Wow…what a difference a year makes! eTech Ohio is to be commended for the changes they made to the 2010 eTech Ohio Technology Conference. I will admit I was very critical of eTech Ohio after the 2009 conference. In my blog post on February 8, 2009, I said I was going to take a year off from going to the conference. I didn’t take a year off, but I only went one day this year. Now, I wish I had registered for the entire conference.

In last year’s blog post, I detailed the reasons I was not going to attend. I mentioned that I wanted to see my colleagues and friends. I did see some of them, so I was thankful I decided to go one day. Last year, I wanted to get my hands on netbooks. This year, I took my Acer Aspire 10″ netbook, iPod Touch and Blackberry Storm (first gen..insert joke here). My Blackberry was useless in many of the session rooms. eTech listened to the feedback and provided wifi throughout the entire conference hall. The wifi network was rock solid and very strong. I witnessed attendees taking notes, backchanneling on Twitter and other sites and viewing the presentations and websites from the presenters. I really enjoyed following the conference hashtag (#oetc10) and I am not following some more users on Twitter. I tweeted that eTech should put the Twitter feed on the wall by the information booth. I received a tweet that it was up. Even though I could not see it, I read tweets from users mentioning the Twitter feed. Next year, I am looking forward to presenters using Twitter in their presentations and providing a backchannel. Ryan Collins mentioned that he would like to see hashtags for every presentation in the conference planner. That would be sweet!

Now that eTech is providing wifi, I am hoping that presenters will live-stream their presentations. That way, if you are in a presentation and are not engaged, you can leave the session, go out in the hall and find another session to watch on your laptop. This would be helpful for those that have physical handicaps in accessing the second floor of the session rooms. I have never thought about how difficult it would be for someone in a wheelchair to get around the conference hall with 6700+ people. Live-streaming would definitely provide more opportunities, especially if a popular presenter is booked into a small room. Rather than sit on the floor or stand in the back, you could go out in the hall or sit at tables in the back of the vendor hall and watch the live-stream.

I guess I shouldn’t be upset that some of the major vendors were not at the conference. I have to realize that there are many conferences for them to attend and it can be very costly for them to have a presence at every conference. When I make purchasing decisions, I do keep in mind the vendors that I spoke with at the conference. I said last year that I would not buy directly from Dell. I have kept that promise. All of the computers we have purchased this school year have been from Partstock or CDWG. I must say that there is one piece of technology that caught my eye in the vendor area. Epson has an LCD projector that has a very short throw (2 feet) and it is interactive, eliminating the need for an interactive whiteboard. All you need is a regular whiteboard or a white surface. The projector is the BrightLink 450Wi.

If anyone from eTech Ohio is reading this, I am eating my words right now. I may have been a little harsh last year, but I really enjoyed the one day I attended this year. I wish I could have attended all three days. Based on everything I saw this year, I will definitely be back for all three days for the 2011 eTech Ohio Technology Conference. I am assuming the hashtag will be #oetc11, if Twitter is still around in 2011. I am excited about attending next year’s conference and this year’s conference is still going on! Today, I followed the #oetc10 hashtag and I felt like I was at the conference. I am looking forward to doing the same tomorrow!

I created a Protopage a couple years ago. I used it as my start page or home page. I had lots of links and had some RSS feeds and a weather feed. I have been very happy with it, until Protopage began placing ads on the site. I don’t mind the ads. I know they have to “pay the bills”. However, I cannot have “racy” ads on my page.

Since we are rolling out Google Apps for Education, I decided to create a Google Sites page. It did not take very long to put the page together. Right now, I just have links. Google has “gadgets” that can be added to the site. I will do that soon. For now, my Google Sites page meets my needs and I like the fact that I am using something that we have adopted.

Click here to visit my Google Site.

Have you noticed that you can’t download a piece of software lately without being hassled to download other software? For example, when you download Adobe Reader from the Adobe website, there is a checkmark next to Install McAfee Security Scan. If you leave this box checked, McAfee Security Scan will be downloaded along with Reader and installed on your computer. Most users do not uncheck the box.

