Monday, March 30, 2009

Microsoft Opens DreamSpark to High School Coders

eSchool News reported Friday in Microsoft offers free tools for high schoolers that "high school students are now able to access and download professional Microsoft Corporation software such as Visual Studio and XNA Game Studio for free, a service that has been offered to higher-education students for the past year through DreamSpark."

• Microsoft DreamSpark download page

For the Mac crowd, there's the Apple Developer Connection, where one may "create a free Apple Developer Connection Online Member account to download Xcode Tools, receive the bi-weekly ADC News, or to activate an ADC Product."

Google Summer of Code Grants

While we're talking about programming, eCampus News carried the news Google to students: Flip bits, not burgers. Google is again taking applications from student programmers for open source programming projects. Google Summer of Code 2009 is the home page for the project, with the List all accepted organizations showing where you might find a programming project.

Shuttle Discovery Lands - Now on to Saving Hubble

With the safe landing of the space shuttle Discovery from mission STS-119 on Saturday, attention now turns to the launch of Atlantis on mission STS-125, targeted for May 12, to overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope. Over 11 days and five spacewalks, Atlantis's crew will upgrade the telescope, preparing it for at least another five years of research.

In order to reach Hubble, Atlantis will fly in an orbit that has a higher than normal risk of orbital debris strikes for NASA shuttles. The space shuttle Endeavour is also being prepared to serve as a rescue ship should Atlantis suffer critical damage that would prevent it from safely returning its seven-astronaut crew back to Earth. It will be rolled out to a separate launch pad in case it is needed.

• NASA Press Release: NASA's Shuttle Discovery Glides Home After Successful Mission
• Space.com: After Shuttle's Success, NASA Aims to Save Hubble
• STS-125: Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission 4
• STS-125 Shuttle Mission Imagery
• HubbleSite

Conficker Worm May Activate on Wednesday

eCampus News is reporting that the Conficker virus may be up to something on April Fools' Day. In Giant internet worm set to attack April 1, eCampus News says that researchers aren't sure if the worm may just throw a symbolic April Fools' Day message or "get more aggressive about 'phoning home' to the worm's creators over the internet. When that happens, the creators of the worm could begin to trigger the program to send spam, spread more infections, clog networks with traffic, or try and bring down web sites."

Also see: April Fool's Conficker Threat is Likely Hype

Even if the worm threats turn out to be just hype, if you've been neglecting antivirus updates and scans, sometime before tomorrow night might be a good time to catch up on them.

Odds 'n' Ends

It appears that this summer will be another tough one for students looking for summer jobs according to Michael Levenson in the Boston Globe's Wanted: employers to step up. And I'd guess that means teachers hunting summer jobs may find the pickings slim as well.

Amanda Paulson had a trio of good articles this weekend in the Christian Science Monitor:

• Teacher training: what's the best way?
• The approach of Teach for America
• The research: Both theory and practice are important

As frequently happens, today's Educators' News posting was written late Sunday afternoon. I'll be in the classroom again tomorrow (Monday), so I just get this stuff done when I can.

In between subbing assignments, I've managed to do a lot of garden preparation this month. Annie and I devoured our first two asparagus sprouts of the year. They came from a patch grown from seed, and this was our very first picking. It takes three to four years from seed to get good asparagus!

We have spring peas up from seed, and I got in our first planting of brassicas last week. I transplanted broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and kohlrabi last Tuesday. Of course, I still have almost a whole flat of transplants yet to go into the garden. While brassicas can usually handle some pretty cold weather, with overnight temperatures predicted to dip as low as 28 ^o F, I'm keeping the extras safe under our cold frame.

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Wednesday, April 1, 2009

APOD April Fools' Day Humor

The Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) features a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe daily with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. Yesterday's image was the spectacular view shown below of the heart of the Tarantula Nebula.

Over the last few years, the Astronomy Picture of the Day site has shared a bit of geek humor each April Fools' Day. Last year it was New Space Station Robot Asks to be Called "Dextre the Magnificent." This year's offering is Astronaut's Head Upgraded During Spacewalk. Some previous APOD April 1 postings include:

• 2007: Americans Defeat Russians in First Space Quidditch Match
• 2006: Hubble Resolves Expiration Date For Green Cheese Moon
• 2005: Water On Mars

Using APOD

Several years ago, the school I taught at received a large IDEA grant. With some of the funds, we were able to purchase a cart of laptop computers for my special education classroom. Our tech coordinator had placed number labels on the outside of each laptop and on its place in the cart, but the machines still didn't always end up in their proper place. We often found students confused as they searched for their laptop.

