LearnKey Blog

Fun(ded) With Perkins

Educators struggling for funds to provide proper instructional experiences to their students, may be able to rely on a Perkins Grant for some of their needs.  The Perkins Grant, outlined in the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act of 1998, provides funding for school districts and community colleges.  The purpose of the funding is fourfold:

  1. to build on the efforts of states and localities to develop challenging academic standards;
  2. to promote the development of services and activities that integrate academic, vocational and technical instruction and that link secondary and postsecondary education;
  3. to increase state and local flexibility to provide services and activities; and
  4. to disseminate national research and to provide professional development and technical assistance that will improve vocational and technical education programs.

It is the fourth purpose where LearnKey’s library of vocational, and technical education videos can prove invaluable to a school or district seeking funding.  

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CompTIA A+ Transition from 2006 to 2009

The CompTIA A+ 2006 exams expires on February 28, 2010.  I repeat, if you are studying for 220-601, 602, 603, or 604 you have no more than 20 days from the day of this blog post to take and pass the exams.  After this date the only acceptable exams will be the 2009 series.   (220-701, 702)

Potential Certifiers who have not begun studying yet, or are only getting started should begin with the 2009 exams, but this should come as a wake up call to any who have been preparing and studying and were just waiting to feel ready.

If your school is a member of CompTIA’s Education to Careers (E2C) program, the A+ 2006 exam expiration date is extended to July 31, 2010.  Otherwise, time is almost up.

CompTIAs Certification Renewal Program

CompTIA recently announced plans to require a certification renewal program for individuals certified in A+, Network+, and/or Security+. Previously these three have been lifetime certifications, meaning for example the A+ certification I obtained in 2000 is still valid today. This “certified for life” has been challenged by a perception that certified individuals may not be up to date on the latest technology. Wireless technology for example has changed drastically in the past ten years.
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Getting America Back to work.

Despite the high unemployment rate in the United States, there are more than 450,000 IT job openings in the country.  If you look around carefully you may see that it’s not a matter of not enough jobs to go around, it is a matter of not enough qualified and trained individuals to fill the jobs that are.  Police, Medical Practitioners, Instructors, and as noted above IT jobs are going unfilled. It is into this atmosphere that CompTIA, Industry leader in technical certifications, selflessly rushes in with thier “ Initiative”.   Continue reading “Getting America Back to work.”

2010

An optomist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old one leaves.” – Bill Vaughn

Making resolutions is a cleansing ritual of self assessment and repentance that demands personal honesty and, ultimately, reinforces humility. Breaking them is part of the cycle. Eric Zorn

Whatever your reason for celebration this holiday season.  May it be a time of reflection, and resolution.  As you look over your past year may you find there to have been more successes than failures, and as you look forward to the new year may it be with a sense of wonder and opportunity, for this upcoming year. Wishing you all a brave, uninhibited, fierce Year of the Tiger.

The Death of Microsoft Windows?

There have been a number of articles and blogs recently proclaiming that Windows 7 is the end for Microsoft. Or at least for Microsoft’s stranglehold on OS (The Operating System that most PC’s run on.). Sure, Microsoft has competition. Apple has always served as an alternative to Windows, and more recently Linux has taken a chunk of the market share, but Microsoft has maintained it’s “king of the mountain” position.  According to the latest news, that may be about to change.

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Why Web Browser Updates are Necessary

Your web browser is a portal to limitless information. Sometimes referred to as “the little E in the corner”, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is one of the most popular browsers. It comes with Windows pre-installed, so for Windows users it is by far the most easily accessible browser, but it is not the only choice. For those of us who prefer other options, there is Firefox, Safari (a standard on Mac OS X, also available for PC), Google Chrome, Opera…the list goes on and on.  Which browser you use, even different versions of the same browser, affects how you view the internet a lot more than you may think.

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Computer Forensics the CSI of IT

Have you ever been hit with a computer virus?  MyDoom, Melissa, ILOVEYOU, Sobig.  There is some seriously dangerous software out there, and when it hits, it seems impossible to track down where it began.  That is unless you are highly skilled in the knowledge of Computer Forensics and Digital Recovery.

The discipline known as Computer Forensics has many uses beyond law enforcement.  You may have had a hard disk fail and not be willing to part with the information you neglected to back up.  There may be an employee that you suspect of misusing company equipment.  You may simply be interested in a better understanding of how computers work for debugging, performance optimization, or reverse-engineering.

Whatever your reason, LearnKey has the course for you.

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)

As companies grow they enevitably reach a point of saturation from which further growth is impossible.  Whether it be a restaurant that suddenly needs a larger kitchen, or a grocery store that needs more parking, or even a website that just needs more bandwidth.

ITIL is a system of standardizing IT Infrastructure so that as companies grow and merge, and splinter and such, there infrastructure continues to function in a flexible, functional format.  There is a standard set of instructions for how to deal with a problem, even down to the definition of what a problem is.   There are in depth detailed methods of proper Configuration Managment, Change Management, Release Management…etc, all put together with the design of helping folks take care of things in the simplest most standardized way possible.  Some of the provisions are meant to minimize downtime by ensuring that upgrades, backups, and virus scans are run at the least busy time of day (or over the weekend if possible).

The ITIL framework is simple enough to be applied to a single server environment, but it is designed to handle the complexity of companies that are growing from having an IT person to having an IT department to having an IT division etc…