Apple Mac Ad: “Work vs. Home”
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=ot9Jp6-mB-8

Mac PC 2-Girl
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=L_vV5mZ8Ox8

Mac ads - Networking
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=eU9EflLJuf8

Apple Get a Mac Ad: Choose a Vista
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=PxLgBx3W9Ss

Get a Mac ad with Gisele Bundchen
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=KNnX6XRQBec

Apple “Get a Mac” ad: “Goodwill”
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=MSWNYlaqzw8

Novell Linux, Mac, PC
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa1RCg-Ccp0

Apple Mac Ad: “Computer Cart”
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=Rolx3HQbs74

Novell Linux - Apple Ad Spoof (1st)
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=rtp5gNhBZgo

Apple “Get a Mac” ad: “Tech Support”
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=6xuzY4VFlkA

Apple UK Get a Mac Ad: Office Posse
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=Sol2zeR_h60

TheUNreleasedMacAd
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_uyC_GF3A

Apple Get a Mac Ad: Party is Over
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=sfCHuVrWHPk

Apple “Get a Mac” ad: Sabotage
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=BaNzb7hmtB4

Apple Get a Mac Ad: Genius
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=R0tLubCFdyM

Apple “Get a Mac” ad: “Gift Exchange”
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgIb0xBQhk

Apple - Get a Mac - Surgery
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=ci2D1ig4df4

Apple “Get a Mac” ad: “Sales Pitch”
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=cWVNFqpBNvI

MAC vs PC (Viruses)
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=GQb_Q8WRL_g

Japanese Apple/Mac CM (w/ English Subtitles)
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=WhuN–AwqqE

Apple “Get a Mac” ad: “Self Pity”
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=iH5auChwfmA

Mac Vs Bloated PC
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=1EbCyibkNB0

WWDC 2007 Opening- PC Guy is Steve Jobs
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=KftrYHIu9O8

Macbook Random shutdown-reboot
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=v0QxafBu0b8

Apple “Get a Mac” ad: “Meant for Work”
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=Hao-VSm2rlo

Get A Mac - Angel/Devil
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=PNRObcLBpVM

Apple “Get a Mac” ad: “Counsellor”
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=eUawnYHqWWc

Apple “Get a Mac” ad: “Trust Mac”
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=DDuB8NLTj_I

Apple “Get a Mac” ad: “Accident”
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=QioLksee6mM

Hi,  Continuing my pursuit for the perfect student desktop I am exploring VMWare ACE and VMWARE Views + ThinApps on a fleet of student owned laptops.

I presently look after 250+ desktops alone so I am confident that my methodology works reasonably well and I can also honestly say that a sound educational pedagogy ranks higher than ease of computer management in my book which is why am exploring ways of facilitating the use of Student Owned laptops with the use of Virtual OS’s and tunneling applications to the desktop using ACE and VMWare Views. I already use ThinApps to wrap difficult applications, perhaps using a school SOE on top of a privately owned computer/laptop is a viable solution.

The following are ideas not statements - so please go easy on me:

Decentralisation is key to success, one of the reasons MOE must eventually fail, it is way too restrictive, personal empowerment is more important than consolidation : What I am trying to say is that students with their own laptops / notebook running applications or (SOE) desktops on their own workstations may possibly be a better solution than running a school owned fleet of laptops.

How likely / unlikely is it the idea that a school could operate on self own laptops using VMWare ACE and VMWARE Views + ThinApps ?

The key issue will be deployment of SOE / ThinApps or ACE to unmanaged laptops:
How does one achieve this goal easily? We should be teaching students to manage
their computers and select software. I imagine using a Management Website where
students are encouraged to download recommended software and application: Self
Management and Bit Litracy amongst students.

The problem I face is that I do not want to get in bed with VMWare, Microsoft, Citrix, 2X, Linux, or anyone else: I think the term they prefer to use is “partnership”. I see this as a synonym for “entrapment”, however taking what is needed from each of these vendors, affordability and flexibility is the key to a successful community.

