Dell Vostro 1520, Ubuntu 9.10/Fedora 11, Wireless & Promethean

I’ve been trying to get a working build of Linux for our new Dell Vostro 1520 laptops, and have hit on three problems (which I’ve now, I think, resolved)

1. Frequent keyboard/mouse lockups under Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)
2. ActivStudio locks up under Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) – no mouse clicks accepted
3. No wireless support under Ubuntu 9.10 or Fedora 11

I started with Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) as this is an officially supported release by Promethean.
Hit a problem where I’d boot up and the keyboard and/or trackpad were unresponsive. Normally just the trackpad.

I managed to work around that – it’s well documented in various fora – by adding irqpoll to the grub boot options (/boot/grub/menu.lst) for the current kernel. (2.6.29, I think it was, from memory)

Got ActivStudio installed. All seemed great. Until I tried to teach a lesson. The board was very sluggish, stubborn to respond to writing, but only occasionally. I put it down to it being an old board. But then I found I could write on the board, but not click on any of the icons, or even close windows, etc. All very odd. Couldn’t find an obvious fix.

So, I tried to update to kernel 2.6.3x via several routes – first, just downloading a deb and installing on Ubuntu 9.04. No wireless support, and the promethean module wouldn’t compile either.

Ok, tried 9.10 beta, with 2.6.31 kernel. No wireless. Grr. Tried Fedora 11, still no wireless. I can’t say I was surprised, as they’re all based on the same kernel, and the change of behaviour is down to a rewrite of the wireless code in 2.6.3x, and NetworkManager, apparently.

So a bit of digging… And it looks to be a Dell specific bug – the wireless kill switch (rfkill) is reporting an incorrect status to NetworkManager, which assumes that therefore the wireless is disabled.

Well, that lead me to a Dell Firmware update for the Vostro 1520, to A03 – bugs fixed? “Fixed incorrect WiFi kill switch status”. Sounds promising. Oh, but you have to run the update from Windows… grr. So, I re-imaged my machine from our standard Windows build, which, fortunately, only takes 6-7 minutes on a gigabit connection. Installed firmware update.

Re-installed Ubuntu 9.10 beta.

Got Wireless!

Went to Promethean, added the Ubuntu 9.04 deb repository to /etc/apt/sources.list

Installed activdriver, activtools, activinspire, activresources-core-en. Sat back. Rebooted. And then started using my whiteboard.

All seems good so far in iwb on Linux land, with a few tweaks along the way to deal with my hardware oddities.

Moodle -> gApps SSO Update

This last week I’ve managed to get all my groups from year 3 to year 6 signed up for our Google Apps domain, using the Moodle SSO to create the accounts.

Mostly, this has been a straightforward exercise, but every now and then, an account pops up that just won’t create in Google. If I go to the gApps control panel, and try to add the user manually, I get “the user already exists”, but it doesn’t appear in the user list.

Solution – GAM – http://code.google.com/p/google-apps-manager/

I can create the problem users in GAM, and suddenly everything works. How odd!

Some examples of GAM usages – http://code.google.com/p/google-apps-manager/wiki/GAMExamples

Moodle, Mahara, Google Apps and SSO

This weekend, after much geeking, I managed to get our Moodle, Mahara and Google Apps for Education systems all talking to each other. Fortunately this is all fairly well documented on the web, so it was just a matter of following instructions.

What does this achieve?

My students can now login to Moodle, and once logged in, they have links in their sidebar (Blocks, as they’re really called in Moodle) which allow them to click through to Mahara and Google Docs WITHOUT HAVING TO LOGIN again. Even better, the SSO (Single Sign On) system automatically creates user accounts in Mahara and gApps if they don’t already exist for the user.

I know what Moodle is, but what’s Mahara?

Mahara is an e-portfolio system. I must admit to having completely dismissed it when I first read about it. I just didn’t get it.

But… Imagine each child you teach uploading the finished versions of their essays, projects, etc to their own webpage or portfolio, so that, at the end of the term/year/school, they have ALL their work collected together in one portfolio. Imagine other children or teachers being able to comment on and assess the work in that portfolio. Imagine being able to share that portfolio with the outside world, e.g. parents.

That’s what Mahara can do for you.

Why would I use Google Apps/Docs instead of Word?

Lots of reasons!

• It’s online – no more do students have to e-mail docs to themselves, or use USB sticks, etc.
• Collaboration – up to 10 students can work on a Google Document at the same time. Up to 50 can work on a spreadsheet. Each document has full revision history so that you can see exactly who contributed what. YOU could even collaborate on that doc with them – live marking, for example.
• Forms. Google Forms are absolute genius. Design a Form for gathering data using their friendly designer. That form is then published on the web, and any data entered into it is inserted into a row in a spreadsheet. All those ICT lessons where you wanted a dataset and had to contrive one are a thing of the past. Want to do a Geography survey? No problem. Want to do a poll of opinion about the quality of food at school? How about some AfL? All easily and beautifully handled by Forms. Check out Tom Barret’s 10 Google Forms for the Classroom at the bottom of this post for more ideas.
• Cost. It’s free, apart from the domain name (£10 a year?).

Yes, Word has more features. Yes, Word’ll let your kids generate prettier documents (and uglier ones too). But, to my mind, content is more important than “prettiness”. Collaboration is the new learning nirvana. Google Docs provides.

