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Smell-O-Mints is Back
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Joe Martha's Scienceman.com currently lists several periodic table applications, including his favorite, Periodic Table ($20). He writes in a review of the cross-platform application, "By all accounts, Periodic Table from Synergy Creations is a real winner for the high school classroom." Joe also likes Atomic Mac ($24.95) and favorably mentions a newcomer, Elements ($10). New School Proposed in New Stadium Neighborhood The New York Times has a column about a new school to be built in Sheldon Silver's district. Silver is the speaker of the State Assembly and the Times Winnie Hu writes in School? Bloomberg Says Yes. Stadium? Silver's Still Thinking, "The proposed stadium could come for approval before the Public Authorities Control Board, where Mr. Silver holds veto power, as early as the next board meeting, on Feb. 16." An old op-ed piece by Bob Herbert in The New York Times, Wish Fulfillment for Woody, gives a pretty good take on the whole "money for a stadium but not for education" thing. Indiana Superintendent Cuts Loose E. B. Carver, Superintendent of the Franklin Township Schools in Central Indiana, put out a blast last week about Governor Mitch Daniels proposal to withhold promised state funds to Indiana's schools to help balance Indiana's budget. In a letter to The Indianapolis Star, Cuts hurt kids, educator says, Carver concludes:
Daniels never seemed to miss a chance to extol what he would do for education in Indiana during the recent gubernatorial campaign. Since taking office, it appears there is a clear disconnect in Daniels's campaign rhetoric and his actions in education and a number of other matters. It's too bad Indiana doesn't have a recall law similar to California's to employ on politicians such as Daniels. Smart Boards in the Classroom While we're on Indiana schools, the Star had a nice column last Friday about electronic whiteboards in the classroom in New technology points the way. The Star's Holly VanSlambrook tells how Angie Clevenger uses a Smart Board to improve instruction in her fourth grade class at Harrison Parkway Elementary School. Electronic whiteboards are something to keep in mind for the next time the technology grant fairy or some other serious funding source visits your school! There's also some good information on the subject in Using Electronic Whiteboards in Your Classroom: Benefits. Rumbles from Utah...Again About this time a year ago, the Utah legislature stirred the No Child Left Behind pot a bit with a bill "to prohibit the state's education authorities from using any local money to comply with the president's signature education law, No Child Left Behind." (See Educators' News, February 12, 2004.) The word then was that a bunch of high-powered "Bushies" were dispatched from Washington last year to quell that insurrection. The Salt Lake Tribune's Ronnie Lynn reported Friday in Strange bedfellows back protest of No Child Left Behind that the conservative Utah Eagle Forum and the Utah Education Association have banded together to urge "the House Education Committee to advance a bill and a resolution that stand firm against Washington mandates." Sacramento Bee staff writer Gilbert Chan tells in Pension fund to governor - no deal: CalSTRS opposes call for shift to privatization that the "trustees of the California State Teachers' Retirement System voted Thursday to oppose proposals to privatize public pensions and to shift state retirement contributions to school districts." Chan quotes trustee Carolyn Widener as saying of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan, "This is a nightmare. This would turn (retirement) planning on its head and into a joke." Vouchers The Minneapolis Star Tribune's Norman Draper and James Walsh tell of a renewed bid for school vouchers in Minnesota in Bill revives debate over private-school vouchers. State Representative Mindy Greiling said of the bill introduced by State Senator David Hann and Representative Mark Buesgens:
I received Larry O'Connor's latest missive from Other World Computing and was pleased to see that he included a new Quick Tip on the Mac Mini. It should be posted soon on his Quick Tip Directory. Larry writes that OWC now has a new OWC Mac Mini Video that shows how to install the three upgrades possible on the Mac Mini. While OWC offers RAM (I got my 1 GB chip there.) upgrades, it also has larger and faster hard drives and a "superdrive" that can handle dual layer burning. Use the OWC link for the video download and info on their various upgrades. Note: Other World Computing is not an Educators' News affiliated advertiser. We don't get anything from clickthroughs on the above links. They're just a good vendor with whom we've had good success in both products and in solving problems associated with orders.
I'm still slowly getting my Mac Mini set up to totally take over my Mac computing functions at work from my old Blue & White Mac. Part of the slowness of the changeover is that the B&W has two 120 GB drives, and I have to pare down my files to fit on the Mini's 80 gig drive. Since the Blue & White was my main Macintosh for a few months between my old beige G3 and my new G5 tower, it has almost all of my files from home. Now, I'm having to be really selective about what files I'll continue to need at work. Other issues have been a single, unexplainable and unreproduceable kernel panic on the machine, and several lockups when I tried to activate File Vault to encrypt my user folder. The machine simply went to sleep and wouldn't awake during the long process (2+ hours). I didn't loose any data in the glitches, but it did take three tries to get it to work.