How would this work: I create and VMWare Player image: which once loaded allows students to login and access the school network, once connected they use a small application from which they are able to subscribe to additional applications and sofware which the school uses and have licensed? Basically “Self Service” for Staff and Students, including the initial download of VMWarePlayer and the school SOE or similair solution.

The SOE in question has ThinApps, Limited VMWare Views, recommended software
reinstalled: All students with their own laptops receive a detailed Manual / User Guide : use and understanding of which itself educates and enhances the bit literacy and digital education of said students.

Basically there are a number of ways one can go:

A) School Owned Managed Fleet of Laptops
B) Student Owned and Managed of Laptops
C) Mix of School owned / Student Owned (User Chooses)

At this stage I am suggesting that it may be possible to run both programs simultaneously: user chooses either.

A) School managed laptops which we lease / rent / loan to students and carry the management overhead or.
B) User owned laptop and we teach / provide ways of self management using some of the above ideas and goals or.
C) Students / Parents choose to use either A or B.

Already we have a massive increase in the number of student owned laptops entering into this school: I remember so very clearly listening to Ken Capps, about 6 years ago explain at a conference that students know well how to use computers, software, games, communications …… and we come along and try and teach them “word processing” on inferior systems which are often far behind what is available at home or what they currently have their school bags. ha ha, this idea has never left my mind and I continually strive to ensure that systems, software, games, computer resource inside of our school is superior to what is available to students outside of schools.

Understanding full well that we are diverse in our opinions and software management approaches I can’t help feeling that I am only a hop, skip and a jump away from the right solution: I would very much value your ideas and suggestions.

Kind regards
Roland

Please Note: This was a post a made to a newsgroup which attend,  I did not get much feedback, however, I  intent to keep this idea alive while I continue to exporte this more fully.

Time Flies, its seem like only yesterday I was busy constructing this web log and then failing to update it as regularly as had initially hoped I might. It has certainly been a long time since I last maintained and updated my blog, I think there was only one post for 2008, and a few miserable blogs in 2007.   

I’m off to see my parents in the UK after an absence of almost 6 years to the day. I plan, of coarse to see family, friends and colleagues while I am there. It will be most interesting for me to contrast the changes in both countries over the space of half a decade.

I only regret that I have not travelled much during this time.  However one must consider that I have immersed myself in the culture of three countries for fairly significant periods of time:  South Africa, the United Kingdom and Australia.  I feel that I might be able to utilize these experiences in some way to “Further the Kingdom of Heaven” and to fulfill my responsibly to my wife and family.

So there are a few things to ponder:  Has it all been worth it?  I am currently “Head of Information Technology” in a Christian School (of 500 students) in South East Queensland on the Sunshine Coast of Australia. Unfortunately it has been neither a pleasant nor prosperous journey for reasons I shan’t go into now.

In less than a week I shall have been in the UK for a few days and wonder now how I might feel about these three countries mentioned earlier.

This is available at http://www.homeschool.co.uk/education and you would hardly know it was a wiki. One of the primary benefits of using a wiki is that it facilitates easily adding and updating information. So the three main sections of CHE are as follows

http://www.homeschool.co.uk/index.html - Static and Dynamic Pages, since 1999
http://www.homeschool.co.uk/blog - This Blog
http://www.homeschool.co.uk/education - Education Wiki

In October 2003 we moved our family of five, our furniture, belongings and the cat to a quiet but quaint little village in the Cotes d’Armor region of Brittany. We had always wanted to live in France and in 2003 we felt that it was ‘now or never’, and to our family and friends amazement we actually went through with the plans which had talked wistfully about for most of the thirteen years of our married life. My husband left a well paid steady job as a music lecturer, and the children and I gave up our home education together, as it was decided (after much deliberation), that they would go to school in France to help them learn the language and make friends.

