One of my students this semester has hair longer than mine. Maybe that's why he's been writing such great blog posts! Anyway, I thought you might enjoy or profit from his review of free alternatives to Microsoft Word. It's fairly comprehensive and even has screenshots. Check it out!

Microsoft's "I'm a PC' campaign created with Macs and Adobe software.

However, not even Microsoft itself can wean itself off the Mac, as the metadata discovered by Flickr user LuisDS points out. Microsoft was not only using Macs but also Adobe's software in place of its own Expressions Studio, which the company bills as software that "takes your creative possibilities to a new level."

Read about this and other Microsoft marketing problems difficulties here.

I’ve been back to work for a week and many of our faculty will be back next week.  My staff has been hard at work all summer setting up new machines and reimaging old ones.  We’ve rolled out 50 new desktop computers in two computer labs and classrooms.  We are in the process of rolling out 30 new faculty laptops and servicing the other 40 that are already deployed to faculty.  This includes service packs, an Outlook upgrade, and SmartNotebook 10.  As we do these laptop upgrades, we’re requiring faculty to participate in a 30-45 minute training session when they pick up their laptops.  During this training session, we’re reviewing basic laptop maintenance, spending a few minutes training the faculty on Outlook, and making sure our backup script works. 

In addition to the nuts and bolts above here are some of the projects that I’m working on for the school year (Thanks to Jim Heynderickx for the inspiration here):

Outlook Training: During the first month of school we have to make sure to provide enough support to faculty, staff and students so we can complete our transition from FirstClass to Outlook.  So far, so good as our transition over the summer was completed with only a few minor issues and with a positive reaction from the community.  Change is hard, so I don’t expect that September will be a cake walk, but with appropriate communication and preemptive training and support, we’ll be in a good place in October. 

Continued Professional Development including New Faculty and Student Orientation,  Collegiate Connect (our SIS and communication hub for school constituents), Gradebook, Smartboards, and Moodle.  This is a big one. 

• New Faculty Orientation is a big one as we need to bring our faculty in, show them what we have to offer and how to find resources about technology at the school.  Luckily, we have two one hour sessions with the new faculty this year and that will allow us to do a nuts and bolts session: file sharing, printing, Outlook email, and Collegiate Connect (SIS).  The second session will be a technology scavenger hunt that our Academic Dean and Lower School Assistant Head are putting together.  This is going to be a fun exercise to see if new faculty can use the training and FAQ material we’ve posted on our department web site to get the scavenger hunt done. 
• New Student Orientation includes much of the above, plus a heavy dose of Acceptable Use in 20 minutes.  Any ideas? 
• Collegiate Connect training is usually done in conjunction with division meetings as it consists of specific administrative responsibilities of the faculty in each division.    We’re creating lots of documentation in the form of FAQs on our Technology web site for this.
• Gradebook, Smartboard and Moodle training.  None of these tools are  required so we’ll be providing as needed support on them in September and then rolling each out via targeted monthly themes with professional development and communication with the faculty during those periods. 

Powerful Learning Practice — This is very exciting.  Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Will Richardson are running this professional development program for five of our faculty/administrators.  Here’s how they describe it:

Powerful Learning Practice offers a unique opportunity for educators to participate in a long-term, job-embedded professional development program that immerses them in 21st Century learning environments.

Day one of this is September 8th.  I’m psyched. 

Website Upgrade — Yes, we’re upgrading our web site.  This collaborative process has taken longer than I planned, but we’re on track for a January launch providing us a much better look and feel and more integration between our site and Collegiate Connect. 

And a few smaller ones —

Faculty Professional Development Reports — Last year we did these in a DrupalEd environment.  This year, they will be in Moodle.   Just waiting for MoodleRooms to finish up our Moodle config and we’ll be rocking and rolling. 

New Media Gallery Training – Whipplehill just released the new version of their Media Gallery which is a Flickr like upgrade to their photo galleries but also includes a slick video and audio player.  Tagging and all sorts of web 2.0 goodies available.  We’re starting with our archived digital photos from 2001 to the present.  Our archivist has two parent volunteers who will be working on this all year.  Very exciting!

Oh, yeah — On the personal front we’re a few weeks away from a working kitchen — you can check out some of the pics here.  Feels like I have two 10 hour a day jobs lately. 

arvind and I will be webcasting again over at EdTechTalk in the next few weeks.  Just need to wait for his teaching schedule to get going. 

