IT Ideas

Prezi is a nice alternative to more traditional presentation tools such as Google Slides and MS PowerPoint. Free accounts have very limited space and your work is public and cannot be make private. However, you can get an education account as long as you have a email address with the same domain name as your school. Sign up here  for an Edu account. You get 500Mb space and your Prezi's are private by default. There is also an app in the Chrome Webstore. Been using it on my Chromebook - works well. You can have up to 10 people working on the project at the same time - bit like a Google Slide presentation.

If you want to make presentations a bit more interactive - maybe a quiz or just a bit less linear or something for students to interact with in their own time, adding links can help. This is a brief vid on how to do it if you have not added navigation/links to presentations before:

We have just switched broadband providers and hit a problem that the content filtering that they provided remotely did not really meet our needs. There main issues were with WiFi, BYOD devices and number of proxy exceptions needed to make Google Apps work. For BYOD, users had to input the proxy and an unrealistic number of exceptions. Our WiFi system did not work correctly with the content filter. Without a load of exceptions, Google Docs did not work correctly on any device and as we use Google Apps this was sort of important. This forced me to look at alternative solutions. We had been using ClearOS 5.2 for DNS and a few other things for some time and a knew it could do content filtering. So I setup a test VM (running on ESXi) of ClearOS 6.4 Community . The content filter on this seemed to work well and the proxy ran in transparent mode - so no pesky proxy settings or exceptions. For a production system, more system resources were needed. This i...