The first year in school went relatively smoothly for our two older children. They were somewhat of a novelty in their little primary school with its three teachers and sixty children, but as the year drew to a close it became obvious that our eldest was struggling a little. He had spent most of the year trying to get to grips with the language, and most of the other things ‘taught’ to him had gone largely over his head. His teacher suggested another year in primary school instead of moving up to the secondary school with his peers, which is quite normal practice in France. The second year at school only confirmed that whilst his French was now virtually fluent, his ability to concentrate in a classroom situation was a problem. All the reasons we had turned to home education in the first place were rearing their heads again. Owing to his Dyspraxia his organizational skills were lacking, and he would frequently loose books, pens, homework, or do the wrong class work or homework altogether and he was very easily distracted by anything else that went on in the classroom. His teacher spoke to us many times of the necessity that he ‘get himself together’, and organise himself “or else”, she warned, “He will never cope at the secondary school”. These were to prove to be prophetic words. Less than a term into his new secondary school and we were being regularly called in to speak to teachers to be told he was lazy and unorganized and finally, one weekend after a long ‘family conference’ we decided that we would waste no more time – the following morning we would recommence home education. Three months later, his brother and sister, also now fluent in French, joined us at home and we reestablished our rhythm of daily life as a home educating family.

Now that they are not at school every day, and with the French education authorities always close on our heels, the children have to keep up regular French lessons, and it was out of this necessity that our new business was born. ‘A present from France’ has been developed to provide resources for all children to learn French through games, music, stories, audio CDs, books, worksheets, posters and lots more. The ‘present’ idea is designed to capture the imagination of the children and we have been careful to include something for all learning styles; audio, kinesthetic and visual. The carefully chosen learning tools in the ‘present’ are likely to appeal to children around the ages of 6 - 8, although older children and even parents might learn something too!

The boxes are dispatched every two months and each ‘present’ includes two themed subjects, for example ‘Les Couleurs’ (colours), ‘Les chiffres (numbers) or ‘Salutations’ (greetings).

We are a musical family and are lucky enough to have a recording studio and a live music room fitted in the house. This means we have been able to produce our own audio CDs (stories and music), and we have been able to draw on the local talent of French teachers, speech therapists and singers to ensure authentic French voices and accents on our CDs.

So far, our efforts have been enthusiastically received and we hope to continue to expand our repertoire to enable us to continue our lives, home educating, here in France.

You can visit our website at http://www.apresentfromfrance.com ________________________________
This article was kindly written by

Kim Hoffmeister
Moncontour de Bretagne
France

In the Name of Education seeks to answer questions that have plagued concerned individuals for decades. Armed with a bevy of historical facts, Alexis takes on the challenge of addressing the problematic situations in education today–including a discussion of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, a book that has sold more than forty million copies

Here are some games we have played which have been successful:

Name Game No. 1

Gather everyone into a circle, facing inwards. This probably works best with 10 to 20 youth although it would quite possibly work with more but may be quite difficult to learn so many names at once. Once everybody is in a circle, each person needs to identify themselves by calling out their name and enacting, for instance I might introduce myself as rowing Roland and pretend to row my boat. Jack might introduce himself as jumping Jack and hop around for a few seconds. The rest of the circle need to listen attentively as each person introduces themselves and enacts an aspect of their name. Crazy Carol may pretend to be insane. Once you have gone around once or twice you may pass the token to someone else whose name you remember, for instance I might say “rowing Roland to crazy Carol”, Carol would continue “crazy Carol to stinky Steven”. Each person enacts their own name association and the association with the person they are calling to. This is a fun way of introducing yourself and surprisingly easy way to remember other people’s name and it is also a pleasant ice-breaker.

Name Game No 2

Get everyone to stand in a circle looking inwards, I guess in this case the size doesn’t really matter although 15 to 30 might be a reasonable number. Each person calls out their name as quickly as possible, going in a clock-wise direction and as they call out their name they look into the face of the person on their right (you may want to warn people to pay attention to the person on the left and right). Once you have gone around once or twice or perhaps more times, remember speed is essential, a sort of Mexican wave. Change direction and repeat the process the other way. Good, now you know the person on your left and your right. Now the tricky part, you need to call out the persons name on your right while looking into the face of the person on your left. The person you have just looked at needs to call out your name and look into the eyes of the person on their right. Go around as quickly as you can (it is really not too bad as long as you can remember the person on your left and shout it to the person on your right). Now the fun part, at any one stage you can change direction of the wave so if somebody shouts the names of the person on their left to you, you can keep looking at them and shout the name of the person on your right. This will change the direction. It is all good fun but should probably be demonstrated but I hope that these instructions will be enough to get you going.