Another example is when you upgrade Java, there is a checkmark in a box to install Yahoo Toolbar. Again, most users do not uncheck the box and they end up with a dozen toolbars installed in their browsers. I saw a browser that had so many toolbars installed, you had to scroll down to see the top of the webpage on a 15″ monitor!

Software makers know that most users will click yes or Ok, so they know the software will get installed on a lot of computers. Since they make money from these types of installations, I don’t see the practice ending anytime soon. However, I do not like this and would like for software makers to cease this practice.

On March 1, I wrote a blog post on Spiceworks. We had just started using it, so it was a little early to give usage information. We had a few helpdesk tickets that were entered through the Active Directory integration or via email. My tech and myself were entering tickets and we were encouraging our teachers and staff members to enter tickets directly instead of filling out paper forms, coming out to our office or stopping us in the halls.

At the beginning of the school year, I sent out an email detailing how to send an email to the helpdesk. At the time, my tech and I had about 20 tickets that we had entered. We were hooking up computers in classrooms and found computers that were not working and other issues. I was amazed by the response from our teachers. I started getting emails on my phone from the helpdesk. Spiceworks had processed the requests and entered them in the helpdesk. After the dust settled, we had over 40 tickets in the helpdesk. Last week, we closed 30 tickets. This may not seem like a lot, however, there are a few factors involved. First of all, some of the tickets contained multiple computers. For instance, one ticket had 6 computers that needed serviced. Some tickets take longer than others. There are some tickets that take a few minutes and some that take a few hours or quite possibly, a few days. Also, my technician only works 22 hours per week. On top of working on helpdesk tickets, we had to issue laptops, attend meetings, enter users in Active Directory and create user profiles on the servers.

I am very pleased with everyone utilizing the helpdesk. It is a very easy process to initiate a request and it keeps us organized by having everything in one place. We don’t have paper requests, post-it notes and voicemails to deal with. Everything is in one place and we try to close out the requests as quick as possible. We hate seeing a lot of requests in the helpdesk. We would like to have zero requests. Right now, there are 49. We will work hard to get them closed and I wish we could get them closed quicker than we can. I wish I had larger staff to close the requests quicker. However, I was taught to be grateful for what you have. I am grateful, given the current economic climate, to have a part-time technician. Also, I am grateful that we will be hiring building technology coordinators soon. They will help us by having a contact in the building that can help us out by resetting switches, servers and other tasks.

I attended Podcamp Ohio 2 on Saturday, June 20, 2009 on The Ohio State University Main Campus. It was a great day to learn and there were 184 attendees. I took notes using Evernote in the sessions I attended and will post them at the bottom of this blog post. If you are not using Evernote, you should!

I met some wonderful people at Podcamp Ohio 2. Thank you to The Ohio State University for providing guest wireless internet access. I had a blast taking notes and tweeting some highlights of the sessions I attended. I tried to keep up with everyone at the unconference by following the hashtag #pco09 on Twitter.

Thank you to Qdoba for providing the fantastic lunch! It really hit the spot after attending the morning sessions. I love the tortilla chips! I will have to find the nearest Qdoba location so I can enjoy it again! Also, thank you to Avitae for providing your delicious caffeinated water! Thank you for providing a wonderful product with no preservatives or additives!

Thanks to @AngeloMandato, @DoctorAnonymous, @MerryCricket and all of the volunteers and workers for putting on Podcamp Ohio 2. I really enjoyed all of the sessions and I soaked in a lot of information. Thank you to all of my new followers and I am following 20 more people as a result of attending Podcamp Ohio 2.

Podcamp Ohio 2 would not have been possible without the sponsors. Thank you to The Ohio State University Center For The Study And Teaching Of Writing, Blubrry.com, Doctor Anonymous Podcast, Circle Of Seven Productions Book Trailers and Marketing, AssistCoach.com, blip.tv, TechSmith, SpaceBlue and Avitae.

