Dharumavantha School to adopt Google Apps for Education in 2009

Since I started in my position as a assistant principal at Dharumavantha School, I was losing my focus for some time. I was spending most of my time reading and exploring managerial skills, motivational strategies for teams, students and other administrative and leadership issues. A week after the end of this academic year, I am back on my IT focus and exploring, playing with new and innovative products, solutions available. Since I have been fan of google products for quite some time now, I started my exploration by looking into Google products. I am thrilled at what google has to offer to schools and little ashamed that I didn’t learn about this earlier.

Google has been successfully creating products that are simple to use and reliable. They create products that users eventually feel they can’t live without. What they have done with Google apps is something that has not been done before. I was looking for a reliable and cheaper email hosting service for my NGO, Edhuru Annex for quite sometime and I started my Google Apps experimenting with Edhuru Annex domain. In less than 2 hours, I am all set and using email services, calendar and google docs.

One big concern I had in mind was regarding the nature of “FREE” services. What if Google decided that education had to pay sometime down the track?  As I looked for an answer to this questions it was clear to me that it will be highly unlikely that Google will force educational institutes to pay for their services because they use open standards throughout the Google Apps.

Next task is to setup this services for my school. I know it will be more time consuming than edhuru domain because hosting services provided by dhiraagu is restricted unlike many others. I need to email dhiraagu technical support to configure the domain to point at google.

My target is to make it ready before school re-opens for new academic year 2009. When our teachers return in January, each of the staff will have an account allowing them to communicate and collaborate easily and effectively. After launching it for teachers and staff, we will start the services for our students too.

This will make Dharumavantha School, the first school in the Maldives to partner with Google to provide services and first school to provide email accounts for all staff and students.

Google Apps Quick Tour

Chris Iremonger speaks at Google@school – Google Apps Demo

How to maximize control of roomful of computers

My inspirations for writing this post came from several sources including my personal experiences as computer studies teacher and HOD. I started looking into classroom management system when I was teaching at Dharumavantha School, where we had 25 computers setup around the perimeter of the computer lab. I usually copy the files to each computer prior to class time and while demonstrating I bang on the desk with a marker to get students’ attention.

Today, and even back then, there are classroom management systems that can provide above mentioned functions and more that will keep students on task and away from surfing. In other words, these systems enabling educators to manage, control and optimize the use of technology to support teaching and learning. Here are some useful features I noticed.

• view students’ screen on the teachers station.
• Freeze students’ screens.
• Broadcast the teachers’ computer screen to the students’ screen.
• Broadcast any students screen to the other students’ screen.
• communicate with student computers.
• control desktops.
• copy files to/from computers.
• install software and updates remotely onto students’ computers.

With all these features readily available, I hope someday we will be able to have such system in our school computer labs. No doubt our teachers will be both relieved and thankful.

Above is a list comparing many of these products is from The Teaching Methods Committee of American Library Association and is updated annually.

Is this the ideal laptop for our students?

I came across this video demonstrating the robustness of a laptop specifically designed for students. The engineers at the UK based company RM took their laptops into the car park, and then drove cars over, to see how much abuse it could survive. Three cars later (and car number 2 definitely looks like the one that should inflict most damage) it is still up and running. And just to prove it isn’t a trick, they take it back into the office and plug it into a monitor too, to show it’s still alive and well.

Definitely, impressive for me as I think it can withstand some of the likely abuse from students.

About RM:

RM is founded in 1973 offers wide variety of products to education industry. They are one of the leading provider of ICT software, infrastructure and services to UK education. In addition they also have offices in the US, India and Australia.

RM Mobile One laptop

This new product from RM is loved by teachers and students alike. It is designed specifically for classroom rough-tough and can withstand everyday prods, nudges, accidents and bumps. A hard LCD screen, spill-resistant keyboard, tough magnesium lid and reinforced ports are just the start.