Gorillapond Dot Com

I’ve been learning about the One Laptop Per Child’s XO laptop concepts and playing with the emulated environment. I’m completely impressed and excited. More on that later.

I’m completely excited that I have finally (after waiting 3 weeks) made first contact with someone at OLPC, who forwarded my information to someone who can help me directly. It’s just a baby step, but it’s much better than no contact at all.

We’re looking at getting a few demo units. Beyond that, I’d like to get a set for a whole class, and then the sky is the limit. I am so very excited.

If you will be at the eTech Ohio Educational Technology Conference next week, come see me. I have 2 sessions: Virtualization Everywhere and Desktop Deployment. Both are on Wednesday afternoon. If you are looking for the notes/slides from these sessions, just click the appropriate heading at the top of the site. You should be able to download the handouts from there.

I hope to post some thoughts on the sessions I visit each day, so look out for those.

Update: I think I will post results and new ideas from the sessions when I get home instead of trying to do it here in the hotel. I also updated all the handouts to the newest version of the slideshow tonight. If you saw the session and have comments, leave a comment on this post!

My Major Tasks to Complete:

• Test, test, and retest mass account creation for staff and student accounts
• Fix sound card issue on notebooks and verify it works (oops.)
• Test and tweak student computer lockdown security
• Install Read 180 Enterprse on server and create client package
• Create as many software packages as possible before start of school, and keep going until they’re all done
• Ensure Destiny install goes well. Upgrade SQL server to newest service pack.

All of this seems pretty easy and possible if I were able to focus on them exclusively. But, I can’t. I’m being pulled in many different directions so that I can’t stay focused on one task for more than an hour. It’s starting to get to stress me a little.

Update: I wrote this last week. This week has been quite a bit better. I think we’ll be okay, aside from all the software we still need to package. I just noticed the title of this post has 2 meaning depending how you read it!

I never thought I would be ‘blogging’ but here I am. I’m not sure what direction the content on this site will go, but I suppose nobody does initially. I hope to update it often with little tidbits instead of monster posts. Feel free to subscribe to it using the Entries RSS feed.

My idea is to combine the topics of Computing (What’s cool, What’s new), Information Technology (Stories from the life of a network admin), and Instructional Technology (Supporting teachers using technology in the classroom and helping our students get ahead)

If you want to know more about who I am, and what it is I actually do, check out the “About” link at the top.