iLike the iPad for day-to-day
I attended the PSUG of Michigan Summer Conference in Battle Creek, June 27-28.
My friends from Brother Rice let me borrow a gen1 iPad (thanks Br. Rice!).
I used it both days of the conference and while not everyone agrees (see 10 Things Netbooks still do better than iPads), I found it to be an adequate replacement for carrying my notebook.
One of the things I kept thinking about during the conference was "wouldn't this be a great device to use if I was still in school..." Bingo! I think the iPad or a like device is only a year or two from changing students' lives.
Here are a few things I found:
- Middle School Math a Perfect Fit... (iPADModo)
- 10 iPad Apps that Preschoolers will Enjoy... (Examiner)
- Replacing a Pile of Textbooks with an iPad (NY Times)
Regis in the news: Internet connection
St. Regis didn't get top billing but we did have a nice feature in the local Observer and Eccentric newspaper. click here for the article
The article references a bandwidth upgrade project we completed in August 2010 with Marian and Brother Rice High Schools. See the previous post here.
Since the connection went live earlier this year, we have only averaged 6 Mbps out of a possible 100 Mbps. Looks like we still have some work to do!
Regis LibraryAnywhere
Would you use the St. Regis School Library catalog more if you could search from your mobile phone?
Well the truth is you can view the catalog already but not in a mobile-accesible format.
Enter applications like Library Anywhere. I think we are going to look into this program which allows complete access to the catalog -- even reserving books. Currently available for iPhone and Android devices.
What if we even had a few iPod touches for the library so they students weren't tethered to the OPAC computer?
Read more about the app on LibraryThing.com.
Also see the product website for a live version of the app that you can try out.
Status website
We have created a new status website! This website will show the status (up or down) of our main websites. Also, whenever a website is down -- visitors will automatically be forwarded to the status site. Of course we are hoping for no downtime!
You can also see some nice uptime and response time graphics.
Waveform LLC upgrades St. Regis bandwidth
St. Regis first started it's relationship with Waveform in the late '90s. Owner Noel Montales is responsible for bringing most of the local Catholic schools online -- Holy Name and Queen of Martyrs in addition to Marian, Brother Rice and St. Regis.
Sharing infrastructure costs with Marian and Brother Rice -- this summer we built out a 1/4 mile of fiber from the 14 Mile/Lahser Rd intersection to Marian.
This allowed us to connect into Waveform's privately owned fiber network. The private fiber feeds each school with 100 Mbps of bandwidth. Wow. See the two speed tests that I ran during the school day! Just need to tweak the upload speed a little bit...
Read the full press release at The Great Lakes IT Report (GLITR)
Did You Know 4.0
This is an update to the Did You Know or "Shift Happens" video that made the rounds a couple of years ago. If uses current stats from Fall 2009. Worth the 5 minutes to watch!
Contrary to popular opinion
There was an annual gathering of hackers at Pwn2Own 2009 and the goal was to hack each of the major browsers (IE, Firefox and Safari - sorry Google Chrome). Of course IE fell first right? Wrong, a fully-patched Macbook running the latest version of Safari went down in seconds. See the article at ZDNet.com.
To be fair, Firefox was hacked next and IE eventually fell. I thought it was curious that they were testing IE 8 (a release candidate) running on Windows 7 (still in beta). Anyways...I thought that Macs were so safe.