NECC 2004:Blogs@School Next month I will have the opportunity to work with Will Richardson, Anne Davis, Tom Hoffman and Steve Burt at NECC helping conduct a 3 hour workshop on weblog use in education. Am looking forward to the conference and the workshop.
We've known these changes were coming down the pike for a while, but a little advance warning about the actual changeover would have been helpful.
We managed to get them to keep the old connection open for the time being, and after some confusion caused by the power cord falling out of a switch, we're still on line, but this is really just the first step in being assimilated into the borg.
I laughed when I read Tom's post tonight. Today our CTO (I think that means Chief Technology Officer...) came to visit Lewis. Was worried a bit about the visit. Was afraid he would notice all those iMacs we updated to OS X. Turns out he had some interesting ideas to share. One thing he wants to do is create a sandbox environment segmented off the main admin network, for teachers and students to work in. (Am thinking of things like Plone, student blogs, web based assessment databases and such...) I have always felt it necessary for schools to have a bit of freedom to explore uses of technology that go beyond just record keeping. From what he said today, it looks like he thinks the same. I refrained from sharing our web site. Will do that next time I meet with him...
Lewis Elementary School 
On Thursday we had our annual Art Night at Lewis Elementary. The school hallways were turned into an art gallery with art projects from thoughout the school year displayed in the hallway. Students worked as docents and helped explain the projects to visiting parents and community members. In addition our music students preformed throughout the evening. Over the years I have heard great comments about the Lewis Art Night, but it was great to be able to take part this year as principal and to see the positive reaction from our families and community.
Tom says it very well.
Microsoft is expected to recommend that the "average" Longhorn PC feature a dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.
via Airbag.
The second factor is Will Novell Adopt the Linux Terminal Server Project?
At Lewis, we have mostly iMacs. With a RAM upgrade, all of the iMacs can and will soon run the latest version of OS X. So as long as the Macs are running we will go the route or OS X. If I had come to a school with a majority of PC's we would of worked to move to LTSP. Of the 2 instructional PC's none have the specs to run XP, let alone Longhorn...