It's the first Monday after Labor Day in the United States and the flood of Sunday education supplements has abated. That makes it a good time to peek at some of the standing educational resources available on the web from some traditional news sources.

The Washington Post maintains an extensive Education: Schools, & Parenting section online. Being a K-12 type, I immediately found a story of interest in that section about Saxon Math. In the Kids Post Brainfood section, I found 9 year old Kara Godbout's mnemonic for remembering the parts of a good map, "Green and blue kissing toads." The Trends & Debates page carried links to issues such as Creationism vs. Evolution, Gifted & Talented Education, and Phonics & Whole Language.

I've mentioned the New York Times Learning Network previously in Busman's Holiday and View from the Classroom columns, but the section bears re-listing as another potential source of learning materials. The Learning Network features student news summaries that are updated Monday through Friday and a lesson plan archive for teachers. Starting points besides the base URL are Student Connections and Teacher Connections.

CNN also maintains a teacher resources page.

Tuesday, September 11, 2001

The SchwabLearning.org's new offerings for for parents and educators this week include:

• Susan Hall Speaks with SchwabLearning.org about Reading Disorders vs. Developmental Lag
• A Fresh Start: Partnering with the Teacher
• Developing Reading Skills in Young Children
• The Value of Collaboration
• A Mutual Education

All else pretty much pales in importance in comparison to the national tragedy in New York and Washington, D.C.. Our prayers go out to those injured and to the families who have lost loved ones.

Wednesday, September 12, 2001

Education Week's daily education news clips page for today is a Special Edition: Terror Touches Schools.

Thursday, September 13, 2001

With national attention here in the United States justifiably focused on the continuing story of the World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorist attacks, there's an understandable lull in education news. A week or so ago, I used a similar lull in daily news of interest to educators to highlight the Macintosh freeware TomeViewer. One of the reasons that I chose TomeViewer, beyond its obvious usefulness, is that it is only available now on a couple of sites ("endangered freeware?"). With the demise of Newer Technology last December and the subsequent removal of their site, it appeared some excellent freewares and device drivers maintained by Newer might also slip away. Fortunately, Bernie Case was able to establish a Newer Technology mirror site which now appears on his new domain, technojunkie.org. Besides carrying the Newer mirror archive and support forum, technojunkie.org carries a number of other items, including a great Funnies Archive with a specific Education and School section.

One "must have" utility when dealing with lots of different models of Macs is GURU (GUide to Ram Upgrades). GURU 2.9 (545K) covers all Mac RAM and VRAM requirements and specifications through the early G4's. If for no other reason, "The GURU FAQ...or... Mrs. Marciniak wins a Saw Horse," makes for some interesting and entertaining reading.

The old Gauge Utilities have now been rolled into one application, Gauge Pro 1.1 (75K). Gauge Pro reveals a host of information about your Macintosh, including the CPU type, version, speed, and temperature. It also tells the system bus speed and cache size.

SpellTools 1.3.3 (1821K) is an outstanding freeware offering. It is basically a freeware spellchecker, but also enables the Mac's text-to-speech capability (if installed) in most programs, can clean up text from emails, and do case changes. Author Craig Marciniak has regained the rights to SpellTools and has released the SpellTools 1.4 upgrade (144K), which works with System 9. Craig is planning to re-release this excellent utility as a shareware.

(Update 6/29/2002) With Newer Technology returning from bankruptcy, Bernie's mirror site is no longer active and the Newer urls above have been changed to reflect that.)

Having reviewed three Mac freewares, let me quickly add that 1st Class Software has upgraded 1st Class Gradebook to version 7.0. While once a dual platform application, the Mac version has disappeared from the web since I reviewed it in View from the Classroom. Version 7.0 supports Windows 3.1/95/98/ME/NT/2000.

Ruth Ann Baker, writing for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, asks, How many teachers would $2 million hire? She's referring to the Quaker Valley School District's giving every teacher and student in grades 3-12 a wireless laptop. Baker writes, "This experimental project is clearly a massive undertaking. It's exciting, it's whizbang, and it's not a very wise idea...Until the student-to-teacher ratio drops to 10-to-one, I'd vote to spend money on more teachers every single time -- to choose messenger over medium."

Friday, September 14, 2001

Heather Newman has a good column in the Detroit Free Press, News for kids, advice for parents. Ms. Newman links to some sites that provide timely advice about kids and terrorism. Some of the links are good ones to just have on file for counseling purposes and others are just good general kids' sites.