Tuesday, June 26, 2001

Joe Martha has a Scienceman Review of the Boreal USB VideoSkope today on Scienceman.com. This is the kind of classroom technology that gives "throwing money at the problem" a good name! I can remember trying to get a class of 25 sixth-graders to each take a quick peek at a euglena through a microscope before it swam out of view. Joe says, "The best part of this camera is the tremendous images it creates, and it's slick ability to get those images onto your computer screen via an integrated USB port."

Two recent editorials from the San Francisco Chronicle are each worth a quick read. In the Blame game isn't helping schools, author Louis Freedberg sees the root problems in public education as unsolved social issues, often beyond our control in the classroom. I strongly agree. (Don't we all love folks who agree with our opinions?) Another column appearing on the Chronicle, Can public schools truly be saved, describes the problems involved in state takeovers of local school systems. It originally appeared on the Detroit News under the name School reform meets political obstacles.

Dan Knight has an interesting "how to" on Low End Mac, Making a Trifold Brochure. Dan and his wife, Linda, needed to make a limited run tri-fold brochure. They used AppleWorks 6 for the task, since that's what came with her iBook. This column is a good guide and has a heartwarming ending.

The National Education Association has posted a news release, NEA Hails New Report on School Technology Needs. It links to the CEO Forum site which has a download link (1.1 MB PDF document) for their new "policy paper with education technology recommendations for the federal government." From the NEA summary of the report, the CEO Forum suggests:

1. Focus education technology investment on specific educational objectives
2. Make the development of 21st Century skills a key educational objective
3. Align student assessment with educational objectives while including 21st Century skills
4. Adopt continuous improvement strategies to measure student progress
5. Increase investment in research and development and dissemination of best practices
6. Ensure equitable access to technology for all students

While the Forum's suggestions sound pretty reasonable, reading the report made me feel like another group was adding another round of hoops for (you and) me to jump through at school when I really ought to be teaching kids how to blend /c/ and /l/ into the initial blend /cl/! I think I need a few more weeks of summer break before my attitude is right to go back to the classroom:-).

The SchwabLearning.org this week features three pages pertinent to educators:

• Research-based Reading Programs describes a number of programs for remediation in easy to understand terms.
• Is it AD/HD or Something Else? -- My take: It's getting so that to qualify for special education services anymore, parents just need to go to their doctor and get a prescription for Ritalin and their kid is in! What happened to "a history of school failure" in the evaluation process? Schwab offers some guidelines for parents before running off to the doctor's office.
• Dr. Sam Goldstein Speaks with SchwabLearning about AD/HD Criteria: Question 4 Schwab asks, "One of the most common complaints teachers have about children and teenagers in classroom settings has to do with restless, impulsive, and inattentive behavior. Do all of these kids have AD/HD?" Dr. Goldstein responds (in part), "No, they do not. In fact, the..."

A related link from Schwab leads to a two-part Salon column on Kids on Drugs: A behavioral pediatrician questions the wisdom of medicating our children. Dr. Lawrence H. Diller writes:

Last year alone, I wrote more than 400 prescriptions for Ritalin or a similar stimulant. I am not against prescribing psychiatric medication to children. But I've become increasingly uneasy with the role I play and the readiness of families and doctors to medicate children.

Many columns and reviews of Steve Jobs keynote speech at the NECC yesterday are now available on the Mac web. The reviews range from blindly enthusiastic to soberingly realistic. After reading many of them which describe the content of the speech, my take on Apple Education hasn't changed.

Apple has retired the Apple Software Updates search and contents pages. Requests to asu.info.apple.com are transferred to this article (60858) which explains the changeover to the Knowledge Base system. Manual downloads are still possible by browsing the downloads web site. An FTP address I've used for downloads was still working as well at this writing.

Hewlett-Packard had a couple of familiar sounding announcements at the National Educational Computing Conference with HP Announces Mobile Education Solution, Grants for Classrooms and HP, NetSchools Lead the Way with New Access and Equity Initiatives.

CNN Education reports that the High court to hear school grade, honor roll case. The suit involves the common practice of "trade and grade."