Notes from the sessions I attended taken in Evernote:

On April 5th, 2007, I started this blog to provide information on technology for students, teachers, parents and anyone who wanted to read this blog. Though the focus has not changed, the frequency of posts has changed. There are many reasons why I have not been posting regularly, but the number one reason is Twitter. I have been more active on Twitter over the past year, with the majority of my tweets beginning in December 2008. The popularity of Twitter has skyrocketed and my Twitterverse has expanded. A lot of my friends and colleagues are on Twitter, which has expanded my personal learning network.

A lot has changed in the past year. One major change is having a new boss who is very supportive of technology. It is very refreshing to have someone who understands and uses technology daily. She expects everyone to read their email daily and all memos and information that used to be sent out via interoffice memo is now sent via email. This expectation has lowered costs and has increased efficiency. Another major change is I have a part-time college student providing technology support 22 hours per week. He is a hard worker and has lots of ideas. Support tickets are now manageable, which has given us time to provide new services and streamline our operations. Since January, we have installed a new helpdesk solution (Spiceworks), installed a new imaging solution (FOG) and we are in the process of rolling out a new antivirus solution. We have installed 110 computers and LCD monitors as well.

What changes are coming down the road? We have a lot of ideas and priorities we would like to accomplish. Our servers are getting long in the tooth and need to be replaced. We would like to replace more computers. We would like to get more technology in the classrooms. We would like to provide training for the teachers. All of this will take time. However, by streamlining the support ticket process, we have more time to devote to new projects. At this point, we are taking inventory of what we have and what we will need to acquire.

I am very excited about the future of technology at Logan Elm. Even though the economy may be down, things are looking up. We are in the process of creating a plan for new facilities. This has been a time-consuming process, but we are getting a lot accomplished. Next week, we will have community meetings where we will get a lot of input which will help the committee form master plans. From a technology standpoint, I can’t wait to get new buildings. I drive by our neighboring schools that have new buildings and wonder why their students are any better than the students of Logan Elm. The fact is, they are not. They just have new buildings. Logan Elm students deserve better facilities. We believe now is the time and we believe they will get new buildings soon!

The Great Seal Network, a consortium of school districts from Pickaway, Ross and Pike counties, sponsored a Web 2.0 Conference at Unioto High School on Friday, March 27, 2009. Over 50 teachers attended the conference, attending three sessions on blogs, wikis, Google Docs and Sites, social bookmarking and RSS feeds. Presenters of the tools were Michelle Bowdle from Unioto, Paul Carpenter from Ross-Pike ESD and Melissa Higgs-Horwell from SCOCA.

The day opened with registration, breakfast and an opening address from Alvin Trusty. Alvin is an Assistant Professor with College of Education at the University of Findlay and Director of the Educational Technology Program. The opening address was via video conference. It was great seeing Alvin and his address was interactive, informational and set the tone for a wonderful day of learning.

My assignment for the day was to assist Melissa Higgs-Horwell with RSS feeds and social bookmarking. There were a few times that attendees had difficulty with the tasks that were presented, but we were able to assist them. I will say that I learned some new tricks as well. I wish I was able to see the other sessions, but I did enjoy my assignment. My Delicious network has grown, by having some attendees add me to their network. After logging into my Delicious account, I added them to my network. My network of bookmarks has grown to 25,774 and counting. I learned how to add search results from InfOhio’s EBSCO Host into my RSS feeds. I added some more feeds by looking over the shoulders of the attendees. The day ended with a wrap-up speech by Tony Siders. Door prizes were given away and every attendee received a headset, 2GB flash drive and a lanyard.

I want to thank Partstock for donating the 22″ LCD monitor, SCOCA for their donation and Ryan Hawk for donating the Palm Tungsten devices as door prizes. Thank you to Unioto and Michelle Bowdle for hosting the event. I wish Logan Elm would be able to host an event like this someday. A big thank you goes out to Tony Siders. It was his idea for having this event and the Great Seal Network made his idea become reality.

