ways technology could be integrated into teaching Academic Language which was the main topic of the keynote.

    I am not an English Teacher. I don’t even play one on TV, so I found the keynote presentation about Common Core and English Language Arts fascinating. I hadn’t given much thought to all that goes into teaching kids English fluency. The closest experience I’ve had has been watching Kid1 spend every waking moment with a book glued to her face since she was old enough to read (and I don’t remember when/how that happened exactly) and hearing Kid2, now just over two, start using complete sentences and emulating her big sister’s fascination with books. So my understanding of ELA instruction is mighty thin.

    I’ve known the Common Core was coming for some time and realized early on that it harbored big changes to what classroom instruction should/would look like (that’s why I pushed so hard for modern teacher tech and 1:1 student computing at Le Grand UHSD) but this morning I came away with a clearer picture of just how big the hurdle for ELA (and all teachers actually) is about to become. Here are some of my notes from the session:

    • Students are going to be required to read more informational text, with a much higher level of Academic vocabulary than found in the old standards and much more challenging that what is currently tested under CST.
    • Students are going to have to learn to write differently in the form of academic summary vs. what they “liked” about a text.
    • “The New Basic” will be Far Below Basic (FBB) under Common Core, implying that students that score Basic on the current CST tests will struggle under the new Common Core Assessments and score lower than they do now.
    • Implementing Common Core successfully does not mean doing what we’ve been doing only better but looking at changing what we’re doing altogether.
    • When planning lessons, it is no longer enough to ask students what they think about or for their ideas on the objectives. Students must be able to answer and provide justification, evidence and conclusions and explain why they answered they way that they did.
    • Group Work is overdone and poorly executed. Group work and Partner work can be effective when used with structured procedures, scaffolding and repetition.
    • High Utility Vocabulary will be important to student’s academic success.

    I was impressed with how Dr. Kinsella modeled her instructional methodologies throughout the session with active audience participation. She repeatedly stressed the teaching of Career (and College) appropriate communication. Basically these are the soft skills that Employers and Universities complain students graduating high school don’t have.

    A random thought that popped into my head at one point was, “It sounds like she wants to make kids act and sound like little academics!” And I suppose she does. I’m curious to know what Sir Ken Robinson’s take on this approach would be, since the Common Core and ELA instruction tailored around information text and strict Academic Language would seem to further drive out Creativity and Play from our classrooms. But then again, Dr. Kinsella did seem to think Kindergarten teachers posed a particular challenge and I’m quite fond of the idea that all school should look more like Kindergarten.

    We were provided an excellent 58 page handout (yes, 58 pages!) that I will be sharing with my Ed Services department when I get into the DO on Monday. While technology was mostly absent, save the Keynote and Video presentations used, it was an informative and thought provoking opening. Common Core is coming and things are going to change. That much is certain. Those that have recognized this and have already started adapting are poised to provide their student’s a distinct advantage in preparedness for what awaits them beyond school. For the rest, it could get ugly.

    What do you think? Is Information Text and Academic Vocabulary the way forward for preparing kids for the unknown?

     

    PS. Tomorrow at 2:30 I present:

    Small School Big Tech – The 1:1 Challenge

    iPads, Netbooks, Chromebooks, MacBooks, Tablets, Apps, Wifi, Cloud, Google Apps. What’s a school to do? How do we scale from 60 to 600 to 6000 devices? We’ll talk about strategies for leveraging free and open source resources to minimize infrastructure costs and maximize classroom technology from a district perspective.  Where are we spending our limited technology dollars? Build a five year tech budget with a ten year vision. Have a plan! What’s the future of edtech look like, what’s important to be investing in now? We’ll discuss key areas to focus on for building a 21st Century technology footprint for today and tomorrow. 

    I should probably start working on the slide deck…

  • My New Nemesis, The iPad mini

    I don’t think the iPad mini likes me very much. This is an update regarding the picture quality of the iPad mini when used as a doc cam. Upon further research, it turns out the rear camera on the mini should be just as good as the iPad (3rd & 4th Gens) so I have no idea why I was getting such pixelated images when zooming compared to my old iPad (3rd Gen) during my doc cam testing. I decided to run the test again. Here is a picture of the setup:

     

    iPad Doc Cam

     

    And the results:

    iPad 3rd Gen Full Zoom

    iPad 3rd Gen

     

    iPad mini Full Zoom (From same height, with same lighting and pointed at the same document)

    iPad (3rd Gen)

    You can see the iPad mini image is much more pixelated. This is not a function of the picture upload or it being encoded for the web. This is how the two pictures look on the iPads. You’ll notice how crisp the camera icons are in the iPad mini screen shot above.

