Martin Spriggs

Earlier this week I was able to secure a Samsung Chromebook and have Google essentially “emulate” the experience a school technology administrator and a student using the device might have. Normally Google will not allow an off-the-shelf Chromebook to connect to a Google Apps environment. So with a 30 day variance my objective with this project is threefold:

1. Determine the fit for our typical WELS classrooms considering a 1:1 computing initiative (primarily our high schools and elementary schools). This will include the budgetary impact and suggested ways to fund them.
2. Test the administrative capabilities of Google Apps and the Chromebook to see if our overworked technology coordinators will save time with a more centralized computing environment approach
3. Identify web-based applications that will serve as suitable substitutes for traditional (i.e. PC-based) applications used in classrooms.

Each blog post in this series will examine a different aspect of the project, but what I’m looking forward to the most is the feedback I hope to get from teachers and school technology coordinators.

Introduction
For those not familiar with the Chromebook or Google Apps, here are a couple of links to get you started: 1) Intro to Chromebooks and the Chrome OS, 2) Google Apps for Education. In short, the combination of a internet-only netbook and online web applications suggest a student computing experience that can be flexible and manageable by the teacher and school tech guru. This is not a traditional computing environment. It is entirely browser based — Google Chrome in this case. All content that is created needs to be stored “in the cloud” as the Chromebook has only limited and temporary storage. This also means that no traditional downloadable or disk-based application can be installed on the machine. So every application needs to be able to run in a browser. This, I believe, will be the challenge. As we go through the review, things will become a little clearer if you are still a bit fuzzy.

Installation
The setup process for starting a Chromebook and getting a student going on it right away is a snap. The school, of course, needs a Google Apps account. Refer to the previous link to get signed up. Any school can get one for free. This will provide email, document storage, calendaring, web sites, chat, etc. The school technology administrator will need to create accounts for each student who will be using a Chromebook. You don’t really need one laptop per child to make this work, but each child will need an account on Google Apps. One of the sweet things about a Chromebook is that anybody with an account can use the device with no fear of any security issues. The laptop is just a web browser and thus there are not files left on desktops or differences in applications. Therefore the laptops can be shared easily. It doesn’t matter which one the student grabs.

Before the laptops get distributed for use by the students the administrator will want to start each one and follow the setup instructions. It takes about 2 minutes (depending on whether the Chrome OS needs to be updated–it happens automatically). You will need to find the local wifi, enter the credentials for it, and then “enroll” the laptop. It’s a simple key combination and then enter in a username and password that belongs on the Google Apps domain. After that, just log off the machine and close the lid. When the student opens it for the first time, all they will have to do is enter their Google Apps username and password. Their desktops, applications and extensions will be all ready for them. I’ll write about how to set that up in a later post.

My guess is that the prep time per machine will be about five minutes tops. The domain setup will take longer depending on how much customization you want to do, but that discussion we’ll save for another day.

First Impressions
After one day with the Samsung Chromebook and just playing around with the Google Apps configuration settings, I will not have a lot of depth to my reactions. But here are a few…

1. The Samsung Chromebook is adequate, but not a powerhouse by any means. I’m probably not going to be able to provide a very balanced review as the only thing I really have to compare it to is the Macbook Air. The two are similar in size and weight, but that is about as far as it goes. Now the Macbook Air is about three times the price, and you can tell. The place where I notice the most is the screen, especially viewing angles. Having said that, I think the Chromebook is perfectly suitable for classroom and homework use. It seems durable. The keys are responsive, as is the touchpad. There are special keys on the keyboard well suited to web browsing–a search key replaces the caps lock, and browser type buttons (back, forward, full screen) have replaced the function keys.

2. One of my first challenges was trying to fine a tool to write this blog post. I do most of my writing on a Windows machine and absolutely love Windows Live Writer. It allows me to write one article and publish across the three blogs I maintain. Working within the Chrome OS I was unable to find an “app” that came close to providing that kind of functionality. To be fair, that grade of tool is also not available on the Mac OS X. I wound up simply using the built-in web-based authoring tool within WordPress. Two of my three blogs are WordPress based. The extra step of course is that I have to copy the content from one web site to another.

