While at Summer Conference this year, I was surprised to hear quite a few of my colleagues asking for advice on how to lock down their labs to prevent students from doing some of the things they shouldn't be doing.

While I work in a large school system, locking down the labs is not a problem that I have. In some cases I actually have to be a little creative in finding ways to work with the security and procedures that my school system has put in place. But, while surfing around today, I found a really nice "Cookbook" ...<< MORE >>

Just got back from Summer Conference and had a few minutes to sit down and compose my thoughts. IMHO, every teacher should go to some type of professional conference at least once a year.

To me, this is a perfect opportunity to learn new things, and possibly contribute some of your own ideas as well. My opinion of a successful conference is any time that I can walk away from one of these events with more new ideas. I would have to say that this year's conference was definitely a success.

Picked up some interesting tips about << MORE >>

As a school webmaster with a limited no budget, I sometimes have to be creative when building my school site. I purposely look for FOSS projects when thinking of my site. I've used Joomla! to build the site, supplemented it with VTCalendar, and even used MagpieRSS to help me include headlines from the sports scheduling service that my athletic director uses.

Using Magpie took a steep learning curve, and I would be hesitant to recommend it to anyone who didn't have a pretty good understanding of HTML and  PHP. But, enter Google... Google has done ...<< MORE >>

As the resident "QTL Moodle Dude" I am often asked about if a teacher can use the QTLMoodle site for their "other" courses. Unfortunately, my answer to that question is "no". Hey, I understand, I LOVE Moodle and use it for all of my classes. However, I also understand that my QTL friends don't have the resources to support other classes. In addition, some teachers at my school aren't fortunate enough to be involved in any of the QTL Programs. So, I did a little research for a ...<< MORE >>

I'll admit it, I'm not normal. My classes are pretty high on the geek level, but, there are just some things that are really, really cool. You see, I love VMware Server. I used it way back when on my Red Hat 9 laptop, and I think I've loaded it on just about every Linux machine I've used ever since.

About a year ago, VMware made their server free to the public, and that, my friend, was all I needed. Now the joys of virtualization were no longer relegated to my own desktops, I could share this with ...<< MORE >>

I'm teaching a class the other day and I realize that I need my students to read a passage from an old eBook I've got... the book is way out of print and I really only wanted them to look at a page or two. At first I just printed the pages I wanted using PDFCreator. Then I'm looking over the book later and realizing that I'd like for them to see a couple of other sections, and wouldn't it be nice for students to be able to look at the Glossary?<< MORE >>

My latest "little" project (Thanks Todd Thibault & David Barbour) has been an effort to convert existing SkillsUSA tests into Moodle categories. It turns out NC SkillsUSA is interested in using online testing in their upcoming state competition so, David asked Todd & I to create a Moodle Server.....<< MORE >>

I originally started this post at SeedWiki a year or so ago, but, I discovered today how unreliable it can be to depend on someone else to host your thoughts. So, below is the same information, that I now control...

Every semester I have a discussion on Computer Ethics and the like.... This discussion always ends to the questions of how can I NOT use illegal software when I need it. This page has developed from those discussions and is included here for my own documentation. Like it, love it, or leave it... the choice is yours....<< MORE >>

During a recent workshop with QTL, Barry Cochran was demonstrating Camtasia Studio. While the presentation was very interesting and Camtasia does a great job of making really cool demo videos the $299 price tag hit me hard.

Yes, I know... Barry was giving away free copies thanks to the fine people at TechSmith. And yes, they do offer free trial versions. But, hey I'm all about the free stuff and I wasn't lucky enough to get a free copy.

Well, a little investigation at I want a Freeware Utility to ... 450+ common problems solved helped me to find Wink....<< MORE >>

I teach technology, so, my needs may be a little different than your own. However, there are a lot of times when my students or myself need to transfer files. Now, sometimes a flash drive is quite sufficient for moving around documents, pictures, etc. However, in my courses we sometimes move around ISOs or we backup entire directories full of files. After a certain size flash drives get really expensive.

So, my solution is simple.... I often get computer "leftovers" either PCs that don't work or are just too old to use. I usually just buy several inexpensive external drive enclosures and rip the hard drive out of these dinosaurs! Sometimes the drive sizes are pretty small, but hey, I'm not buying the drive....<< MORE >>