    So what am I doing wrong here? Shouldn’t the iPad mini have better picture quality than my old iPad 3? I’m staying away from the mini for teachers mainly because of this issue. Now I’m a little concerned given that they should all have the exact same cameras. Anyone care to test this with a 4th Gen iPad?

  • Apple Fan Boy – The Holy Wars Return

    Apparently to some Android fanboys on Google+ I came off sounding like an Apple fan in my last post about the Nexus 7 and the iPad mini. Well, I have been running iOS devices since the iPhone 3 days so yes, I’m a bit entrenched in the iOS ecosystem. (And yes, I shouldn’t let a few posts get to me, but it was write this reply or work on virtual desktops, so here we go).

    I have not spent all of my past waking moments in iOS. I did run a rooted Nook Tablet with Cyanogen for several months and found Android to be hacker friendly but not as good as iOS at the things that were important to me at the time. While the hardware and the OS have much improved, I still feel pretty much the same way.

    As I noted in my device comparison, I’m vested in the Air Video Server app for playing my media library. If the Air Video Server app was made available for Android tomorrow, I’d still prefer watching video on the mini due to the better screen brightness and the more comfortable feel of the device when held in landscape mode. While watching YouTube on the Nexus 7 and then going back to the mini, I find the video looks better to me on the iPad, even without the retina display. And let’s not forget about the magic that is AirPlay Mirroring.

    The bottom line for me is that the iPad mini runs the apps I want (and have accumulated over the years), lasts on standby for days and generally feels better in daily use. And yes, it has a hardware button that works. I can’t say that has been the case with the Nexus’ soft buttons all the time. I also much prefer the 4:3 form factor of the mini to the 16:9 wide format of the nexus.

    Is the iPad mini for everyone? With a $139 price premium over the Nexus 7, the answer is a solid no. However, were I buying a 7″ class tablet for my Mom (not that I would) and thinking about those family tech support calls, the iPad mini would be my choice hands down. If I had a teenager, I’d think long and hard about a Nexus 7, although a 4.3″ Android smart phone would probably be preferable. I’m also very interested in Android’s multi-user mode as I think this would be a great feature for a “living room” tablet but as yet, I’ve not seen a 10″ android tablet I really like (hardware wise).

    All of this reminds me of the Windows vs. Mac holy war from days gone by. Now it seems, Android and iOS are similarly positioned. Android tablets may have reached the “good enough”and cheap enough status levels needed to break out with wide spread user adoption but the iPad still is what a “tablet” is in most people’s minds. All others are compared to iPad and Apple does still make some of the best hardware around. Of course Apple blew their chance to dominate once before. Who knows, maybe they’ll do it again.

  • mini V Nexus. And The Winner Is?

    I’ve been alternating between the iPad mini and Nexus 7 tablet for over a month now and a clear winner has emerged. But first, a note about these two devices as applied to schools. That was the original genesis of my interest in both. Unfortunately, neither device meets the minimum requirements for the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) testing. This takes both out of play for student use. Perhaps that might change in the future, but for now I don’t recommend purchasing large numbers of devices unless they can run the new state testing regime.

    As for teacher use, I came across on interesting discovery while testing iPads as Document Cameras the other day. Running an iPad3 as a doc camera using the rear facing camera works great. The image is clear and can be zoomed in without loss of quality. A critical feature when wanting to display text to a room full of 2nd graders. However, when I switched to the iPad Mini I found that zooming in on text produced pixelated and blurry images. Doing some research (ok, I googled “iPad mini camera”) I discovered that the camera on the mini isn’t so great. Since replacing $500 doc cams with iPads is a big selling point for me at the moment, the weak camera performance rules out the mini for teachers. The Nexus 7 with it’s lack of a rear facing camera doesn’t qualify for use as a doc cam at all and it’s lack of AirPlay Mirroring further limits it’s effectiveness as a teacher presentation tool in my opinion.

