The Importance of backups

I was reminded today, again, that it is a good idea to have copies of any important digital documents in at least two locations. Those little USB flash drives occasionally stop working or get misplaced, so I wouldn’t recommend keeping your only copy of a file on there.

Likely your school-provided network storage location is backed up automatically, so that’s the best place to store things. I’ve also written previously about online (Internet) storage options for your files.

That reminds me, I need to backup my photos at home.

antivirus

I'm often asked about antivirus for home PCs, and I always recommend Avast Home Edition.  It is a free program with free updates, but it requires (free) registration.

It works as well or better than other paid products, which is why I recommend it.

I also only recommend free software.

digital marking

There are a few different ways I have students hand in digital assignments. For larger projects (video and audio files mostly) the students can just save them in their profile folders or on our school media server. However if you don't have this set up, or if you want to be able to do marking at home, there are a few other ways.

USB flash drives: either student or school provided, students can save their work to individual flash drives, or have multiple students save their files on a single flash drive.

Email: I usually have students email their completed assignments to me, since we have gmail accounts set up for students and teachers with about 7 GB of storage space each. I can then mark the assignments on any computer with Internet access.

TurnItIn.com: our district subscribes to this website which provides originality checking and online marking, as well as opportunities for peer review.

Learning Management Systems: online systems can be set up for assignment submission as well as peer interaction et ceteras using something like Moodle or Ning.

I'm sure there are other ways that teachers are marking digital assignments, but these are just a few I've experimented with. Feel free to comment on some of the systems you've used or seen in use.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Next post will be up on January 7th, 2009.

creating your own blog

Chances are, if you're reading this you know what a blog is. If you're not blogging already yourself, I wanted to recommend Google's free blogger.com. Creating a new blog is very easy, especially if you already have a gmail address, and it's very easy to create new posts on your blog.

As well, you may have noticed that there is a "listen now" button for each of my blog posts here, that's a free service from odiogo.com. That's also relatively easy to set up, and then you can say that you are also a podcaster, since your blog posts are automatically converted into audio files that can be subscribed to.

Instructable - repairing Rock Band instruments

I've written a brief Instructable about some quick and cheap repairs and modifications we've made to our Rock Band (video game) instruments.

electronics kits

If you have students starting to solder and want to teach them a little about circuit design, I'd like to recommend the kits at http://ladyada.net/make/ . They are relatively simple to construct, if you students can solder a cable end, they should be able to follow the (excellent) instructions on the site and make a usable device. I recommend the MintyBoost kit, athough the TV-B-Gone is not much more difficult and seems to be somewhat more popular with the kids.