NTI’s Dragon Burn CD/DVD Utility
by Mitchell Levine

Simply having hardware doesn’t necessarily benefit the user. Although this might seem like an obvious truth, it unfortunately doesn’t always hit home until it’s too late. The investment in technology made by our schools over the last several years, while being the first efforts towards a laudable goal, will do nothing by itself. Educational benefits are only available if all that hardware can be made to do something worthwhile.

For example, having an entire class outfitted with state-of-the-art (by education standards) laptops is quite unlikely to do much more than equalize access to very expensive typewriters, if the entire class can’t be coordinated. Interactive technology in the classroom won’t really lead to interaction unless a teacher and her class are on the same page: Sharing assignments, demonstrating skills, and simplifying the day by eliminating drudgery like scoring tests by hand.

While it would be nice if every school were able to provide an 802.11a-grade wireless LAN that stretched from one end of the district to another, it’s probably not going to happen anytime soon. Until that day comes, parents, teachers and students will have to share files the old-fashioned way – through storage media. Floppies, however, are rather limited, especially given today’s extensive multimedia files, and ZIP disks much too expensive. The most practical ones, CDs and DVDs, while capacious and well-supported by education’s favorite hardware manufacturer, Apple’s standard options, have traditionally been plagued by poorly executed software applications, an alphabet soup of file types, and generally bad documentation.

NTI’s Dragon Burn provides what seems to be the first truly workable solution for the institutional use of CD/DVD burners available for the MAC OS environment. Just listing all the various file types and standards the program can handle would probably take more room than this section can handle, a godsend for design and digital editing classes that must negotiate the potpourri of them those specialties inevitably require.

Other features will be comfortable as well, including support for multiple burning – which teachers that accept work or give and grade tests by digital means will undoubtedly appreciate. One clever feature I’ve actually not seen in another application: Support for multiple document interfaces. With this in place, it’s actually possible to create and edit layouts while burning, an excellent time management proposition for the busy AV department.

The product is really too feature-rich to give a complete listing of its potential. I highly recommend that any classroom instructor leading a design or editing specialty program, teacher implementing an enterprise program communicated through CD/DVD, or, most especially, an IT manager/consultant at any large school get the full product details from the company themselves, which can be done at their site, www.ntius.com.#

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