    So, bottom line, both the iPad mini and the nexus 7 aren’t a good fit for schools. But when it comes to personal use, it’s another story.

    In my month of daily use,  a clear winner has emerged for me personally. While the Nexus 7 is an excellent tablet and it’s the only android tablet I’m recommending to my budget conscious friends, my media lives in the apple echo system. As such, I’ve worked out a system for media access that works great for me. I use a product called Air Video Server to play all the DivX files I’ve accumulated over the years (you do remember DivX, don’t you? It was great for compressing all those DVDs). While I’m slowly converting to H.264, Air Video on the iPad Mini streams non-H.264 content to an iOS device like a champ. Paired with AirPlay Mirroring to the AppleTV on the big screen and I have a complete media streaming service that works across all of the iOS devices in the house. iPhones (3GS to 4S) and iPads (iPad2, iPad3 & iPad Mini). If only Apple would release Apps for AppleTV, I could cut out the middle man and stream direct from the Air Video Server to the AppleTV.

    Now, before you lambast me with comments, yes, I am aware of alternative, non-apple solutions to my particular media problem. I’ve tried most of them at one point in time or another. XBMC, MythTV, Windows Media Center, Plex, etc… None has worked as seamlessly and effortlessly as Air Video Server. To the point that my Wife and my 7 year old can both now access our media library on their own iOS devices. Not that we spend every waking hour watching Thailand vacation videos or Notting Hill. But we could, if we wanted to. And quite easily too.

    But I’d be pretty shallow if my main reason for liking a device was how easily it can access media from a home server. I also find the reading and web surfing experience on the mini more user friendly. The mini is more responsive than the nexus in everyday use. Despite the goodness of Project Butter, there are still times I find myself waiting for the Nexus to respond to a touch command. I’m also severely bugged by the “soft” home button. Maybe I’m so used to the iOS devices and their physical home button that I’m programed for that experience now but for whatever reason, it really annoys me. I find I actually like the mini’s wider screen for reading on the web, although I do end up holding it in landscape view more often then portrait because of the width. I hold the Nexus in portrait mode more often than not. Mainly because the primary app I use on it, Flipboard, doesn’t give me the option to go into landscape mode (UPDATE – the latest version of Flipboard on the Nexus 7 does provide for landscape view, however I’m finding the narrow screen doesn’t lend itself to this view as well as it does on the wider iPad mini). Strange as it seems, I miss the “freedom” of iOS when using the Nexus 7. Also, the mini feels ligher. That might change when I put a case on it though. I do like the rubber non-slip back of the Nexus 7. I’ve been running the mini naked but it really does need some protection if it’s going to survive long term.

    To sum up, I don’t see either device being the perfect 1:1 solution for schools. Sometimes price isn’t everything. If Apple revs the camera in the next version, then maybe the mini will be a good fit for teachers. I think they’d appreciate hefting the lighter weight around all day. As for the Nexus, without a rear facing camera and AirPlay support, I just don’t see it as a teacher tablet device. Even in a Google Apps environment, which I haven’t really talked about, neither device really makes sense for edTech (yet). For personal use, the iPad mini is the clear winner for me. It’s light, responsive (my previous experience with performance issues was probably related to trying to install a dozen apps right out of the box) and it works in my media environment. The killer app for me is AirPlay Mirroring. When Android might support AirPlay natively, I don’t know but I hope they look to do it at some point. Even Plex, the awesome media server app, is baking in AirPlay support. It really is stupid simply and very powerful.

    Based on my environment, the iPad mini is the little tablet for me. Android just isn’t there for me yet (or maybe I’m so deep into iOS, I can’t see a way out). Wether or not I actually need a little tablet when I have an iPhone (two actually since my 3GS returned from the dead) and an iPad is a discussion for another day.

  • The Future of EdTech Is Free (Mostly)

    Without knowing it, I spent the last nine years preparing my previous district for the future. It was all very much by accident. We decided to embrace thin clients early on. The driver was primarily cost and had no real connection to instruction. We just wanted more computers in more classrooms. As a result of running thin clients and quadrupling our student computer count district wide, we started down a path that would position us to move to 1:1 computing when the opportunity presented itself.