The New York Times yesterday carried News Analysis: New Schools Are Rising, but Costs Rise Faster. It tells of New York's centralized building plan costing far more than was projected.

Thursday, June 28, 2001

I'm wondering if aliens have spirited away all of the authors of Macintosh shareware and freeware. While there are a number of listings for June in the Educational category of Version Tracker, I've not seen a posting that made me want to download the item and try it out in my classroom. I was confident that there would be some exciting updates and new releases timed to coincide with NECC, but that only produced a new Reader Rabbit, World Book for OS X, and Britannica. I suspect I've become addicted to educational shareware and freeware and am now going through withdrawal!

Now shaking from lack of shareware sustenance, I managed to find MacCentral's Dennis Sellers interview of Cheryl Vedoe, Apple's Education VP. Immediately afterward, I found a CNET link to Compaq preps back-to-school PCs. The latter column says Compaq is introducing three new Presario models, starting at "around $550." With Apple supposedly going to more expensive flat-panel displays for the next iMac, I wonder what that will do to Apple's entry-level model pricing and resultant school sales. Who knows? Maybe Apple will keep producing the current entry-level iMac as the iMac LC for schools.

The Macintosh News Network has posted that the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has released its decision in the Microsoft ant-trust case. I followed MNN's link to CNET's Appeals court: Don't break up Microsoft. According to the CNET posting, Microsoft will not be broken up. The case will be sent back to a lower court for remedy, but with a different judge than Judge Jackson. Jackson appears to have taken a spanking from the higher court. A Washington Post column notes that the appeals court upheld some areas of Jackson's decision while overturning others.

CNET is reporting that "smart tags" will not be part of the final Windows XP release due to be released October 25. While included with Internet Explorer 6 in beta versions of the XP system, Microsoft's Jim Cullinan is quoted as saying, "At this time we just don't believe it's going to be ready when (Windows XP) ships in October." Smart tags have been a source of concern to those many of Microsoft. Walter Mossberg, writing in the Wall Street Journal, described them as giving Microsoft the ability through the feature "to re-edit anybody's site, without the owner's knowledge or permission, in a way that tempts users to leave and go to a Microsoft-chosen site -- whether or not that site offers better information."

Katie Hafner has an educationally pertinent column in today's New York Times, Lessons in Internet Plagiarism. Ms. Hafner notes the obvious temptations of cut and paste and borrowing others work via email. She also quotes Illinois English teacher Cathy Aubrecht, "I have kids every year who have a hard time understanding that ideas can be plagiarized as well. If you get a good idea from someplace, or a concept is related to you via a book or Internet site, it needs to be recognized. But they assume that everything is public domain."

Just as I was ready to put my browser to bed for the day, I did a final check of Version Tracker and found, lo and behold, Harry Hooie Creations anAtlas (2.2 MB). This nifty freeware contains an adequate basic database of geographic locations and can tap any number of internet resources. From the Read Me file, anAtlas allows one to:

• Search local or Internet databases
• Find cities, states, provinces, countries, airports, caves, churches, schools, etc.
• See results displayed on a full color map
• Link quickly to Internet resources such as maps, weather, and imagery
• Find distances between locations by setting a "Home Base"
• Work with your own data by simply dropping or pasting it into anAtlas

I didn't check all of these functions, but I did map our city and used anAtlas to link to the weather and the terra server. I would have checked more, but I got lost playing around with the terra server!

I had trouble pulling down anAtlas 1.5.3 from the link above and ended up downloading the file in the larger, BinHex format (3.0 MB). It took a while, but it was worth the wait. And...I've had my freeware fix for the day:-).

I received a nice email yesterday from fellow educator and vintage Mac collector Scott Schuyler. Scott's site has some excellent content and his home page is a treat for those of us with an off-the-wall sense of humor.

I got so involved yesterday playing with anAtlas that I forgot I was filling the kitchen sink to do dishes and flooded the kitchen! That gave birth to a revival of the old Busman's Holiday series of columns and Beware: MacIdiot at Work.

QuickTime 5.0.2 is now available from Apple.