3. Setup was a joy and at first blush, the configuration of the domain and user preferences looks to be equally as easy. This will be key as an initiative like this must be administrator friendly. Admittedly the fact that everything is web-based can be a double edged sword, but in the case of centralized administration and user updates, this is the way to go.

Conclusion
Overall a great start. The hardware seems workable, the setup easy and the entire concept of cloud computing in the classroom intriguing. My next post will cover the Google Apps configuration process and how easy/hard it will be to configure a standardized computing environment for any student who cracks open a Chromebook.

My wife Debbie and I have been reading through the Bible in one year. It’s been a wonderful experience to do it together, and there is something special about reading it out loud. I will have to say however there are some very challenging parts of the Old Testament to actually read out loud. You probably all know the parts of I’m talking about. Yes, those sections filled with extremely hard to pronounce names. Here is a sampling from our reading this evening…

“Those who sealed it were: Nehemiah the governor, the son of Hakaliah. Zedekiah, Seraiah, Azariah, Jeremiah, Pashhur, Amariah, Malkijah, Hattush, Shebaniah, Malluk, Harim, Meremoth, Obadiah, Daniel, Ginnethon, Baruch, Meshullam, Abijah, Mijamin, Maaziah, Bilgai and Shemaiah.” (Nehemiah 10:1-8)

You get the idea. While we do our best we have found that listening to someone else read sections like that is preferable – namely Max McLean via the Listener’s Bible. This audio Bible is available for MP3 download for $49. However it is free if you use YouVersion on one of many mobile devices including the iPod, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Windows Phone 7 and Android. I’ve mentioned YouVersion before. Just a wonderful little application that provides the entire Bible in digital form, as well as reading plans, bookmarks, note taking tools, and more.

Once you happen on a chapter in the Bible that you’d like to have read to you, click on the microphone icon at the bottom of the screen and you will hear the beautiful voice of Max McLean. This is an excerpt from Max’s bio on the Listener’s Bible home page:

“Max McLean is President of Fellowship for the Performing Arts, narrator for the Listener’s Bible audio line, and speaker on the daily radio program Listen to the Bible which airs on over 670 radio affiliates worldwide. But he is best known for his theatrical presentations of The Screwtape Letters, Mark’s Gospel, and Genesis. Each of these has received critical acclaim in a wide array of publications including the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.”

He is good and provides a depth to the reading that you will enjoy. What’s more…he seems to have a good handle on Hebrew pronunciation! I would highly recommend giving him a try.

You can also listen online to any selection by using the Bible Gateway website at: http://www.biblegateway.com/resources/audio/.

Of course there are many personal uses for an audio bible, which could include downloading the entire recording and playing it in your car each day on CD or MP3, using the 1 Year Bible Version, or simply playing selected passages as mentioned above. Beyond that however there are some other more public ministry uses that include:

• playing selections for your classroom or catechism class,
• using the recordings as background “music” in the narthex or other church locations,
• providing copies to shut ins or those with vision difficulties,
• as a pronunciation guide for some of those difficult names of people and locations,
• to assist with Bible passage memorization
• as a giveaway to visitors or confirmands,
• and the list goes on.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention our very own Through The Bible in 3 Year audio podcasts read by retired Pastor David Witte of Fond du Lac, WI. Those can be found at http://www.wels.net/streams/podcasts/series/through-my-bible. These take a somewhat slower pace through the Bible, but allow you to listen through the Bible in 5 to 10 minutes a day.

Audio books are very popular these days as we often find ourselves in situations that we can’t really open a book and read (in the gym, running/walking, in the car), but can still listen to God’s word in some ways via a very similar delivery method as was practices in ancient times…having it read to you. Enjoy.

This post is a part of the Summer 2011 WELS Hacker series on the WELSTech Podcast.

