The Perfect Student Laptop

I've been talking to several students about our school's upcoming laptop program and many are not that excited about it because they are not looking forward to carrying around a heavy laptop in addition to all of their books, binders, notebooks, and other school materials. I completely understand where they are coming from.

Considering this scenario, I think there will be a premium in the first few years of our laptop program on form factor. This convertible tablet PC from 2GOPC very well might be the best student laptop option given the fact that there will be a premium on a device that is light, durable, easy to carry, flexible, highly portable, and inexpensive.

What are your thoughts? Given that next year our students will be adding laptop computers to their already exploding backpack sizes, what computer do you think will be the "perfect" student laptop for students in grades 6-12 (ages 12-18)?


NOTE: Our laptop program is built on an open, OS agnostic model. Students and families are permitted to choose the OS and form factor (from netbook to full size laptop) that will work best for them (their system must meet a few basic minimum requirements that we've specified).

Moodle 2.0 Alpha and Mahara ePortfolio Integration

Adam Contois and I are really, really excited about the possibilities associated with Moodle 2.0 and its new integration with the fantastic ePortfolio solution, Mahara. Moodle 2 is still in alpha, but Adam recently set this up here on our LAN so we could demo its integration with Mahara and Google Docs. Right now we only have it setup with the capability for students to copy and push files from the Moodle virtual learning space over to their ePortfolio in Mahara and their Google Docs. We're scratching the surface of single sign on integration between Moodle 2 and google apps for education network and we're also looking at some of the other 3rd party integration features (flickr, Amazon S3, box.net, etc).

I've said it before at this blog, but I think we to think differently about assessment (even beyond rubrics) as school 2.0 continues to emerge and develop. Authentic student ePortfolio spaces should be a major component of this paradigm shift.

Major, major props to both the Mahara and Moodle open source communities for their outstanding work on this project.

The screencast below is pretty low budget, but hopefully it gives you a better idea of what this integration looks like.

Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional

At the end of the school day I received a tweet from Alec Couros regarding an invitation to join a little live demo of Adobe's Acrobat Connect Pro piece. This was a really neat experience! After signing in to the virtual learning space, I was sharing video and audio with close to 10 other participants. It was kind of like having a skype conference with several people while allowing everyone the opportunity to share video. Alec is using this piece to conduct a gradulate level class that deals with the topic of web2.0 technologies. Click here to see a portion of the recorded session. Thanks for the invitation, Alec!