Education News 4/23-27/2001

Monday, April 23, 2001

I hope you got through last Friday (anniversary of the Columbine tragedy) without any significant difficulties. We had police on site for the day at my school and about a 33% absence rate! We'd had rumors of threats early in the week. While it was all a bit unsettling, I'm not sure I'd advocate allowing threat makers the right to close our schools with rumors, threats, or anonymous phone calls.

Tomorrow is it. If you haven't visited Tom McKenna's G3 All-in-one Stop Shop recently, tomorrow will be the last update. Tom says, "After 149 weeks of updates, I finally ran out of steam. Thanks to everyone who's contributed over the years!" Actually, it's our thanks that go out to Tom for his excellent site -- even for those of us who were never fortunate enough to own an All-in-one.

Having originally produced and distributed my humble sharewares in ClarisWorks/AppleWorks, I was immediately interested several weeks ago when I received an email from Jeff Lucas. Jeff's has produced an interesting set of educational activities using ClarisWorks/AppleWorks databases and spreadsheets. I took some time to play with Jeff's ongoing project and was favorably impressed. His activities are available through his web site, ComputerWorks SchoolWare. Activities include: Investigations; Math Facts; Mathemactivities; Mental Math Exercises; Simulations; SkillBuilders; and Utilities. Jeff is currently working on some downloadable demos.

According to C/Net posting last Friday afternoon, Apple has scheduled a "press event" for May 1. It apparently will be hosted by CEO Steve Jobs and may be the stage for several product updates or new releases/revisions.

While Mac OS X has generally been lauded as having great promise, a number of reviewers feel the release leaves much to be desired. (I'll try to post a cogent column on the subject sometime this week.) While many Mac web sites have pooh-poohed Gary Krackow's OS X revisited, as it appeared on MSNBC, others such as Fortune's Peter H. Lewis, and Karen Kaplan of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate are taking a much more reserved and less favorable view of the release. Lewis comments, "...Apple has simply raised the price of its public beta program by a hundred bucks." Wow!

Over the weekend StimpSoft released the 3.2 version of Son of Weather Grok (1 MB), and Jim Matthews of Fetch Softworks has released another free beta version of his excellent FTP client, Fetch 4.0b8 (3.3 MB).

If you've never visited User Friendly's Daily Static cartoon page, click on over for Sunday's cartoon. It says a lot about computer geeks.

In case you missed last week's Educators' News (which includes all the world's population minus 3:-), I'll repost the following portion of last Wednesday's initial edition.

Several weeks ago, Tom McKenna announced that he would no longer be updating his excellent G3 All-in-one Stop Shop site after April 24, 2001. Several fellow educators suggested another site might pick up where Tom's had left off. That's a tall proposal, as I think Tom's site had a unique, down home, comfortable feel that will be tough to duplicate. Tom had a way of making everyone feel at home.

I'm adding a test page at this point, not really sure where it will go. I suspect there may no longer be a need for something as specific as the All-in-one site was, but a "watering hole" for fellow educators seems like a good idea. At least at first, most of the content will be Mac specific, simply because that's what I know best, although I'm not adverse to posting relevant material that pertains to other platforms as well.

If you have some suggestions, news ideas, etc., please .

For all of you lucky TiBook owners (the green is for TiBook envy:-), beware when traveling by air with your PowerBook! Carl Hess was kind enough to send the url to a Los Angeles Times column that tells of hundreds of travelers being delayed at the Burbank airport as authorities investigated a possible bomb in a laptop. A traveler was detained around 4:30 P.M. last Friday and X-ray analysis of his laptop was inconclusive. So authorities ran a test on the computer and its bag. The test ""came up positive for a chemical residue of concern,' although the titanium in the laptop might have triggered a false reading" The laptop owner was still being detained and questioned at 11 P.M., although "authorities said they had determined the laptop did not contain explosives." Now, how many companies do you know that manufacture a titanium-clad laptop?

I realize that I'm a bit of a comic addict, but Scott Adams's Dilbert often says it better than mere words can express. (Note: Substitute "classroom" for "cubicle" in the comic text.)