Most of you are probably familiar with Google Docs – Google’s offering for cloud-based word processing docs. It’s OK, but wouldn’t it be nice if you could get those familiar Microsoft Office programs in the cloud? Well, now you can. There are cloud-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote all available…for free (with Project and Visio coming soon). Let’s walk through how to set this up.

1. The first thing you will need to do is sign up for a Windows “Live” ID with Microsoft. Just go to http://www.live.com and click on the Sign Up button. Fill in your info and you’re set. If you have ever used Hotmail, MSN Messenger or XBox Live, you already have an ID.

2. Now with your freshly minted ID, login to live.com. You will see all kinds of social options. For now you can ignore those. Later you can hook up Facebook and all kinds of other things to the account, but right now we are interested in the link at the top called SkyDrive. SkyDrive is your hard drive in the sky. It can hold up to 25 gigabytes of data AND it supports the cloud versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. I should say at this point that the cloud versions of these applications don’t have all the features of their big brother computer based counterparts. However, they are just fine for general word processing and the like. If you have Microsoft Office on your computer you can sync documents back and forth, or go into the full product for some serious editing. It should be noted it doesn’t matter if you use a Mac or PC, or what browser you are using…although Internet Explorer is recommended.

When you hover over the SkyDrive link, you will see a listing of everything you can store on your SkyDrive – photos, documents, as well as the ability to create new documents. Go ahead and click on “New Word document.”

3. Give your document a name and hit “save”. You may have noticed there was a link called “change” next to “sharing”. We’ll come back to that.

4. Now you are in full on edit mode. You will see the edit window and the all too familiar ribbon toolbar. Go ahead and write your novel, or sermon, or lesson plan.

5. Once you are ready to save, all you have to do is click on the little save disk icon in the upper right, or click on the File tab and click save. It saves it to your SkyDrive for future access. You may have also noticed the “Open in Word” option at the top. If you have Word installed, go ahead and try it. Once you hit save there, it saves the document back to the SkyDrive by default, where Microsoft takes care of backing things up for you. Even if you use advanced editing features like footnotes, etc. they are saved to SkyDrive as well. You can’t edit them online, but you can “Open in Word” at any time to continue your advanced editing work.

6. Now about sharing. This part is really cool. Click the File tab and then “Share”. You can use the slider to share this with different groupings of people, or you can type in email addresses of those you’d like to share the document with. They will need to have a Windows Live ID as well. But once they have that, they can come in to edit the document with you…at the same time if you like. You will see what they are working on, and they will see your edits. This even works if you both open up the document in your local copies of Word. This works for Excel and OneNote as well.

Give it a shot. Microsoft has done a nice job of bringing their popular Office suite to the web. There are many other features I have not even touched on, but I’m sure if you kick the tires yourself you will begin to see the possibilities.

This post is a part of the
Summer 2011 WELS Hacker
series on the WELSTech Podcast.

When people mention "tablet computing" you probably think they are more than likely referring to Apple’s iPad. However, there is a growing group of non-Apple engineered tablets that might be worth a try as Android’s "Honeycomb" operating system has closed the gap a bit in the race for tablet computing supremacy. There are two major benefits of moving toward an Android-based tablet over the iPad: 1) price, and 2) flexibility. Because we are in the process of building WELS apps for both platforms I purchased one of the higher rated Android tablets from Asus to test things out. The model that I purchased was the Eee Pad Transformer. It is a 10 inch tablet that allows you to attach an integrated real keyboard (on which I’m typing now) and "transform" the touch-based tablet into a nicely equipped netbook, complete with a couple of USB ports, SD Card slot and video out.

The cost of the Asus Eee Pad Transformer is about $100 dollars cheaper than the equivalent iPad, not including the keyboard which is in the $125 dollar range. The screen is beautiful and is in the 16:9 format which makes viewing wide screen movies/videos a more pleasant experience than the iPad. However, because of the longer/narrower form factor, it is most usable in landscape format. Holding it in portrait mode seems odd and is a bit too narrow to be useful.