    We moved from client/server applications to web based hosted solutions to improve performance. To provide students the opportunity to use tools we would not otherwise have been able to afford we moved them to open source apps like OpenOffice and the odd sounding but very good Adobe replacements; Scribus, Inkscape and The Gimp. Teachers resisted but students didn’t miss a beat. When we realized even free apps required installation, management and support, we pivoted to free cloud based solutions like Google Apps, Aviary and Animoto. On the server side, we traded paid services for free when we setup an open source Moodle Learning Management server and hosted our District web site on our own WordPress server. We used free virtualization tools from VMWare to consolidate Servers and reduce our expensive server hardware footprint.

    When the rise of multimedia in the classroom clashed with thin client performance we pivoted again to netbooks running the open source Ubermix (http://ubermix.org) from Jim Klein at Saugus Union School District and desktop labs running the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP). We were able to seamlessly switch operating systems because we had embraced the cloud early on. Only the teachers really noticed, but again, the students kept right on moving forward with us.

    We did struggle with teacher adoption of technology until we realized we were asking teachers to use outdated tools (Office 2003 anyone?) on old, slow computers running outdated Operating Systems (Windows XP). We experimented with teachers running Ubermix but ended up going a different route when the iPad appeared on the scene. We counted up our teachers, did the math and made the decision to lease everyone a new iPad and MacBook. We finally decided to build up to date teacher technology into the cost of educating 21st Century Students. Just like everyone else, we had no money but what money we did have we deliberately chose to start spending as close to the classroom as possible.

    In doing so we made some non-traditional decisions along the way. We did not buy expensive web filtering software (Open Source software does meet CIPA compliance, didn’t you know?) or email filtering (Google Apps includes it for free). We didn’t buy enterprise class network hardware from the number one manufacturer. Instead we bought branch office grade from the number three and got free next day hardware replacement and software updates for life. We did not buy into the network security FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) being bantered about by the sales reps. We were a school district, not a bank. Instead of buying expensive annual support contracts for devices that were locked away in closets, we bought teachers the best hardware available to help make their jobs easier.

    We installed mounted LCD projectors in every classroom to provide digital presentation capabilities for all teachers. We increased our bandwidth to the Internet significantly and paid the additional cost. After all, the web made free possible. Cloud Services, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), and 1:1 student computing all had significant bandwidth and wireless access requirements and we were ready for the opportunities when they arrived because we invested in bandwidth early. We replaced wireless networks three times, finally settling on a solution that was robust, inexpensive and so easy to manage a teacher could do it and did (much like Google Apps, our Open Source Web Filter and the Ubermix netbooks).

    Once teachers were mobile, running on modern hardware, able to project the web to the class and had access to web 2.0 tools, instruction started to change and collaboration along with it. Teachers could take their technology with them to collaboration meetings. They could sit with their laptops working on data, reviewing student work and accessing subject area content in real time. We opened up access to tools like Dropbox for file storage, YouTube for hosting video and Google Apps for collaboration workflows. We sent staff to conferences and they started bringing back resources, experimenting with ideas and sharing with their colleagues in the district. Our teachers started to become active learners. In short, we invested dollars in empowering teachers with modern technology and they started driving the instructional revolution in their classrooms. All it took was a shift in how we looked at technology.

    We shifted from a server room and computer lab paradigm to a mobile, classroom and student centered paradigm. We realized we could do a lot with free and open source but only if Teachers and Students had access to modern computers with reliable wireless network access and fast Internet. Most importantly, we locked in a hardware refresh cycle to ensure that teachers would always have a common and up-to-date platform from which to deliver instruction and collaborate with one another. And that is the first step to unlocking the future.

    My previous district is two years into a three year plan to go 1:1 District wide. They deployed iPads to 9th through 11th graders this year. I’d like to say we had a crystal ball handy when we made the decisions that we did but the reality is we were just trying to provide the best services possible with (almost) no money. Web 2.0, free and open source software, cloud services and shifting the technology focus to opening up access to the web and empowering individual teachers and students is the future. It can be a mostly free future if you spend wisely and embrace it.

    This is the way of Small School Big Tech.

  • iPad mini – Star Teck Tech At A Premium Price

    A few Sundays ago I just happened to be within a stones throw of an Apple Store. Long story short, I walked in, hailed down a blue shirt and bought a black 64GB Wifi iPad Mini. On opening weekend, it was all that was left. I paid $529 for it. I immediately took it home, unboxed it, picked it up and thought to myself, “Where’s the rest of this thing?”