I've noticed that many writers have commented about how quiet the Mini is in operation. I find that to be a somewhat accurate assessment, but have found that the Mini's combo drive and fan running at the same time are really fairly noisy! It doesn't happen all that often, as I don't use a lot of optical drive disks or burn many. One last note on the Mini: While the Mini's stock, non-upgradeable 32 MB of video SDRAM worried me a bit when I purchased the unit, I've found it to be more than sufficient for driving the Dell 19' flat panel display I use at work. In comparison to the laptop docked into the display, the Mini's graphics support comes out quite favorably. Of course, I think the Mac desktop just looks better from the getgo than the XP desktop. EdNews Updates
If you teach science, math, and/or computers anywhere around the middle school level, you may find PRISM helpful to you and your students. We find that folks all over the country and even a few from other countries are using the site. While our links to digital teaching materials are indexed to Indiana state standards, the site is also fully searchable by topic or concept, making it useful to those outside Indiana, homeschoolers, and parents hunting for help for their kids. 
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Part of the problem may be that while the Mini was creating my encrypted directory, I was switching back and forth between the Mini, my Compaq laptop, and even the old Blue & White, all hooked up via a 
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Bush Proposes Cut in Education Budget In a budget proposal "that would erase scores of programs and slice Medicaid, disabled housing and many more but still worsen federal deficits by $42 billion over the next five years," education also gets the ax. The Associated Press's Alan Fram tells of the general budget in Bush Proposes Steep Cuts in $2.57T Budget. (Hey! If I really wanted to be political about it, I could have linked to Bush's sham budget.) Anne E. Kornblut describes the education cuts in A Cut for Schools, a First for Bush. Kornblut writes:
The AP's Department of Education Budget at a Glance tells the story in numbers. California Governor Schwarzenegger Faces Stiff Opposition to Education Cuts Robert Salladay write in The Los Angeles Times, "Schwarzenegger predicted that people would howl at his 2005 agenda, and he is being proved correct." In Gov. Battles Rising Criticism on Multiple Fronts, Salladay tells of the various groups now arrayed against the Governor, including teachers who "say the governor went back on his promise to provide schools the full amount they are owed under Proposition 98, a constitutional provision that gives schools a fixed percentage of state revenue." Schwarzenegger also has proposed privatization of the state teachers' pension fund, producing howls of protest from teachers. (See below.) Along the privatization line, a piece by Paul Krugman, Spearing the Beast, relates some of the problems with privatization in regard to Social Security. Merit Pay Since today's posting seems to be leaning rather heavily to the left, I thought I'd post (ooh, yuck) Minnesota teachers warm to performance pay, just to even things up a bit. The CNN column states, "Teachers are trying hard to prove they're worth the money, from more frequent student testing, to e-mailing parents, to trying out different styles for their students." Of course, an NEA news release several years ago noted, "Public Agenda found that most teachers oppose merit pay - based on favoritism and test scores - but many support other non-traditional compensation plans, including extra pay for extra work, incentives to work in schools in need of improvement, and incentives for National Board certification. None of those alternatives are merit pay, and NEA and its affiliates have supported those proposals." Hmm...guess we're still leaning...but...
The Astronomy Picture of the Day yesterday featured A Mysterious Streak Above Hawaii. The APOD descriptor says, in part:
There are lots of cool links to follow in the text that I haven't reproduced here. How's that for apolitical? Computerworld on the Mac Mini's Impact on IT Remembering that we're not a Mac site, but an education site produced by a bleeding-heart liberal on a Mac, I'll add a link to Frank Hayes interesting analysis of what effect the Mac Mini will have on IT, Mini Options. A few quotes from the piece should tantalize you:
This one is a good read! Enjoy!
