Digital Arts Service Corps - software

back at it

Wilson Bull — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:54:07 +0000

Greetings and HNY. I’d like to report on what I’ve been up to lately. I have travelled to Eastern Washington to give a training and to visit some of our clubs in that area. The training went really well. We’re trying to work with a group of university students at Central Washington University to have them provide training for families who receive computers from the TAP clubs. Fortunately for us, they’re willing to travel a couple hours to give the trainings, for free and will even go into the homes of the recipients to train them. Now it’s just a matter of picking a date and hoping people show up. I also visited some clubs in Bridgeport and Brewster which were interesting. It’s funny to see the different styles of the club leaders and what their kids are like. Each club really has its own personality which is kind of cool. Coming back from that trip I experienced, quite possibly, the worst driving conditions I had ever faced. Coming back from Eastern Washington requires going over two mountain passes, which does not sound that terrible, and the first time I went, it wasn’t. However, coming back over the passes, there was a lot (3-6 inches) of snow of the road, combined with a lot of snow falling from the sky. It was probably the most intense couple hours in recent memory. Anyway, one of our clubs had a computer distribution on 12/18 which apparently went pretty well. Now it’s time to try and get the trainings happening and visit the clubs I haven’t been to yet.
I had somewhat of an extended vacation in that because of the snow travelling to the office was pretty much impossible. I was, however, able to work from home which was enjoyable. I’m looking forward to setting up some training for the recipients of the computers and having the rest of the distributions.

ALSO! I'm using my in-service training funds to take a class on CSS this Friday. I'll let you know how it goes.

Winter Update

Davina Fournier — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:53:35 +0000

Most of my day is spent working on projects to boost our numbers of students and mentors (i.e. recruitment.) Now that it’s getting near the holidays, this has slowed down. When I first started here, it felt like I had a least one or two events a week I attended in order to round up more students or volunteers. Thankfully, those days have ended. We actually have an organization in my town whose purpose is to coordinate after-school youth programs. They were a great help to me when I first started because they compiled a list of a number of different events where youth could be reached (community events, back-to-school, nights, etc.) Unfortunately, they don’t have enough funding to continue everything they have been doing this summer but hopefully they will be able to find it somewhere.

I’m glad that recruitment has slowed down because it gives me time to plan for next year. Also, as a side project, I’ve been working on a portion of our website. I wanted to create a list of all the different programs we have along with tutorials and example projects. Many of our mentors come in knowing Office but not much beyond that (myself included when I started as a mentor.) Therefore, we’re trying to beef up our training for them so that they feel more comfortable when kids ask “How do I make a game?” or “How can I create this in Fireworks?” Rather than looking like a deer in the headlights, we’d like them to feel comfortable saying “Well, let’s start here.” The site is certainly still a work in progress but if you want to check it out, you can find it here. I’d be glad to have any feedback, tutorials, or additional free programs you might suggest. Also, if you work with kids and are looking for anything (Nathan, you were asking me about this at one point), then you may want to check out some of the free programs available. My favorite is GIMP since it does much the same as Photoshop but has a much better price tag (free!) but Alice is also a pretty unusual program when it decides to work correctly.

P.S. Why is it so cold in Virginia? I wish it were April...

Firefox 2.0 Add-ons

Tim Wescott — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 18:42:19 +0000

Firefox is currently the most popular (http://socialsourcecommons.org/tool/by_popularity) tool in SSC, so it's pretty big news that Firefox 2.0 was released yesterday. I updated my version yesterday afternoon and so far it's been working great for me. More importantly, I haven't noticed any problems with SSC since I've been using it, although I will still be doing more testing.

Along with the launch of Firefox 2.0, there has been an increase in activity among blogs and bookmarking sites listing add-ons for Firefox, most of which I've encorporated in Firefox's Useful Links field (http://socialsourcecommons.org/tool/show/51/support).

Most add-ons can be found through Firefox's website (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/). In particular, Firefox's website has a list of recommended add-ons (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/recommended/). I'll be exploring a few of these for my personal use. So far, I've been using Sage (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/77/) as my RSS reader and Google's Browser Sync (http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/browsersync/) so that I can use the same bookmarks on both my home and work computers.

RSSin' across the Universe...

Tim Wescott — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 21:52:00 +0000

"There's newsfeeds on the starboard bow! Starboard bow! Starboard bow!" <ahem>

(If you don't get the joke, click here).

Anyway, I've been spending much of my time recently having fun with RSS. Much of what I'm doing is searching for information around the web that I can aggregate onto Social Source Commons, and naturally blogs are very helpful to this task, as are the official websites for the tools. I've also been signing up for Google Alerts, and getting e-mail whenever a new hit on Google results for my search terms.

Since I've been using Firefox primarily, I downloaded Sage and have been using that. It seems to work fairly well, but I'd be interested in hearing what other RSS readers people are using.

Social Source Commons

Tim Wescott — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 23:28:14 +0000

I just wanted to give a plug for Social Source Commons, the project I will primarily be working on here at Aspiration. We're developing this website so that non-profits can find out information about various software tools of all stripes. Ideally, this website will be a source of information about new products and upsdates to existing products, as well as pointing to help and documentation about products. Hopefully, the content will be user supplied and maintained, with minimal input form us. It's still in the Beta testing phase, so we could always use some new eyes to look at it and try it out. Let me know how you think it can be improved and made more useful.

Questions about access control for community computer center

Andrea Collopy — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 16:34:11 +0000

Hi guys,

Hope everyone's first week is going well! I was hoping to get some ideas and suggestions from those of you who have any knowledge about what I guess I am calling access control. This is an area that I am unfamiliar with and trying to utilize all of my resources to learn more about:)

We would like to find some software for our computer center that will allow us to:

-require users to login and logout

-track who logs in and when

-prevents users from accessing certain controls and settings

-and return the computer to its original settings (so that nothing is permanently saved) upon logout

I have found a few programs that might accomplish this (Public Access Desktop, WinU, and Clean Slate), but I wanted to see if anyone had any expertise in this area. I would appreciate any comments or suggestions that you may have.

Thanks!

Andrea