    In case you haven’t held one by now, the iPad mini is super thin and feather light. As in, when I hold it I have to periodically remind myself that I am actually holding something in my hand. It is the mythical data pad from Star Trek TNG that promises to help extricate its users from any and all impossible situations.

    For a week, I put aside my faithful iPad 2 and used the mini pretty much exclusively doing all the things I do with an iPad; watch netflix, check email, use twitter, remote into an occasional windows server, look things up on the internet and read. All in all I found the iPad mini to be on par with the iPad 2 in daily use with a few annoyances:

    • During the first few hours of use, the system would often become unresponsive to touch. I think it was having a tough time downloading and installing all of my purchased apps.
    • Trying to tap on URLs and things on the edges of the screen sometimes took multiple tries. Everything is smaller on the mini.
    • It’s light so holding it in one hand was easy but I found myseld holding it in landscape mode over portrait because it’s just a bit too wide in portrait for comfort.
    • No retina display, which didn’t bother me since I use an iPad2 mostly, until I decided to compare it to my 4S screen and then it started bothering me.
    • During some game play I noticed a bit of lag in the transitions. Specifically playing Fruit Ninja HD.

    And some highlights:

    • It’s light. So light it feels like a toy. But it is easy to hold one-handed for prolonged movie watching or reading.
    • I had much better wifi reception compared to the iPad2.
    • Every app I tried looked great and just worked.
    • After the initial responsiveness issues, it seemed fairly snappy.

    Primarily I bought the iPad mini to see if it would be suitable for use in the classroom. I quickly decided that for only $70 more, an iPad2 makes more sense. Size and weight are not issues with iPads in classrooms. Usability, accessibility, durability, deployment and ongoing management are. For the bigger screen (easier to share, show and create content), bigger virtual keyboard and (in my opinion) more durable device makes $70 insignificant. If the mini had been in the Nexus 7 price range, I may be singing a different tune but alas it is not. Apple still has momentum and ecosystem going for it in Education but the $329 price opens the door for android tablets which only continue to improve. Open systems will always win our over closed ones.

    In the end, I decided that $529 for a non retina, A5 based mini, 64GB and all, was just ridiculous. I ended up returning it after 10 days. Did you know apple has a 14 day no questions asked, no fee return policy? Crazy! I’ve decided to wait for a mini with a Retina display before handing over my own money for one. I feel like with iPad2 hardware, Apple is selling an old product that will be obsolete in six months. Yes, it’s the lowest entry point for an iPad, and it is definitely an iPad experience, but it’s last years experience which will be out of date in only a few months.

    I still have a work iPad mini that I am using. Mostly to show people why an iPad2 or iPad (4th generation) is really the way to go for the classroom for now. And I’m also using the Nexus 7 quite a bit more now. The 4.2 update with multiple user sign on has potential, especially in a shared cart based deployment. Apple may have brought us future tech from one of my favorite universes but it missed the boat on pricing and educationally, I think the larger screen works better in the classroom. Now if only they’d make a full-sized iPad that looked and felt like the mini. I guess I just have to wait a few months for the iPad (5th generation, or will it be The Next Generation?) to come out and really obsolete my 3rd generation iPad. Got to love planned obsolescence.

  • Computer Technology for Teaching & Learning – Help!

    This upcoming Tuesday I start teaching a college course entitled “Computer Technology for Teaching/Learning I”.

    I have been given a Syllabus outlining the objectives and the person that taught it last has shared his google site with me. Both are fairly open and I could take the class many different directions. My question is, what essential technology skills do new teachers need their first year to succeed in this ever changing landscape? I’m thinking document formatting in word and making a powerpoint aren’t going to cut it anymore.

    Your comments and suggestions welcome.

    Thanks

  • VDI: These Aren’t The Desktops You Are Looking For

    One of my presentations at CETPA last week was “1,000 Desktop View” and it was all about how I’ve inherited a 1000 VDI desktop environment running VMWare View. At some point I may write a longer post on the topic but for now here are my slides from the presentation and if you’re a school looking for a way to save money on technology, don’t go VDI in the classroom. Buy your teachers laptops. They’ll thank you for it and you’ll all be a lot happier in the long run.