Another place the Eee Pad shines is in the flexibility of the Android Honeycomb operating system. I will say it is not as elegant as the iPad, but far more configurable. You can add "widgets" that can take up more of the screen real estate than the rigid tile system of the iPad. Nice home screen views of your calendar and email are totally doable and very handy.

Battery life is acceptable, but not on par with the iPad. However, if you add the keyboard, which has it’s own battery, that can add up to over 15 hours of battery life in my testing.

I’d give a slight edge to the iPad for it’s app store, but Android is a close second and gaining every day as more developers realize the large potential of creating apps for the Android platform. Most of the main/useful apps are available in the Android marketplace. One complaint however is that many of those that work great on an Android phone, don’t look or even install correctly on the tablet OS Honeycomb. One of those apps that doesn’t fare well is the WELS ONLINE app. We’ll have to work on that.

While I think the iPad as well as the Eee Pad will work well for anybody looking to move into a tablet, the sweet spot foe either is in the education space, and specifically the classroom. Adding the keyboard option to the Eee Pad makes the tablet a nice netbook for heavier duty typing, but the elegance of a tablet when you don’t need that.

Here are a couple of links that provide much more detailed information about the Eee Pad if you are interested:

• http://www.asus.com/Eee/Eee_Pad/Eee_Pad_Transformer_TF101/
• http://reviews.cnet.com/tablets/asus-eee-pad-transformer/4505-3126_7-34467853.html

Even better news…if you are are interested, our ShopWELS program is offering the Eee Pad on sale right now for only $395 while supplies last, or until the end of July. The keyboard can be ordered separately. Just visit http://www.wels.net/shopwels/product-month.

One way to add a little visual interest to your church or school website is by adding Photo Galleries of select images that visitors might find interesting. The idea is to not overwhelm them, but give them a sense of the sights they can expect to see when visiting you.

Before I get into the technical details of getting these on your website, just a few suggestions about what images to select:

1. Don’t publish group shots. Close-ups of one or two people are preferred. Visitors don’t have an appreciation for the shots you have of the 20 kids who make up the 5th grade class or all the members of the choir that sing on Sunday morning. Try to find photos that capture those neat facial expressions that preach a sermon or send a message.
2. Try to insure that the tonality of the photos is the same. Don’t throw in photos that have a red or blue cast with others that are more faithful to true skin color, etc. Just because it has great composition doesn’t make it a great candidate if it’s tonality isn’t up to snuff.
3. Make sure you have secured permission from the subjects in the photos to use them in a public/promotional way. While it is not illegal to use photos taken of people in public places, it’s just good form to ask.
4. Try to avoid too many shots of buildings. It’s ok to have a few just to give them a flavor of your beautiful facilities, but don’t go overboard. They are going to come there for the people and the message, not the place.
5. Limit the number of photos to a dozen or so. No need to share the entire family album with them. They probably won’t sit there and watch for too long anyway regardless of how compelling or stellar the photos are.

Now, on to the technical details of getting your gallery on to your web page. For these steps I’m going to assume you upload your photos to Flickr. It really doesn’t matter what service you use as they all have similar functionality. I would say you should absolutely use a service rather than house all those photos on your own website. Just a couple reasons include disk space savings and better management tools are usually available through services like Flickr.

1. First you have to upload your photos to Flickr. Once you’ve selected the ones you want, go to your Flickr account and hit the upload button. It’s right on top. The steps are pretty simple.

2. Put your desired photos in a “set”. You do that by clicking the “Organize & Create” button and dragging your photos onto the blank area in the middle of the screen to “batch edit” them. Then click on the “add to set” button at the top, name it, and you’ve got your set.

3. Go to your Flickr home page, click on the little arrow next to“You” and then “Your Sets”. Click on the set you just created. This will open the set up for viewing. You will notice in the upper right corner a button that says “slideshow”. Go ahead and click there to start the slideshow. You must be logged in to your account at this point.

4. Once the slideshow starts to play click the “share” link in the upper right corner. You will see code in the second field there called “Grab the embed HTML”, and below it “Copy to Clipboard.” Go ahead and click that link. Now you have the code you will need for your website. (Note: If you really want to get fancy you can click the “Customize this HTML” to tweak how the gallery will look once embedded on your site. Very cool.