What do you need to get it going for yourself?

• Moodle install (ideally 1.9.5 or later)
• Mahara install
• Google Apps domain
• Administrator access to all the above
• Ability to upload files to the Moodle installation directory

The technical side of things is pretty straightforward – just remember to follow all the steps in the following guides to the letter.

Documentation:

Moodle/Mahara integration
Moodle/gApps SSO

Some tips:

1. Google Apps requires passwords to be 6+ characters. If your student passwords are shorter than this, then their accounts will not be created.
2. If you find that when you try to login to Google via Moodle, you get a “Invalid credentials” error, the chances are that you’ve not followed the instructions about certificate installation accurately.
3. When filling out the Google Apps SSO setup page, upload your certificate FIRST – those URLs that you’ve just typed in will disappear, so why duplicate the work?
4. Create local administrator accounts in both Mahara and Moodle just in case you mess up the authentication system – if you don’t have local (i.e. non-network authenticated) admin accounts, you could get locked out of your own systems!
5. If Mahara authentication stops working a few months down the line, check the expiry date on the SSO certificate. If it’s expired, copy and paste the key from Moodle into Mahara again. All fixed, hopefully!

So, what to do with your newly integrated apps?

Check out the following ideas:

Marking Work in Google Docs
10 Google Forms for the Classroom
21 Interesting Ways to use Google Docs in the classroom
Using Mahara

ICT Resources for the English Teacher

A friend of mine asked for some ICT ideas to incorporate in her English lessons. This is what my friends on Twitter came up with:

View this document on Scribd

Note taking and task management

I’m one of those people that loves nice stationery – productivity pr0n as Merlin Mann would describe it. Trouble is, I never have it with me when I need it; you pop over to the staffroom for a coffee, and get collared on the way – “Could you just do xyz when you have 5 minutes?”. Normally said in that condescending tone which applies you’ll never have 5 minutes and it’ll never happen without being nagged a hundred times.

Truth is, it will happen.

If I remember what it was I was supposed to be doing.

David Allen and his GTD fans would say I need a better capture system. By better, read always available.

My problem is not that I have a bad memory – but that I have no alarm system. If I bump into someone who asked me to do something, I slap my forehead and pretend I was just on my way to do said job – I can remember the conversation perfectly, I’ve not had a trigger until that point to recall the conversation. I just don’t get any subconscious prompt to say “Go do xyz for Person A”.

Part of the reason for this is that I work cross-platform – Mac. PC. Linux. Solaris. Paper. PostIts. The paper is my attempt to keep everything in one place. Never works – see above. PostIts is everyone else’s attempt to make me do things. But they stay in one place (under the wheels of my chair or stuck to a shoe, normally). So, it has to be computer-based. I’ve tried ToodleDo, but there’s no real alarm system apart from daily e-mails.

I do get myself organised about once a month. I grab whatever system I’ve not used in a while, shoehorn all my tasks into it, and get busy being organised for a few hours. But I don’t really get anything done, I just *feel* like I have.

Coupled with my dreadful task management skills, there’s the whole issue of notes. I like making notes in a notebook with a nice fountain pen. Preferably a nice moleskin or such like. But, invariably, my notes get intermingled with todo items, which never make it back out of the notebook. Plus, I can never find the notebook when I need it, or I’ve left it at school when I want it at home, etc.

I’ve tried big notebooks, small notebooks, Hipster PDA, Palm pilots, etc. None of them work. I’ve tried OmniFocus on the iPhone/iPodTouch, as well as Notes.

So, a combination solution’s needed, I think.

Evernote is looking the most likely candidate for me right now. I’ve been a fan of MS’s OneNote, but it’s Windows only, which is a pain, even when using it under Parallels on the Mac, it’s just too much of a pain to keep it mobile. Evernote isn’t as feature rich as OneNote, but it does have iPhone/iPodTouch, Mac, Windows and Web clients, which makes it about as portable as you can get. I always have my iPod with me; hopefully to be turned into an iPhone some day soon.

I’m going with, effectively, context-based notebooks; school, home, computer, with Task pages in each context, and then general notes.

There is still no alarm system, which is going to be a problem, potentially.

There are some workarounds – drag and drop the task note in each context to Outlook’s Todo bar, for one. But, that’s not a reminder for an individual task, that’s a reminder for a collection of tasks. I would, I hope serve to remind me to review my task list, I guess.

As each note seems to have a URL associated with it, I’m considering writing a URL scraper, then using something like remind to e-mail me whenever I have a task due.

It’s not ideal, but it’s better than anything else I’ve got out there. I think I will continue to keep a Hipster PDA on me, just in case; it’s easier for taking note of multiple actions in a meeting.

My only real concern with using a computer based solution to note taking is that it limits the way in which I can take notes. Mind mapping is one of my favourite ways of either taking notes or creating/notating ideas. Mindmapping is not a tool that sits well with the iPhone. It just about works on a computer, but it’s just not the same as using a pen and paper. Prezi, whilst designed for presentations, might just be a way forward there, but I think for recording purposes rather than creation; nothing quite beats pen and paper for quickly fleshing out an idea. My preference for mindmapping is to have continuous roll of paper to my right – start drawing on the left hand end, keep going ’til you’re done. Folding artist’s sketchbooks are quite good for this too as you can get the same effect.

Suck it and see, I guess!