Lincoln's Online Museum and the Google OpenGallery Project

Lincoln's Online Museum

Lincoln School in Nepal was invited to participate in the beta test of the Google OpenGallery Project (https://www.google.com/opengallery), part of the Google Cultural Institute. The project allows museums, galleries, and individuals to display art, images, videos, and text in a format online that is similar to the experience of being at a sophisticated interactive museum.

The project is still developing, but now at Lincoln, we have our very own online gallery, located at: 

http://lsnepal.culturalspot.org. 

Google has provided the school with an online consultant located in Paris, and in return, we provided Google with feedback. 

The school has been able to create numerous exhibits with the Open Gallery. The vision for our museum gallery is to showcase exemplary work of the school community, raise the profile of the school, and to provide a new platform for the expression of school projects.

Our museum gallery was a perfect fit for AP Art student Yazmin’s exhibit "The Nepal Collection” (http://goo.gl/OYkG0s) as an example of exemplary work. 

One of the interesting features of the Open Gallery is how pictures are rendered. Normally when you create a web page, you want to use low quality images, otherwise it would take forever to load the page, something we are especially sensitive to, located in bandwidth poor Nepal. The Open Gallery is different. You upload high definition images and the Open Gallery automatically adjusts the image. This allows you to zoom in on images, taking advantage of all the pixels available as seen in the picture the below, taken by Peter Hennigar. Peter is one of our faculty and a fellow museum curator. The photo is featured in the "Exploring Nepal Exhibit “ (http://goo.gl/uYxoMj).

Magnified on the Gallery page - photo by Peter Hennigar

Visit our museum, checkout an exhibit, click on a picture and then use the magnification tool to zoom in on any part of a picture. Enjoy your visit!  

Go to Google's Open Gallery and sign up for an invitation. Once you get an account, you can add administrators and curators, and multiple exhibits. 

Besides the school's Google OpenGallery, I also manage my own OpenGallery that I hope to publish soon on my travel blog site: "Remember; no matter where you go, there you are."

The personal gallery will include stories and images of over 40 years of travels around the world, for example:

Create, curate, and spread the culture.

Bill Willis

Director of Technology

Lincoln School Nepal

The Functionality Overlap

Who is doing what to solve the various common problems and tasks we have at international schools? Several years ago at a NESA (Near East, South Asia) Virtual School conference we asked that question. We had a breakout meeting on student information systems then quickly realized there were many more concerns we either had in common. Warren Apel, who at that time was the Director of Technology at the American Embassy School in New Delhi created a shared Google SpreadSheet called the “Functionality Overlap”.

The collaborative document went beyond the question “which student information system are you using.” As a group we tried to capture many of the common processes of schools and added statements such as:

• Athletic office uses a calendar to manage locations for athletic events
• Teacher sends a parent of a student in their class an email
• Teacher checks to see if a technology device (video camera, laptop cart, digital microscope, etc) is available from the technology department to check out
• A teacher creates a website for their classroom
• A principal sends a newsletter to parents 

Soon we had a list of over 100 common tasks schools faced. Each of us at the meeting took a column and added how our school dealt with the job. 

Over the years the document has flowed passed the borders of NESA and now includes over 40 schools from Europe to East Asia. There are currently 150 editors in the document.

New tasks/questions have continually been added to the list.

Around the world, school administrators and tech administrators have been using the document for comparison, planning and inspiration. Need help customizing your student information system? Use the document to see who else uses the same product. Maybe they or another school are using the same solution, but to solve another problem you have. It is a great resource and can be even better if your school is adding to it.

When you contribute to the document, an interesting side effect occurs.  Not only are you helping people understand your school, but you start to understand your own school a little more.  You realize that for some tasks, you might have 5 different systems in place.  And you realize that you might be paying a lot of money for a system that only does one task at your school.  As you scan sideways across the document, you see how other schools solved problems that you have.  And then you can start to make deeper connections.  

To see the document, visit: http://goo.gl/jR3pOQ

If you need to update your school’s data, or wish to add your school, send a request to become an editor of the Functionality Overlap document to Bill Willis at bill@macwillis.org or Warren Apel at warren.apel@gmail.com.

Bill Willis

Director of Technology

Lincoln School Nepal

Warren Apel

Director of Educational Technology

International School of Amsterdam

Another giant Leap (motion) for mankind...

I am waiting for Christmas on July 22nd. That's the day my Leap Motion device will ship.

What is a Leap Motion? It is a new way of interfacing with your technology. It is a very small box that will connect to either your Mac or PC, and give you the same user interface enjoyed by Chief John Anderton, Tom Cruise's character in The Minority Report. Grabbing and moving objects with your two hands flying through the air. But as they say, seeing is believing:

When I ordered the device back in February it was scheduled to ship in May, but alas as with many tech innovations the date has been pushed back. Had I been a Leap Motion developer I could have had my hands on (or over) the device sooner.

There are many apps being created for the July launch. Here is a screenshot of Leap Motion's Airspace, their online store:

On YouTube you can find demos of apps under development. You can also find geeks having fun, such as this programming jam with Leap Motion:

Here is an example of a music app with the Leap Motion:

A lot of these videos are very arm intensive. Looks a lot like Mickey in the Sorcerers' Apprentice, or an orchestra conductor. Two hours of playing a Halo-like game with the Leap Motion would be quite a workout. I hope my arms don't get too sore.