I have been looking for a replacement system for tracking our helpdesk tickets. The web-based system we were using was outdated and was not meeting our needs. It was getting slow and when our hosting provider upgraded to PHP5, some of the code stopped working. The date function did not work, so we could not track when the tickets were entered or how long the tickets had been in the helpdesk. We could see the information in PHPMyAdmin, but the information was not being displayed in the helpdesk. I searched for a fix, but could not find one. Development for the project came to a halt when PHP5 was released. I could have asked for help from the eTech Ohio Listserv or from PHP programmers, but I thought the best thing to do was find a new solution.

I searched the archives of the eTech Ohio Listserv and asked some of my colleagues what they were using. I was doing research for a presentation I was working on for the eTech Ohio Conference when I found Spiceworks. During my presentation, I mentioned Spiceworks and a tech coordinator in the audience spoke out on how well Spiceworks worked for her district. When I returned from the conference, I shared the information with my tech. Two weeks ago, we decided to replace our imaging computer and we loaded Spiceworks on the same computer.

Installation went flawlessly and only took 5 minutes. We went through all of the steps in getting email notification configured, as well as Active Directory integration. We entered the ip address ranges we wanted to scan and let it go. A half hour later, Spiceworks found our workstations, servers, printers, switches, router, firewall and anything that has an ip address. With a little tweaking, we have built a solid inventory of our network and now we are working on cleaning up and adding information to the inventory. I have an Access database of the computer inventory that will be replaced by Spiceworks.

We released the helpdesk portion of the helpdesk to our users last Friday. There are two ways for users to enter tickets. The first method is to enter a ticket in the helpdesk using their Active Directory login. We have customized the entry page by adding location and room fields. There is a box titled “Referring to” that a user can enter the computer name if it is a computer issue. When they start typing the computer name, it will populate the field by searching through the current inventory. We have asked users to use a building code and room number in the summary so it will be easier to sort tickets in the helpdesk. We do not complete tickets in the order they were entered. We cannot drive 22 miles to fix one ticket. We wait until there are enough tickets to warrant sending someone to the building for repairs.

The second method is to email the ticket to an email address that is configured in Spiceworks. Every 5 minutes, Spiceworks checks for new messages and then enters the tickets in the helpdesk. In the summary field, users are instructed to enter the location code and room number as well as a short description of the problem. In the body of the message, we have asked for them to provide as much information as possible, including error messages.

So far, we have had a few teachers enter tickets through the AD integration and 1 ticket via email. It is a little early to tell, but I think Spiceworks is a perfect fit. It is recommended for networks with 500 or less devices. However, I have seen comments from companies that have 1000 devices and it works fine for them.

I will say it is a little slow at times, but I will put up with that. For all of the features that Spiceworks offers, I am not going to look for anything else.

Did I mention that Spiceworks is FREE? That feature sold me at first, but the other features were icing on the cake.

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Every year, I look forward to the eTech Ohio Educational Technology Conference. It is a time to get away from the day to day issues and be able to go to sessions, see what is new in the exhibits and meet old friends and make new ones. At the end of the conference this year, I left pondering if it was worth missing 3 days of work, $380 in hotel and parking charges and spending the next few days getting back to work and fixing all of the issues that popped up while I was gone. Years ago, it was understood that if something broke while I was gone, it wouldn’t get fixed until I returned. Teachers did not need to have the internet to teach. It was a luxury. If the circuit went down, they could still teach. Secretaries could do other tasks until the circuit was restored. Our dependence on connectivity has increased to the point where things come to a screeching halt when their is an outage.

What drove me to go to the conference? I read emails to the Tech Listserv from presenters advertising their sessions. I wanted to see my friends and colleagues and be able to speak to them in person, instead of through email, IM, Twitter, Facebook and Skype. I wanted to get my hands on a Dell Mini 9 or Mini 10. We have an Asus eeePC with a 7″ screen. The feedback I received was that the screen was too small and the keyboard was made for small hands and fingers. I wanted to give a bigger netbook a test drive before I ordered some to test.