Time to Think About Summer Camp Looking at the snow on the ground outside my office, I wondered if the folks at SchwabLearning.org weren't getting things just a bit early. You see, the SchwabLearning.org site this week features new and updated columns on summer camps. But just a few hours later, a staff member at Rose-Hulman did an "all-campus bounce," a nice name for spamming everyone with a rose-hulman.edu email address, about a summer camp that regularly fills up by mid-March in Terre Haute! So even though it's 30 degrees outside, it appears to be time indeed for parents to consider summer camp. SchwabLearning.org's feature article for this week is Summer Camps for Kids with Learning and Attention Problems by Linda Broatch and Nancy Firchow. The authors have a good list of items to check before choosing a summer camp for a child with disabilities. Also linked on the site is a summer camp database of camps that LD and/or ADHD "friendly." While only slightly related to the subject of summer camps. there's a good column entitled Controversial Therapies: Why Do Some Unproven Therapies Become Popular? The camp recommended by the Rose staffer was Camp Invention, which by the way, isn't listed on Schwab's database, but says it does serve disabled children. The camps are held all around the country. The camp descriptor reads:
Yesterday's Science@NASA promos the new NASA site Brain Bites. The new site features 60-second video lessons that answer frequently asked questions about NASA and space. Titles so far include:
This appears to be a very good addition to the NASA collection of sites that can be used in the classroom. Big Bucks in Online Education Sam Dillon tells of a small school in Colorado that has put nearly everyone in town to work on its online school. Tiny District Finds Bonanza of Pupils and Funds Online is the story of Branson Online, which "has proved to be an attractive alternative for parents who wish to supervise their children's education at home, and for students who hold jobs or are disabled." If you do a Google search for "online charter schools" as I did, you'll end up with over 2,000,000 pages. A similar search for "online school homeschool" produced 404,000 responses. Obviously, using online resources for homeschooling is a booming business. Update Hell Yesterday morning, I'd resolved to get all of the critical updates (eight of them) on my Campaq laptop and the Mac OS X 10.3.8 update on my new Mac Mini before beginning the day's chores at Rose-Hulman. I arrived at work a bit before 7:30 A.M. and finally finished at 8:30! Along the way, my Recent Documents under XP SR2 decided to take 60 seconds to display each time I selected them. Windows also displayed a pop-up from the toolbar advising me that there were critical updates to be installed...while I was installing them! Before the Mac crowd gets too boisterous, the Mac lost its connection to the USB keyboard and mouse (connected via a Dr. Bott Moniswitch), and I had to force a restart after the update. When the machine came up, it had lost my desktop picture preferences, and it required two restarts before the correct setting would hold! I've had a random assortment of glitches with the new machine, including a recurring refusal to shut down, one kernel panic, slow startups, and a few more that I can't remember right now. In defense of the little box, I try to push it like I do my G5 at home. Need a 6461x1905 Desktop Photo? I hate to admit it, but the most popular page on mathdittos2.com is my small collection of Desktop Photos. Educators' News runs a poor third behind the desktops and Fact Controlled Addition & Subtraction. While I'm filling space so the graphics don't fight each other on the page (Yes, I know what <BR "Clear=All"> can do.), let me add that the site currently runs about 75% Windows, 23% Mac, and a smattering of other OS's, including Linux. Getting around to the point, the Astronomy Picture of the Day for Wednesday, Heat Shield Impact Crater on Mars, would blow away even Apple's 30" HD Display! At 6461x1905 it dwarfs the 30" Cinema Display's 2560x1600 recommended resolution. The image shows "the impact site of Opportunity's heat shield" that the Opportunity Rover visited. 
Now that's a wide screen! Yeah, I like Dreamweaver.
If you're in the market for a WYSIWYG web page editor, I can recommend Macromedia's Dreamweaver. It works well with few glitches, and it has a consistent interface across the Mac and Windows versions. I got mine, and a whole bunch of other stuff over the years, from the Academic Superstore Having just praised Dreamweaver, I couldn't get the ad below to display properly in Dreamweaver! I dropped back to good old Claris Home Page 3 to fix the problem before coming back to Dreamweaver to finish this update. I really think the problem was more in my lack of knowledge of Dreamweaver, rather than an inherent bug in the program. I'm still having problems setting up the page to work equally well on small and large displays. It used to be that if you set up a page to work well on 14-17" displays, you had things covered. Now, with all of the wide screen displays on the market, but with a whole lot of folks (like me) still using CRT's of various sizes, it makes setting up graphics in a page a challenging task. More than once I've thought I had a page right, only to go to work and view it on the Dell 19" flat-panel and be dismayed at giant white spaces caused by...line breaks between graphics. Ah...the learning curve continues! Two New Republican Governors in the News Again The San Francisco Chronicle reports that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has fired four of his own appointees to the California State Teachers Retirement System. The sackings apparently were triggered by the appointees' rejection of "Schwarzenegger's proposals to shift pensions into individual accounts and to require school districts, not the state, to contribute to teachers' retirements." In Governor fires 4 members of teachers retirement panel, the Chronicle's Mark Martin and Lynda Gledhill relate that one of the fired board members, Republican Jim Gray, had "noted that a nonpartisan analyst for CalSTRS warned the board last week...that Schwarzenegger's plan could spell financial trouble for teacher's pensions. Requiring new teachers to invest their pension in individual accounts could leave the current system without enough money to pay retired teachers." An Indianapolis Star column by Andy Gammill, Educator: Daniels lied in speech, says Washington Township Schools Superintendent Eugene White, one of the state's most prominent educators, said that Governor Mitch Daniels lied about school districts putting buildings ahead of learning and is ill-informed on education issues.
The news of White's statements is astounding, as Washington Township is known as a rather conservative school district, not given to encouraging its administrators to make major waves in the news.
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©2005 Steven L. Wood