Apple Computer has released QuickTime 5 for download. From the Apple press release:

If QuickTime doesn't quench your thirst for freeware downloads, try Freggie Heads, by Peter J. Baird. Freggie Heads (306K) allows one to add facial features to a tomato, carrot, banana, or pear. Sounds silly, doesn't it, but it really is cute. I suspect some of the youngsters in my classroom will be charmed by it tomorrow morning.

Yesterday, Apple Computer announced a series of Apple Teacher Institutes. The summer workshops are "designed to give teachers a hands-on technology experience highlighting the potential of digital media, mobile computing, and the Internet. Apple's banner on the teacher institute page reads: "Maximize the effectiveness of your planning and instructional time, expand your expertise, engage an increasingly diverse student body, and discover new ways to individualize instruction." Participation is open to "Classroom teachers, regardless of grade level or subject area, who have at least basic computer skills (keyboarding, mouse, and Internet) and are eager to take the next step and learn to use technology more successfully." Apple is underwriting the tuition for the 5 day workshops, but room and board on campus will cost participants $500 each. Dates and locations for the workshops are:

I've been working for some time on a column about Mac OS X. Today I saw a posting on MacSurfer that totally took the wind out of my sails. The link was to Larry MacPhee's excellent tongue-in-cheek column, The Top X Reasons to Move to OSX Today! It's the sort of humor that makes you say, "I wish I'd written that."

iCab, one of the longest running beta tests around, has been updated to Preview Version 2.5. This version will expire October 31, 2001. iCab comes the the usual Macintosh versions, PPC (1.2 MB), 68K (1.1 MB), and MacOS X (1.4).

MacOS Rumors has some delicious rumors posted in their April 24 update (somehow I spaced and didn't see them until now). They report two totally new Apple devices under development in the $500-600 and $700-$800 "region." What does this have to do with education (that question could fairly be applied to over 50% of this week's postings)?

Apple and Apple Education do seem to be working behind the scenes on something big. Apple has to know that they are a falling star in schools. Without something new and at a price point that matches or beats the current Windows boxes, they'll continue to lose market share. One or both of the above might just be Apple's answer to Dell and others' fierce competition for school sales. Certainly, Steve Jobs isn't going to just go over current offerings at the May 1 Apple press event and in the June 25 NECC keynote. Let's hope there's something in the offing that we can get our schools to purchase and use effectively in our classrooms.

Since this week is really light on education related posts, let me repost something from a previous column. Many shareware authors seem to have gone MIA -- ones where shareware payments mailed come back as undeliverable or email addresses are dead. Web searches only turn up postings of the old sharewares without any way to contact the author. Along those lines, I've been describing Samuel Davidoff's Math Flash Bash, one of my all time favorite fact drill applications, as a "virtual freeware" (attempts at contact or payment unsuccessful) for some time. It drills any combination of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts in a quick, enjoyable way. Flash Bash offers a choice of operations and has various controls for what facts are presented and how many facts in a set.

All of that changed with a pleasant email exchange with Sam last November in which he asked that I announce that Flash Bash truly is freeware to the Mac community. Sam currently is being held captive by the Windows and UNIX world without a Mac to his name and cannot upload a new release of Flash Bash to Info-Mac, etc. from his current box. Be advised, however, that his dandy little math fact drill program is free to use and still works well with many Macs and even on the latest system software (including OS 9.1 and the Classic environment of the OS X).

Actually, Sam is a busy, busy law student who took the time to track me down and ask that I let folks know he'd love for them to use his application free of charge. For now, you can download The Math Flash Bash 2.2 (78K) from this site.

After eight issues, I find I'm mostly posting a rehash of things available lots of other places on the web. From my counter, I know at least a few folks are regularly visiting the site. Let me know what you'd like to see here, as the idea and inspiration for this site was to provide a "watering hole" for Mac educators (and others) similar to Tom McKenna's now inactive G3 All-in-one Stop Shop. (Wonder if Tom has found Miss Wonderful as yet?:-)

Also, I need to find some good sources for combined educational software and press releases. If you have a source, url, or mailing list you'd be willing to share, again, please let me know.