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Needed In-Kind Donations

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Category: Funding, Fund Raising, Donations
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Needed In-Kind (Equipment and Software) Donations

As of: April 12, 2011 | Misc | Server PCs | Client PCs

Prioritized items below are essential for the WebLearningTools Research PI (not yet able to hire paid lab staff or research assistants) to complete more and better work in the short run to the end of 2011.  Monetary donations made via PayPal will help the PI purchase some of the equipment and software listed below from online stores such as eBay and Amazon, as well as from other real and virtual stores with online listings of new and used equipment and software.

    Miscellaneous Devices, Parts & Software
  • (High) Upgrade CD for OmniPage Pro OCR software to current version 17 (from v11).
  • (High) Almost any $150 5+ megapixel digital camera with a zoom lens with macro capabilities. With this camera to make stills and "short" videos) and 1+ "SD" cards for that camera.  This camera will help the PI record on-site examples of installed, working DL and ITS for display on this site.  Also the macro feature of this camera will enable the PI to "manually" digitize technical books in her library of physical books and micro-filmed books in order to use them for "in-house" study by computer and for restricted logged-in public web-use as eBooks to be available care of this web site. (I would be sharing my library with interested and well identified others.)
  • (Medium) Nuance.com's Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition software, 5 seat / computer license, $99 as of April 2011.  With it, the PI can speed up her pace of providing new content and revisions to exiting content on this web site.
  • (Medium) 1 HP LaserJet color printer with toner cartridges usable as a network printer, WiFi printer, or USB cable-connected printer.
  • (Medium) 1+ USB-switch. This device will allow a WLT instructor or TA (i.e. a presenter such as myself of "stand-up" instruction or training) to switch between 2+ USB 2 web-cameras placed in a test classroom (such as at the WLTRes lab) or in a physical classroom. The switcher should also be able to switch between live and pre-recorded parts of a class presentation where that material comes from various servers in the classroom or audio/video sources available to the classroom.
  • (Low) 1-2 17" or wider flat-panel monitors (USB+VGA).

Minimally the PI and assistants will report on best uses and best cases that utilize this hardware in the WLTRes test-classroom and in other nearby physical (brick-and-mortar) classrooms so that educators can better determine which are more suitable to adopt.

    Server PC Parts & Software to improve existing 3 server tower lab on an 8-port Belkin KVM.
  • (Medium) 2+ 320GB (or larger) SATA hard disk drives for RAID-1 on P4 server.
  • (Medium) 1 Adaptec RAID-1 PCI card for SATA hard disk drives for the 3rd of the 3 P4 servers.
  • (Low) 1+ CD/DVD-R/W internal drive(s).
  • (Low) 1 nVidia AGP-3 video card for 2 monitors for the 3rd of the 3 P4 servers.
  • (Low) Pentium 5 upgradable dual-core mother boards with CPU and 2+ GB memory on each.
  • (Low) One Gigabyte-per-second LAN switch

    Client PC Parts & Software for the lab's test classroom.
    The test classroom currently has 2 8-10 years old Pentium 4 laptops each with 160 GB and 40 GB ATA-IDE hard disk drives and 1 GB of main memory, such that the memory is not upgradable.
  • (Low) Upgrade to the latest Framemaker word processor and book publishing software FM v9(?) (from the lab's existing Framemaker 5.5).