5. Go to your website and find/create the page you’d like the gallery to appear on. You will need to find the “edit HTML or source” button/mode. It is different for each website management tool. Most will have some way to enter HTML code directly in. Without this you will not be able to embed the gallery.

6. Once you are “editing the HTML or source code” just paste the copied embed code from Flickr, save the page and you’re done. Sweet. It should look something like this…

If you have other methods for displaying photos on your site, please feel free to share. Examples are always welcome!

This post is a part of the
Summer 2011 WELS Hacker
series on the WELSTech Podcast.

YouVersion is my favorite online Bible for many reasons, but primarily two big ones: 1) It’s availability on the web and multiple mobile platforms, and 2) It’s note taking tools. I’ve written about the former on any number of occasions, so now it’s time to go into a little more depth on the later.

I’ll deal mostly with the web version, but for the most part the tools work the same way on their mobile counterparts. YouVersion’s note taking tool is perhaps it’s most useful. To begin using it simply click on a verse or series of verses in the left hand reading pane. Clicking on one verse highlights it. Clicking on another verse adds it to the selection. As you select verses their reference appears in the right hand “selected” pane. If you select a verse by mistake, simply click it again to unselect it.

Once you have the correct selection of verses, click the “Create New” link next to the “My Notes” section in the “Selected” pane. You will then be asked to title your note, and then pick which translation you’d like to attach the note to. Then you can enter the note itself in a nicely functional WYSIWYG editor. You have the standard formatting tools like bold, italic, bulleted lists, etc. But you also can add images and videos (either of which must already exist on the web, so no uploading directly to YouVersion). It will accept any URL to a picture, or links to YouTube, Vimeo or Flickr.

Finally you determine the status of the note. You can make it public, so others reading that verse in YouVersion will be able to read what you wrote. You can make it private, so that only you can read it. If the note is not quite ready for prime time, you can also set it into draft mode so you can come back to it later to finish up.

That’s it! Whether on the web or on your mobile device it is very easy to annotate your way through the Bible. For me this is an extremely useful feature that encourages me to think a little more deeply about God’s Word and at the same time share it with others. Even better is that notes you make on the web are also available in your linked mobile versions, and vice versa of course.

To see all of your notes, you can click on the “My” link at the top of any page and select “Notes.” There you will see all your notes in chronological order. Your note will also appear in the “Selected” pane if you select a verse for which you’ve added a note, along with the notes of others in their own section.

There are many other features we don’t have time to include here like sharing via Facebook/Twitter, hyperlinking for inclusion elsewhere, and tags which help you categorize verses in ways that make sense to you. Give them a try and I think you will find the entire Bible reading experience on YouVersion even more enjoyable and fulfilling.

This post is a part of the
Summer 2011 WELS Hacker
series on the WELSTech Podcast.

You can’t help but notice all the buzz these days around tablet computers. The iPad 2 was recently released and immediately sold out of every store it was offered in within day or two. Millions of people willing to shell out between $500 and $800 dollars for a 10 inch display that has no physical keyboard and can’t do half of what your desktop or laptop computer can do. Hmmm… What’s the deal? My mother-in-law uses one as her sole "computer" for web surfing and email. I’m writing this blog article on one right now. So there must be something to it. Have you been debating the need for one? Is there a ministry need for one? Let’s explore that question a bit.

Portability is probably the lead argument when debating the need/desire for a tablet. Let’s face it, lugging around a 5 to 8 pound notebook computer is no fun and not real practical in many circumstances. To pull out a tablet to retrieve meeting information or take notes is one of the best uses for a tablet. They are great notepad replacements for that reason. They fit nicely in a briefcase, backpack or large purse. On the fun side, there are many elegant and fun looking cases, carriers and portfolio covers for them.

