Students and the Internet · 204 days ago
Love this quote:
Students do not magically gain the ability at the end of the school day or after graduation to navigate complex, challenging, unfiltered digital information spaces. If you don’t teach them how to navigate the unfiltered Internet appropriately and safely while you have them, who’s going to?
From http://dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2012/08/26-internet-safety-talking-points.html?wpmp_tp=1
— Sean Heuchert
fun with domain names · 464 days ago
As a blackberry user, I love tools that I can send an email to, things like evernote, remember the milk, google calendar, etc. The only problem is the emails that you get from these services are random, like my evernote email which is something like 129038123.sheuchert@evernote.com. I understand this is done to keep people from spamming my web 2.0 services but I like something I can remember and that I can tell my friends.
I also have a ridiculous domain name at work…pvnccdsb.on.ca…I have to spell this out at least 5 times a day. I’d love to change it if we didn’t have so many business cards, letter head, publications and other paraphernalia with it on it.
Enter the one-two punch of CanReg and ZoneEdit.
Go to CanReg.com and register a domain name.
Go to ZoneEdit.com and create an account.
Go back to CanReg and tell them to use the ZoneEdit DNS servers for your domain name.
Go back to ZoneEdit and click on the MailForwarding!
Add some email aliases, like pvncsean@shack.ca instead of sheuchert@pvnccdsb.on.ca or myen@shack.ca instead of 129038123.sheuchert@evernote.com.
I know, normal people just put these email addresses into their address book and give them short nicknames there but I love the flexibility I have for custom email and website forwarding with my own domain name!
If you have a blog you can use ZoneEdit to program a CNAME record to go to your blog address, i.e. www.shack.ca. “A CNAME, or Canonical Name, record is an entry within the Domain Name System (DNS) that specifies where a user can find your web pages, or any other URL. You’ll use the CNAME to associate your custom domain with your blog. For example, if you are on Blogger you can set a CNAME of blog.shack.ca to go to ghs.google.com” (From Google Help)
You can even go supershort with your new domain name and use it as your own URL shortening system – p.sh.ca can forward me to www.pvnccdsb.on.ca. r@sh.ca Could be linked to your Remember the Milk account.
A domain name is also a good way to help your personal blog move up in Google search rankings so that when people search for you, your blog “feels lucky”.
It’s been a while since I set my system up so the details above on setup are admittedly sketchy..email me if you need help..sean@shack.ca
— Sean Heuchert
iPad Configuration for our K12 enterprise · 482 days ago
Hi folks,
I have been asked for this a few times so thought I would share it publicly. Here is how we do iPad rollouts at our school district. We haven’t upgraded to iOS 5 yet so not sure how that will impact things but here goes:
(iDevice = iPad/iPhone/iPod)
We inventory all our IT equipment with an asset tag so the process is based around that:
-Inventory and tag the iDevice, for example – PVNC09300
-Create an email address for the iDevice, i.e. PVNC09300@pvnccdsb.on.ca
-Our email system supports the iDevice Mail App so we set up the iDevice to get email sent to its address
-Setup an AppleID for the device. Set a password convention so that adults can figure out the password from the asset tag but students are not told (e.g. 09300PvncNotReal).
-Apple makes it VERY difficult to setup an AppleID without a credit card so there are a few additional steps.
-Add a credit card to the account as part of the AppleID setup
-Confirm the AppleID email on the iDevice
-Login to the new Apple ID and remove the credit card as a payment method (Very important step!!)
-We also use a service called Airwatch to manage the devices but there is no reason you can’t do mnost of that management manually or with the iPhone Configuration Utility for a small deployment.
After these steps are complete we use our master AppleID (that has my corporate purchasing card linked to it) to gift apps to the devices we want them on. The devices receive an email in their mail app and can install the app over wifi. Our goal with this model was to provision devices that would never have to be synced, they could just use them. One drawback is that in Apple’s current licensing model you could theoretically buy an app once for a single computer and then sync that app to 15 ipads hooked up to that computer, our model is a one license/one device setup which I prefer.
Update – we used this model for rolling out iPad and Proloquo2Go as an AAC device and our SLP’s report that it is working swimmingly.
— Sean Heuchert