£100.

Do you think you could get a laptop that would meet the needs of your students for that sum of money?

If you think not, then it’s time to think again, as ASUS have done it. The ASUS Eee PC 701 comes in around $199 which at present exchange rates is around the £100 mark. Here’s what it boasts:

• Display: 7″
• Processor: Intel mobile CPU (Intel 910 chipset, 900MHz Dothan Pentium M)
• Memory: 512MB RAM
• OS: Linux (Asus customized flavor)
• Storage: 8GB or 16GB flash hard drive
• Webcam: 300K pixel video camera
• wireless 802.11b/g compatible
• Battery life: 3 hours using 4-cell battery
• Weight: 2lbs
• Dimensions: 8.9 in x 6.5 in x 0.82 in – 1.37 in (width x depth x thickness)
• Ports: 3 USB ports, 1 VGA out, SD card reader, modem, Ethernet, headphone out, microphone in

You can read a review of it here.

Sure, it doesn’t run Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OSX, but it runs Linux – supported and maintained by a community of experts for free. It may only have a 8GB flash hard disk, but do your students need 60GB if they are networked?

Ask yourself this when you next fill out your order form for Apple or Dell or their like – what are your students going to use the device for? Browsing the internet, office applications, communicating, collaborating? The Asus does all that – for £100.

For those of you out there that are purchasers for your schools – at what point does open source become an acceptable risk? £100?

Do you spend around £400+ on a PC laptop? – that’s four of these machines. Or £600 on a MacBook? That’s six of these machines. With prices like this, maybe we could move away from the “it’s your turn on the computer” mentality that pervades our establishments.

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Big news all over the world whilst I’ve been away, but Adobe Captivate 3 moved out of beta and into production. It’s always the way, isn’t it? You finish one set of tutorials, and a new version of the software is released! The good news on this front is that I was beta testing, so, I’m well up to speed with the new features. If you’ve waded your way through my course on version 2, then here are my highlights of what’s new in version 3:

• Multiple Mode Recording – it’s hard to tell which feature I like best of the new Captivate, so I’ll start with the obvious one. It was always a complete pain if you wanted to create a demonstration and an assessment simulation of the same activity, as you could only record one at a time. You would either have to record the same activity twice, or spend a significant amount of time editing one format into another. With Captivate 3, you can record multiple versions at the same time! How fabulous! Just imagine, you want to create a demonstration of something online or using an application, then you want to test your students knowledge of what you have just covered. Now this is a simple one stop process in Captivate 3!
• Improved PowerPoint importing – previously, when you imported PowerPoint slides into a Captivate project they would be imported as flat images, irrespective of any animations you may have had on the slides. This too was quite annoying, especially if you had spent time on the PowerPoint presentation in the first place. Now with Captivate 3, there is improved support for animations contained on your slides – excellent!
• Question Pools – I loved the question functionality of Captivate and Captivate 2, but I always wished that the questions could be randomised in some way – hey presto! Captivate 3 includes questions pools that store your questions, allowing questions to be drawn in at run time to provide variety for your students.
• ‘Hot Spot’ and ‘Sequence’ style questions – two new types of questions included in this incarnation, to add to multi-choice, true/false, fill-in-the-blank, short answer, matching and rating scale.
• Rollover Slidelets – one of my reasons for getting interested in Flash in the first place was the ability to reveal images/text/sound/video when your user rolls over a certain area of the screen. Now Captivate supports rich media in rollover areas, so when your student rolls over an area of the screen you elect, not just text, images and audio can be displayed, but video too.
• Animations -  in previous incarnations of Captivate, you could choose ‘no animation’, ‘fade in and out’, or ‘fade between’ for your transitions. Now there are loads to choose from (for those of you that just can’t help but animate things) 

There are loads of other new features, but these are just my highlights.

You can find out more at http://www.adobe.com/products/captivate/, or even pre-order your copy.

The big question – should I start recording tutorials for it now? ;-(

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Having been back in the UK for more than a week now, it’s taken me all this time to get back to the blog! Thanks to everyone for their kind words – we had a wonderful day [despite the rain ], and the most fabulous holiday in what can only be described as paradise. If you really do want to ‘get away from it all’ on holiday, then I can truly recommend Vakarufalhi island resort in the Maldives. And yes, the sand and water really are the colour you see in brochures!

Whilst on holiday, we successfully managed to avoid all news, and you’ll be surprised (and relieved) to hear that I resisted the temptation to ask the barman for a ‘token’ for the one and only internet connected computer that sat in a quiet corner of the bar. Maybe I’m not as addicted as I once feared! In fact, on hearing one couple asking for a token to use the computer we were both quite shocked – you come all this way to a quiet island paradise, only to sit infront of a machine?

The only problem with such a long absence from the net is that there is so much to read on your return! Anyway, after about a week of grazing my aggregator, I finally managed to get the title bar to read ‘0′, so I feel I have almost caught up – I may have read what people have been saying, but that doesn’t mean I’ve digested it! It also makes me realise what a poor substitute the aggregator is – when you are not taking part in the conversation live, then it is incomplete. It seems to me that we need to watch conversations develop in time to really get the most out of them.

Anyway, back to work, eh?

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