...dedicated to...hmmm, we're still figuring that one out...
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It seems harder and harder to get posts up on EdNews these days. Something that stirred me to action was an interesting posting by Scienceman Joe Martha. President Asks for Cuts in Education Spending Almost anything that comes out of the White House seems to stir me, but almost always in the wrong way. President Bush's proposed new budget again asks for deep cuts in education spending, while he still calls for making permanent tax cuts for the rich. eSchool News tells the sad story, Bush: Cut $3.2B from education, with a sub-head of "For second straight year, president's budget plan would slash ed-tech funding." Help Still Needed in South One of our PRISM Teacher-Leaders was in the office this week for in-service. Her husband had just returned from Louisiana and related that conditions there are still terrible in many places. Another friend had reported similar stories and situations a while ago. Since our government is either too inept or corrupt to help, it's probably still up to the rest of us to make a difference.  Indiana Computer Educators Teacher of the Year One of our PRISM Teacher-Leaders from last year, Shannon Hudson, was recently named the ICE Teacher of the Year. I've worked a bit with Shannon and even have had the honor of teaching with her one day (under the guise of taking stock photos for PRISM). She's and incredible person and teacher.
New Gadget I'm probably way behind everyone else, but today I tried out a very cool little gadget. When I'm on the road, I occasionally need internet access where there aren't any free hot spots, dial-up opportunities, or hard-wired connections. For just such an upcoming event, I ordered a Mobile Office Kit from Verizon Wireless. I set it up today, using my work-supplied Compaq laptop. The software install easily, and the unit used my cell phone to establish a 56K connection.
PowerBook
I guess I haven't written much about the PowerBook. It's probably because I'm too busy using it, or possibly because I really hate to admit that I almost blew it on swapping its OEM hard drive out for a 7200 RPM drive. I think I counted 41 screws that had to be pulled to make the switch! Actually, only one screw was a problem. As I finished the reassembly and was putting in the screw just above the security slot, one of those "swoosh" things happened. The screw appeared to be sucked into the PowerBook through the security slot hole! Since the hard drive is just inside the security slot, I suspect I learned a hard lesson about magnetism. At any rate, I got to tear the whole thing apart again the next day to retrieve the wandering screw. If you're set on doing a hard drive swap yourself on a 12" Aluminum PowerBook, I'd definitely recommend spending some time, more than I did, researching the project. While Benjamin Lauderdale doesn't give step-by-step directions on a hard drive swap, On death and dying: reconciling yourself to hard drive failure is a good read about the process. Accelerate Your Mac does have some good directions for a 12" Aluminum PowerBook hard drive upgrade, as does About.com. The latter also has a screw guide, which I could have used the first time in, as I mixed up a couple of them. I once got a couple of bad Power Mac 5400's at school, torn them both all the way down, and reassembled one working model from the parts for my classroom. The 5400 is filled with sharp edges, lots of little screws, and of course, has a capacitor and CRT that can put you down for good if you aren't careful discharging them. Doing the 5400 rebuild was a cake walk compared to swapping out the PowerBook's hard drive! How-To's
For How-to articles, tabbed browsing is great. I generally keep the page I'm working on open in one pane, my image directory open in another, and a third with the site home page. For users, keeping the "how-to" open in one pane and their active work in another seems far easier to me than using separate windows. The major problem with tabbed browsers is simply that many users can't access them on their machines at school, as they are locked down for security reasons and only have Explorer installed. I also get myself in trouble occasionally by having too many windows open at once, each with a number of tabbed pages. But then, I also get myself in trouble at times by having too many applications and documents open at once and drop into virtual (extended) memory. PRISM Site Upgrade After a rather painful period where we tried to add a number of Community of Practice features to the existing PRISM site, it was decided it would be easier to stuff PRISM into the open source Moodle Course Management System. The Moodle software allows us to offer communities that teachers, parent organizations, and others can set up to host web pages, community calendars, lessons and assignments that automatically are recorded in the community calendar, quizzes, surveys, questionnaires and more. Consider "communities" as forums on steroids. "Course Management System" is really a bit of a misnomer for how we're using Moodle. "Content Management System" is probably a better fit. Part of my job is to prepare training materials for teachers and our Teacher-Leader group promoting the site and illustrating how to use the site. For a retired teacher, it's usually a cool exercise in assembling screenshots, animations, tutorials, pictures, movies, and photos into something that educates folks about the site and motivates them to give it a try. (Once folks give it a good try, we've got'em!) The cool part about it is that we're not selling anything. The Lilly Endowment and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology totally pick up the tab. It's one of those truly philanthropic efforts. (And if it brings some fantastic engineering candidates to Rose, so much the better:-). If you teach middle school math or science (and that definitely includes those hardworking special educators who teach a lot of stuff), PRISM may be beneficial in your teaching. While designed for Indiana middle school teachers, it's teacher reviewed links are useful to teachers everywhere in grades...well, we have member-users from kindergarten teachers through college. But for the most part, teachers (or homeschoolers) at grades 5-9 may find PRISM helpful. 
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, I generally take the Mac on the road with me instead of the PC laptop. 
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