For the most part, I enjoyed the sessions I attended. You can always count on Ryan Collins for a great session and come back with lots of good ideas. I attended Chris Carman’s session on Screencasting and I came out feeling entertained and compelled to get back to work and get busy making screencasts for our staff. There are many more sessions I attended that were very good. There was one session I attended that did not go well. They had issues with the LCD projector that hindered the presentation. I was upset that I missed John Schinker’s and Alvin Trusty’s sessions. I had a call from my district ofice secretary and had to “put out a fire”. By the time I got off the phone, John’s session had already started. I don’t like to walk in sessions after they have already started. I am glad that John made his presentation materials available on his website. I missed Alvin Trusty’s session due to an interview with eTech. The interview was at 1:00pm and Alvin’s session started at 12:45. By the time I was done with the interview, I had missed 2 sessions. I don’t understand why they could not have the interviews on the same schedule as the sessions. Why was Alvin Trusty’s session in a small room? He could fill a ballroom. Why doesn’t eTech do live-streaming like some states do? Why does eTech think they can pack 6500 people in a 5000 seat ballroom? It is nice that they make the video available on televisions outside of the ballrooms and on the wall in between halls C and D. I was watching Wes Fryer, even when he was pointing to a video he was showing. Why couldn’t they show the video, instead of Wes pointing? Do they not have the technical expertise? If not, I have a few students that can help them. Why can I only get connectivity on my laptop in the coffee shop in the middle of the convention center? The convention center should have wifi available throughout the entire center. Other conference centers have that capability. eTech could charge $5 more for registration to pay for the bandwidth. Why doesn’t Columbus have metro wifi? Dublin has it. Other cities have it or are installing it. Wise up, Mayor Coleman. Columbus does not need a light rail system. Jobs are moving out of downtown, so why would you spend the money for a light rail? In the next 10 years, more people will be telecommuting and not making the daily trek to downtown Columbus.

Did anyone notice anything lacking from the Exhibit Hall? Hello Dell…where were you? In Texas for the TCEA Conference or just blowing off Ohio? Apple did not show up either. Megan Finnegan, an Apple rep, was “hanging out” in the eTech Ohio booth. It was nice to see her and talk to her about a quote for an administrator.  Microsoft was absent. Of course, they don’t have anything to show right now. Nobody wants Vista and Windows 7 is not available for purchase. HP had a booth, but I don’t want to look at printers and over-priced desktops. I stopped at booths that  provide a quality service for our district, such as Partstock, Amer.com and CDWG. I met my CDWG rep (Eric Christensen) and Amer.com rep (Wes Van de Polder). I have met Devangh (Partstock rep) many times, so it was nice to see him and he thanked me for “plugging” his company during my session.

Dell is no longer a vendor for me. They didn’t make an appearance at the conference and my rep has not replied to my emails or returned phone calls. This happened before over the summer. Dell has good hardware, but I can buy it from Partstock for half the price and get a 6 year warranty. And, Devangh is a great guy to work with. I can send him an image and he can put it on the computers before they are shipped. I will work with Eric at CDWG to get servers from HP or IBM. Eric had a rep from Acer at his booth, so we looked at the Acer Aspire One. We are going to get one for each building (8.9″ models) and will get a few 10″ models when they come out. I read some RSS feeds today that the 10″ model is now available, so hopefully we will not have to wait too long.

Did anyone see any new hardware that is  groundbreaking or earth-shattering? I didn’t. Everywhere you looked, there were interactive whiteboards, student response systems and LCD projectors. How about new software that you are going to purchase right away? If there was, I didn’t see it. I walked through the Exhibit Hall twice. I went through when it opened on Monday and when it closed on Wednesday. It was upsetting to see booths packing up before 2:00pm on Wednesday. Some booths were packed up and gone. A coworker, who attends SCUBA conventions, said that the exhibitors would be fined or told to not come back if they packed up early for a SCUBA convention. If I worked for eTech, I would not be happy.

Am I being too harsh? Do I need to “lighten up’? Take a year off from going to the convention? Maybe. I may just go to the SOITA Conference and pass on the eTech Convention. But, then I would miss sessions from my colleagues. I have 357 days, 3 hours and 2 minutes to decide. The 2010 eTech Ohio Technology Conference is February 1-3.