The speed of access to information is also a great reason to consider a tablet. In literally seconds you can be reading a document, typing an email, or brainstorming ideas. It makes it more "inviting" to get to work when you can get right to it. The “instant on” nature of these tablets can save a lot of time…and frustration.

The final argument that could be made for a tablet as viable ministry tool is the apps. There are apps for everything…from taking notes to doing sermon text studies to preparing lesson plans to showing Bible maps and virtual tours of Solomon’s Temple. Just take a look at apps like the GloBible or YouVersion and you can tell that the app model is well suited for specific ministry tasks.

While I don’t believe that tablets are ready to replace regular computers, it is a category worth watching. For instance, the process I used for writing this blog was to use and iPad notetaking app for the raw text, emailed it to myself (I could have also sent it to DropBox) and then finished up the editing (added links and images) on my laptop via Windows Live Writer. While I could have done that all on the iPad, it is still easier to finalize things on my computer. What was helpful however was the ability to use the iPad to write the basics of the article wherever I happened to be, which wasn’t a place I had ready access to my computer. That is gold to me. To be able to make use of my time wisely by grabbing those free spaces with good tools to get the job done. I can easily imagine a pastor sitting in a hospital lobby or waiting room banging out a sermon outline or thoughts in prep for the sermon writing process later that day at his desk. I can also imagine a teacher doing research on tomorrows lesson on the human body’s nervous system, jotting down a few notes, tagging a few websites, ready for the time when she can sit down later to finalize things.

There are many other scenarios. Some might work for you, some not. But I think for many a tablet might be a great asset for some tasks. And they’re fun!

This past weekend I headed up to New Ulm, MN once again to live web stream the Graduation and Call Services at Martin Luther College (our synod’s college of ministry). Just the excitement of the day is worth the trip. I remember vividly the two call days I sat through to find out where the Holy Spirit was leading me. What an awesome day to see God commission young men and women to go out into the harvest fields.

Over the past few years what has made it even more special is the growing internet audience of folks who would love to be there, but can’t because of distance or other circumstances. This year we used a new service from LiveStream and saw record viewership on Saturday…almost 600 concurrent viewers for the Call Service. This year we also added the option to live chat with other viewers. Reunions were had and people from all over the world participated from places as far away as China, Japan and the Dominican Republic.

I’m looking forward to sharing the experience with even more global viewers this coming week when we stream events at Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary. I’m sure there will be interested relatives, friends, and congregation members tuning in. Be sure to visit http://www.livestream.com/welslive for the full schedule…and then tune in to watch the Holy Spirit at work.

At the beginning of the year my church decided that it would embark on a program to read through the entire Bible in one year. One Year “Daily” Bibles were made available and members were encouraged to “Join The Journey.” My wife and I decided to try it. It amounts to about 15 minutes a day.

In addition, we decided that it might be nice if we read it together and out loud, as it was probably read long ago. Now this new twist created some problems. I do quite a bit of traveling and therefore we are not always together to do our daily reading. That is where technology comes in. When I’m away, we set up a time in the evening where we can Skype each other and continue our read out loud ritual. So far we have been able to keep up, and what a blessing it has been. The Bible we are using is divided up into an OT, NT, Psalm and Proverb reading. That gives us a nice broad view of God’s Word.

Another place technology has assisted is that we only purchased one Bible. So rather than crowding around the one, or when I’m traveling, not being able to read along, I use my iPad to pull up the readings via the YouVersion app. The One Year Bible reading series is available through the app. So as I read along it tracks my progress similar to putting a bookmark in the physical book. I can even enter notes, thoughts or journal entries as I go along. This also allows me to check out the new version of the NIV. My wife reads the 1984 version, while I read the new one and we can see what has changed. Very enlightening. On that subject, I’d say the new version has done some nice things with clarifying certain passages. A lot of work was done in Proverbs. That is pretty apparent from even just a partial read.

Anyway, it’s been a great experience and technology has only enhanced our ability to stay faithful to our goal of reading the bible out loud in 2011. If you want to try it out, here is the page that provides the readings. http://www.oneyearbibleonline.com/ Why not start now?