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" from the The Maintain IT Project that might be helpful.

In particular, I'd say that the chapter on Meat and Potato Public Computers could be very useful to help those who might need it. I wish I'd seen this when others were asking about it...

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 SME Server, Dynamips, Dynagen, Dynagui, and a few other Moodle tricks too. This should keep me busy and hopefully blogging too... Even found a nice tutorial on Dynamips while looking for the URL to use for this post. So much stuff, so little time.

I also presented a few topics myself and my friends at QTL blogged about it, Charles Thorne and I teamed up to present a session on "Setting Up Your Own Moodle Server" that Robin Fred wrote up at The QTL CareerTech Blog.

I'm afraid, though, that we may have missed our audience. Participants seemed to want to know more about how to use Moodle than about how to install it. I'm thinking that next year I'll have to do a session on Moodle tips and tricks. I am happy to add that my post on Free Moodle Classrooms did seem to help a lot with those people who didn't want to install, but, wanted to use Moodle in their own classrooms.

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 for the Internet than Al Gore could ever claim.

The Google AJAX Feed API makes RSS feeds pretty simple. I used this API and in only a few minutes I was able to help out a "non-techie" school webmaster put her calendar headlines (using an RSS feed, of course) onto the front page of her site. It really was as easy as copying and pasting a little code into the head section of her page and then adding additional code into the body of the page where she wanted this little box to go. It took us only a few minutes to get this done, and her Principal is THRILLED.

The site above gives a "hello world" example that is a matter of copy and paste into a text editor and upload for testing. Full documentation is also given in their developer guide. You can even style the look and feel of the gadget to match your site. In a word... wow.