Catie Bell let me know this morning that free online courses from Alan November Learning are available at no cost to Lab School teachers and administrators through pooled Title II funds. These are high quality, high impact online experiences that will absolutely improve your ability to conduct effective web searches, evaluate the information you find, [...]
Posted on April 29th, 2009 by Curt Lieneck
Filed under: Announcements, Instructional links | Comments Off
Want to give a different twist to a writing assignment? Try using Wordle. Here’s how the Wordle people describe the tool:
“Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different [...]
Posted on April 25th, 2009 by Curt Lieneck
Filed under: Instructional links | Comments Off
Could it be that spamming is no longer a viable business model? System Administrator John Krug reports that incoming spam (that is, spam hitting the spam filter in front of the mail server) has declined just about 50 per cent in recent weeks. What a welcome development.
Posted on April 22nd, 2009 by Curt Lieneck
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Over the spring break, we moved mail service to a newer, faster server to help address the slowdowns we’d seen last quarter (you may recall the issue with spikes in the number of simultaneous connections). Since the change, we’ve not seen any slowdowns or interruptions like the ones some of you reported. We also see [...]
Posted on April 20th, 2009 by Curt Lieneck
Filed under: Announcements | No Comments »
(…three days later)
Vendor: I’m having trouble getting a response to your concerns from the Level II people since the product is out of warranty.
Me: I don’t understand. There is nothing mechanically or electronically wrong with the products. It’s the software drivers that don’t work. Why is that a warranty issue? Does software have a warranty?
Vendor: [...]
Posted on April 17th, 2009 by Curt Lieneck
Filed under: Uncategorized, Vignettes | Comments Off
Bad Idea: Saving important files in the Trash. On purpose.
Posted on April 14th, 2009 by Curt Lieneck
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(continued from post of April 7)…
Vendor (3 days later) : Oh, I see now that you actually wanted to get the problem fixed. I’ve escalated your problem to Level II since a) I really want to help, and b) you didn’t seem very happy with the Level I response.
Me: That sounds promising.
(…and now we wait…)
Posted on April 14th, 2009 by Curt Lieneck
Filed under: Uncategorized, Vignettes | Comments Off
Me: We’ve been having trouble with your print driver for months. It doesn’t work.
Vendor: You shouldn’t be having that problem.
Me: I know. That’s why I called you. Again.
Vendor: I really want to help, so I talked to our support people, who suggested you revisit the painfully obvious things you’ve already wasted a lot of time [...]
Posted on April 7th, 2009 by Curt Lieneck
Filed under: Vignettes | Comments Off
One of the policies that seems to need frequent repeating is that all school technology purchases need to be cleared with IT Director Curt Lieneck prior to purchase. This applies to hardware, software, hosted services, and all peripheral devices and accessories, regardless of funding source, including donations. I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s parade, [...]
Posted on April 1st, 2009 by Curt Lieneck
Filed under: Policy and Practice | Comments Off
Among the top selling applications for the iPhone is none other than the old favorite, “The Oregon Trail.”Check it out in the App Store in iTunes. The release of Skype for iPhone and iPod touch is also a big deal, allowing you to make phone calls over wi-fi networks.
Posted on April 1st, 2009 by Curt Lieneck
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