Pass the Semaphore (a Semaphore is a signal)

Create two rows of chairs, back to back, the row can be as long as you like as long as the group remains manageable. So for a group of 30 you would have two rows of 15 chairs with the kids sitting on each side of the row of chairs holding hands. The flagmaster sits at the one end with a large coin which he flips. If it is heads each team must squeeze the hand of the person next to them remembering that only the first person on each team closest to the flagmaster may look at the flagmaster and everyone else looks down the line. At the other end of the row a chair, a ball or an object on top of another chair. So everyone sitting holding hands looking in the direction of only the two persons nearest the flagmaster are waiting and looking at the flagmaster because he or she is about to flip the coin. If the coin lands heads up, the two on the closest to the flagmaster must squeeze the hand of the person next to them, the signal needs to be passed down the line as quickly as possible and the person closest to the ball grabs the ball and wins. The team who win rotate so the person who holds the ball moves to the head near the flag master. If a false signal is sent down the line ant that person grabs the ball (which happens quite frequently) then that team rotates but the other way so that the person at the head goes to the tail.

The first team to completely rotate there team members is the wining team.

This freeware software by Martin Frerz is better than most commercial checkerboard applications. There is a significant amount of information about the game of checkers at Martin Frerz’s website. - Enjoy.

http://www.fierz.ch/checkerboard.php

April 2007

Software
Money Dance
Dreamweaver 8
PDF Creator
Google Picasa
Version Tracker
Skype
UltraISO
SnagIT
Vista Video Codecs
Paint.net
Driver Detective
Version Tracker
Adobe
DVD Shrink
7Zip
AntiVir

Utilities
StartUP CPL
Sync Toy
Universal Extractor
Gmail POP Trouble Shooter

I have been using SVS for about six months now and am very impressed by what I can do so easily and ituitively. I have used it to run almost all my applications virtually. One of the key benefits of this is that I can easily export the application and migrate it to a new or different computer.

It is similair in many ways to VMware which allows the user to run virtual operating systems however in this instance it is the application that can be virtualised and activated or deactivated, imported or exported.  Once the virtual application is deactivated there is no bearing or impact on the operating system of any sort and ti it does not exist in the registry or in the “normal” file system. It exists only in the data file or whatever it is that Altiris have chosen to call it.

SVS is free for personal use. If you often find yourself installing a programme which you later wished you never installed Altiris is what you have been looking for. Altiris monitors what you install and virtualises the application so what is installed has little or no impact on the existing computer environment.

Homeschoolers can benefit significantly from virtualised applications since we are continually installing aind uninstalling educational programmes and utilities.  Quite often these programmes are not  well written and overtime can clutter and slow down your computer.  If you find yourself in this category of user then you may wish to have  a good look at SVS by Altiris.

If you’re reasonably computer savvy you will quickly figure out how it works and begin to benifit from SVS and Software Vitualisation.  If you are not very comfotable with virtualistaion don’t worry SVS will ( I feel)  soon be appearing in different forms and guises in your computer since they have alliances with with companies like Dell, Hewlett Packard, VMWare.

No doubt a useful, clean uncomplicated  product like SVS  will someday will  swallowed up by some conglomerate and  no longer be freely available or worse will become over complicated and  obfusticated in much the same way that  Skype and PayPal were after they were purchased.   -  This is why whenever possible I use open source software.

For More Information about SVS

http://www.altiris.com/
http://juice.altiris.com/svs

Get Ready Build Applications  - http://www.svsdownloads.com/
An SVS Tutorial -  http://www.svsdownloads.com/svs_tutorial.php