I’ve also decided not to subscribe to all of the listserv’s I traditional participate in and concentrate on Twitter, the ISENet Ning and my Blogroll this year.  See you all there. 

I’m sure there is lots more, but that’s it in a nut shell right now.  See you all on the other side!

Read this article from the Times of London before you spend one more dollar on Microsoft products or endorse Intel's Teach for the Future program!

I thought the MS Surface table computer prototype was pretty laughable, but they’ve managed to take the awkwardness up a notch with the Sphere prototype. All of the wonderful distortion of a spherical projection, combined with the limited shared visible space around the sphere to impede collaboration. Wonderful. So now I can view a distorted photograph, but the person next to me sees an oblique partially obscured view of the same photograph - unless they’re on the other side of the sphere, then they see nothing. And vice versa.

try to collaborate with one of these. i dare you.

It’s surprising, because there is some seriously cool technology under the hood, using the projector lens to detect multitouch control gestures. But they just don’t seem to get what a touch interface can really do. It’s not about flinging photographs around. It’s about providing an adaptable interface that conforms itself to what you need to do at that moment. MS seems to get hung up on the metaphor of the projection device - flat == table, curved == sphere - rather than focusing on what a truly dynamic touch interface can do.

Allegedly. Powerset are natural language processing specialists. See also last year’s ISWC talk from CTO Barney Pell, “Natural Language and the Semantic Web”, discussions with Barney from last month’s Talis Semantic Web Gang chat, and earlier commentary from Paul Miller.

After a long process, my school has decided to move to Microsoft Outlook/Exchange 2007.   I realize that this is bucking the trend to move towards outsourced email with Google’s Apps for Schools and Microsoft Live, but these systems did not meet our requirements.  I use Gmail for my personal email and am very happy with it, but we felt that for an enterprise, it were not quite ready to go in that direction.

What is exciting about this move is that we will have better basic email functionality for our basic email users  and more advanced functionality for many of our high end users.  The basic functions include:

• HTML email support
• Outlook Web Access — A much improved web user email interface
• Advanced search
• HTML mailto: support so our SIS email class and email parents links will work
• A standard, clean user interface for our community

The advanced features include:

• Industry standard calendaring
• Integration with many of our installed databases
• PDA/Phone integration

As we migrate, the one space in FirstClass that is not replicated in Outlook/Exchange is the conference.  We will be using Group mail lists, Outlook Public Folders for some of these conferences in addition to Moodle forums and possibly some Drupal or other open source forum software.  The result is that we’ll be moving to web apps being the center of our universe with our email system driving us in that direction.

I’ll be posting more along our migration road. 

I’ve created a documentation web site for this project here.  What do you think?

I rented a new Ford Focus. The car is stylish for a no-frills sedan. It even comes equipped with Sync by Microsoft.

I've seen the TV commercials for Sync, but what it actually does remains hazy. But heck, the combination of Microsoft and Ford can mean nothing less than engineering magic. Who can resist strapping themselves into the love-child of the companies who brought America Windows Vista and the Pinto. (Don't forget Bob)

During the trip from NY to DC I decided to put Sync through its paces. I thought that clicking on the button with a phone icon would allow me to sync with my iPhone. Then I could do something space-age like talk on the telephone while driving.

The problem is that no sequence or combination of button pressing would sync the phone and Knight Rider. Disappointed, I decided to surrender and listen to the radio - kicking it old school while cruisin' down I-95.

Alas, listening to the radio was impossible. Sync was hung in an unbreakable loop.

So, for the first time in my life I had to stop at the next rest area and reboot my car!

Gee, thanks Microsoft!

PS: I still have no idea what Sync does.

I was browsing the template library of Office 2007 today when I came across an interesting "academic" letter template: "Complaint about Teacher." The letter is probably what you could expect from a parent whose kiddo isn't making the A's she rightfully deserves. Here's a few snippets from it:

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Ars Technica reports that Google has urged for ISO rejection of Microsoft's OOXML format as an international standard.

There has been plenty of other criticism of the standard. But I'm of mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I would prefer that everyone--including Microsoft--embrace ODF. A file format developed and maintained by an open standards organization is preferable to a Microsoft-controlled, poorly designed OOXML.

However, if Microsoft continues to resist ODF and never gives in to supporting it, is Microsoft more likely to well-support OOXML compatibility across MS Office upgrades if it is an ISO standard? Or will they continue to create problems for competitors and users by implementing changes in OOXML that make upgrading to the latest version of MS Office the easiest path to compatibility with MS Office produced files?

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