In the world of cloud hosted computing platforms it is fair to say that Amazon have taken the lead with their Elastic Compute Cloud (ECC). The newest contender to their crown comes from Microsoft. The Azure infrastructure provides a global backbone suitable for building, deploying and managing applications and services.
As a test of the suitability of Azure for these types of deployments I chose to deploy and build a new WordPress instance from scratch. This seemed a reasonable, albeit fairly simplistic, way of testing each part of the processes in turn:
Implementing a new computing instance
Installing a standard piece of open source software
While Azure as a platform supports many more technologies including XML, ASP.NET and Node.js the standard WordPress combination of PHP and MySQL provides a test that will cover a large percentage of implementations.
Sign Up
The sign up process for Azure is reasonably simple for those with one of the many incarnations of a Live account. (If not creating a new account at outlook.com is fairly painless.)
Once logged in the sign up requires verification delivered via either a texted code of a phone call followed by payment details. Payment is only required where usage exceeds the fairly generous trial limits.
Shortly after you find yourself confronted with the management portal.
Azure Management
Azure instances fall into four general themes:
Compute: including web services and virtual machines
Creating a new instance of one of these is as simple as following the options. For this test I chose to create a new web service form the app gallery. This is a continually expanding set of pre-cast applications such as ASP.NET, Drupal and Joomla. Creating my new WordPress site is easy.
Choose WordPress and click next
Give the database a name
Keep the default “Create new MySQL database” option
Choose the region where the database is to be stored. For those of us in Europe that have to comply with data protection legislation this step should be given some serious thought
Press the tick and off you go
The new web site is then created and made available. (I’ve skipped over the WordPress setup.)
I’m sad to report that that’s it. The new instance is made available and is ready to go right here
In some ways I would have preferred a longer, more tortuous set-up. As an IT guy I can always charge more for obfuscation but in this case that won’t be possible. The only thing that remains is to try the other facilities.
My iPhone apps as of February 2010 (Photo credit: dougbelshaw)
Having been teaching with a tablet in my classroom for nearly a year it has become evident that the market for Education apps still isn’t quite right. I think this is most evident in the fact that the course I run training teachers to use an iPad effectively in the classroom features almost no ‘education’ apps. I do one session (out of 7) that revolves around subject-specific apps, but other than this, the apps that are used on a day-to-day basis are commercial, and often free.
That said, even these great apps, that no doubt you read about all the time – Evernote, Dropbox, iMovie etc, don’t do everything we need them to do.
The key to successful technology integration in schools is to get the staff on board. To get the staff on board, you need to show them how much easier life becomes with the technology, as well as how much better/enhanced the learning can be. There will always be a core group of teachers who get on board without much fuss and these people are what keep you sane when you’re trying to push things forward. I will discuss the role of ‘champions’ in a future post.
Back to what we need to get devices functioning at a higher level in a classroom. My wish list includes the following:
Finding the best education technology tools is a time-consuming task. It may even be viewed as a chore (for some). Typically, one tracks down a handful of useful apps or web tools and puts them through their paces at home. Then you probably don’t use any of them because each tool took far too long to understand, use, become accustomed to, and actually implement in a classroom.
That’s why I was so excited to find this Symbaloo created by user lcobbs detailing 50 great classroom tools that are all easy to implement into just about any classroom. From Animoto to Prezi to Dropbox to Stixy (wait what?), there’s a lot to check out. Don’t know all 50 tools? I didn’t! Click on each icon to get an idea about each tool and learn more.
The findings of the Skills and Employment Survey, with the latest figures for 2012, show a significant milestone in the employment landscape, with graduate jobs at a record high level and unskilled jobs at a record low.
Students of Saint Mary’s Hall (Photo credit: Robert of Fairfax)
Class discussions that can occur any time of day and students engaged in that discussion. It took me a while to get my head around ‘online’ discussion and I used the experience of other teachers in my school who’d tried it. I currently use this with my Independent Directed Study students (Japanese language) and will be expanding it to my Year 4 students next year. What to consider? Here’s a few of my thoughts:
English: HTC Corporation smart phone “Prophet”, sold branded as O 2 XDA Neo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The world is rapidly becoming a fully connected planet, and here in Northern Ireland we have one of the most widely available access to high speed internet based communications on the planet.
In a connected world, individuals can have a global persona. Increasingly, ‘ordinary’ citizens, people who don’t work in the communications industry, have relationships with individuals and groups of interest spanning all of the continents.
Access to sources of information and knowledge bases is increasingly straightforward. From a simple computer or smart phone, one can access nearly all of the information ever known to mankind. This is a phenomenal leap forward from where we were just a few decades ago, where such access was limited to a very small number of ‘experts’, and with library and historical collections, including art works and copyright library collections being digitised and made available to everyone, this access is often for free.
Access to knowledge is increasingly both classless and independent of nationality, with the world rapidly becoming ‘flat’.
The possibilities that this opens up are mind-blowing.
The game was tested on a group of 10- to 12-year-old girls who had never done any programming before. After an hour of gameplay, the girls had mastered some of the basic components of Java. The team that developed the game — from UC San Diego — plans to release the game for free and make it available to educational institutions and code clubs.
Computer scientist William Griswold, who headed up the project, said he developed the game because there is a lack of qualified instructors to teaching computer science below college level in a way that is accessible. Griswold and his graduate students decided to design a videogame that “completely immerses programming into the gameplay”. The aim was to keep children engaged while they are learning programming, which can be frustrating.
Payment fraud can be defined as an intentional deception or misrepresentation that is designed to result in an unauthorized benefit. Fraud schemes are becoming more complex and difficult to identify. It is estimated that industries lose nearly $1 trillion USD annually because of fraud. The ideal solution is where you avoid making fraudulent payments without slowing down legitimate payments. This solution requires that you adopt a comprehensive fraud business architecture that applies predictive analytics.
This IBM® Redbooks® publication begins with the business process flows of several industries, such as banking, property/casualty insurance, and tax revenue, where payment fraud is a significant problem. This book then shows how to incorporate technological advancements that help you move from a post-payment to pre-payment fraud detection architecture. Subsequent chapters describe a solution that is specific to the banking industry that can be easily extrapolated to other industries. This book describes the benefits of doing fraud detection on IBM System z®.
This book is intended for financial decisionmakers, consultants, and architects, in addition to IT administrators.