Then again, maybe I can operate the Leap Motion hands free, after all, I do have a large nose, and I can wiggle my ears..... a whole new world awaits.

Keeping track of your apples

I have an embarrassing number of Apple devices. There are times I feel personally responsible for Apple's success. How can I keep track of them should one wander away? Through Apple's "Find My iPhone."

You can use this service to find your device on a map. For example, I can see the 1st generation iPad attached to the front of my refrigerator.

If I saw it wandering away, I could lock it, or even reset it completely.

To get started you need to setup iCloud. It's free. You can use the same id you use with iTunes, or create a new id. All you need is an email address.

 On your Macintosh, go to system preferences and choose iCloud. You can either use an existing Apple ID (like your iTunes account) or create a new one.

Once you have successfully logged into iCloud, choose "Find My Mac" from the list. You will have to turn on location services which is located in the security and privacy preferences:

You should use this same Apple ID to setup iCloud on your iPhone, iPad and other Apple devices you might own. On the iOS device, go to Settings> iCloud>login and turn "Find My iPhone" on.

How do you find your device? On a computer (any computer), use a browser and login at iCloud.com. Click on "Find My iPhone." You'll see a list of the devices you have setup with iCloud. Click on a device to see it on a map, or you can even select the device if it is not online. If you login to iCloud.com with Safari on your iPhone or iPad, you will be prompted to install the "Find My iPhone" app.

Once everything is working, you will see a list of your devices when using this service on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad.

You can have iCloud inform you when the device is available. You can also remotely lock the machine, or you can erase the contents. 

If you can't find your Mac, make sure you do the following in System Preferences:

• Set the time zone automatically in the Date & Time preference
• Enable Location Services under Security and Privacy

Use with caution. Should anyone hijack your iCloud id and password, they can lock and/or erase all of the content on those devices.

What happens when you leave a Google Apps School? Part 3: Your Contacts

Keeping track of your contacts may or may not be important to you. But if you are like me, over the years you may have acquired a large number of them. Google apps organizes contacts into four groups:

• My Contacts, are entries you made. You either added the contact, modified one of the contacts from the other groups, or imported the contact from a list.
• Circles are contacts you added through Google+.
• Most contacted are just that, the people you normally correspond with. Their names pop to the top as you are typing in the address box.
• Other Contacts are all the other people you have sent an email to, including replies. 

That covers all the people you actually correspond with, however, if your Google Apps domain administrator has turned on "Directory Sharing", you see an additional listing called directory:

The Directory is a list of all of the contacts at your organization.

Exporting your Contacts....

First off, you can not export the directory of your organization. Workaround: Add the members of your organization to a group - a rather laborious task only for those who don't want to miss anyone from their contact list. But seriously if you haven't written to them by now (so they would appear in the "Other Contacts" list), you probably will not write them later.

Open your contact manager in Google by going to your email, then choosing Contacts under Mail:

Then choose Export under the "More" drop down menu:

You can make separate exports of "My Contacts" and "Most Contacted" under the group button, or you can import all of your contacts which would include those two, plus your "Circle" and "Other Contacts".

Save the contacts in the format you would like to preserve the information for future use. 

Get an iPad, not a Document Camera

There are several designs on the internet for stands that turn your iPad into a document camera. I have the privilege of working with the cleaver Luis Bolanos. He has morphed a couple of the designs into this model.

The document cameras we recently purchased were about the same cost as an entry level iPad, so this year we offered teachers' a choice: Either purchase a document camera or an iPad. While the stand for the iPad/document camera is not as flexible as a dedicated document camera, the iPad itself is a far more flexible device.

In addition buy airserver. Great software for using your computer as an airplay device. Attach your computer to an LCD projector, then find the computer with your iPad and display it over airplay.

What happens when you leave a Google Apps School? Part 2: Your Email

Google does not have a tool for moving all of your email from one Google Apps account to another Google account. You need to move your mail from your old Google mail to your computer and then back up to a new Google account.

old GMail → Computer mail app → new GMail

First go to the settings>Forwarding and POP/IMAP  of each gMail account and turn on IMAP access

Then open a computer mail app, for this example I will use the Macintosh Mail app, but you can do the same with Outlook and Mozilla’s Thunderbird. Create an account for each of the Google accounts (old and new). In my case it was bill@myoldemailaddress then password, and bill@mynewemailaddress then password. The email client will change your GMail labels into folders and then populate the folders with all of the email from your old account. This will take a while.

old GMail → Computer mail app → new GMail

Then you want to move the mail from your computer to your new Google account. There are a couple of options here. If you want to have the same label structure on the new account, you will have to create that on the new account. Personally, I only want to be able to search the old mail, so I created two labels/folders on the new GMail account: Old Mail and Old Sent Mail. Then in the computer’s app, I selected all of the items from the “All Mail” folder of the old GMail account (all 77k of them), and dragged them to the new account. I did the same with the the sent mail.

old GMail → Computer mail app → new GMail

Since you are moving files back up into the cloud, it could take some time.