The solution to the laptop identification problem turned out to be adding a unique desktop photo to each laptop. Since I'm a bit of an astronomy junkie, I chose photos for our iBooks from APOD and a number of other sources. I made a small print of each desktop photo and attached it to the appropriate machine. Our laptop confusion disappeared!

The photos used (with download links) appear on week 85 of the Educators' News Archive. I got so carried away hunting great space photos that I ended up posting all the great sources I'd found in an Educators' News feature, Out of this World Desktop Pictures.

Middle (and High) School Literacy Activities on Teachers' Domain

I missed the eSchool News item last week that told of Inspiring Middle School Literacy: Reading and Writing in Science and History on WGBH's Teachers Domain. Fortunately, since I'm a member (free registration), I noticed the offering in Teachers' Domain News, their monthly newsletter.

Inspiring Middle School Literacy: Reading and Writing in Science and History is a captivating collection of "self-paced classroom activities...designed to enhance the literacy skills of struggling readers in grades 5–8." The free online lessons make excellent use of videos and interactive activities, and stress note-taking, reading, and writing.

I did a "test drive" of the Continental Drift: From Idea to Theory lesson. It presented excellent video and text information, prompted students to take notes and highlight pertinent information to support their answers, and delivered that information later as a printout. Glossary entries were unobtrusively included throughout the activity. A simple record of lessons completed may be saved to individual member folders online.

Resource Sites for Teachers

I've had a feature story nearly finished on my hard drive since last fall. Since WGBH's Teachers' Domain is the first site mentioned in the feature, the posting above got me back into action. Resource Sites for Teachers tells of some of the many national resource sites for teachers that impress me.

Autism Study

ScienceDaily has an interesting report in Autism Skews Developing Brain With Synchronous Motion And Sound. It tells of research that shows that children with autism focus on people's "lip-sync—the exact match of lip motion and speech sound," rather than the eyes or "socially meaningful movements of the human body, such as gestures and facial expressions."

NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel stated, "For the first time, this study has pinpointed what grabs the attention of toddlers with ASDs. In addition to potential uses in screening for early diagnosis, this line of research holds promise for development of new therapies based on redirecting visual attention in children with these disorders."

A study publish last fall noted that Toddlers' Focus On Mouths Rather Than On Eyes Is Predictor Of Autism Severity.

Conficker Worm Update

PCWorld reports Conficker D-Day Arrives: Worm Phones Home (Quietly). Ian Paul writes that "The Conficker worm today has begun to phone home for instructions but has done little else."

NeoOffice Released

While hunting new educational software this morning, I again noticed that NeoOffice for Mac 3.0 had been released on Monday. NeoOffice is a Mac OS X office suite of software based on the open source OpenOffice office suite. I prefer NeoOffice over OpenOffice on my Macs, as it doesn't require launching Apple's X11 X Window System (that makes it possible to run X11-based applications such as OpenOffice 3 for Mac in Mac OS X).

I was pleased in my short test of what NeoOffice could do. I opened up my seed order spreadsheet, along with a couple of letters. NeoOffice didn't seem to mind if it was opening a ".doc" or a ".docx" document. It did have to chew a bit on importing a 140 MB PowerPoint presentation, but eventually got the job done.

Of course, the education application in all of this is that many schools (Mac, Windows, and/or Linux) are moving to an OpenOffice-based office suite to save money (and headaches with licensing). It appears that the OpenOffice movement has come of age and the suite can serve as an adequate replacement for Microsoft's Office suite.

While I was downloading, I also grabbed the recent updates for the Camino web browser and Carbon Copy Cloner. Carbon Copy Cloner is a great utility for schools with Macs, as it makes the job of ghosting computers a rather easy, if time consuming, task. I used to use it to put our software package on all of our iBooks. Note that CCC is free for educational use!

Odds 'n' Ends

Since I'm already rambling a bit today, let me add the following:

I'm frequently a bit surprised when I look at my month end web stats by the volume of "hits" on some of my older columns. I guess that doesn't say much about what I'm writing these days, but then, I haven't put up a lot of columns in the last five years due to writing for hire part of that time. My new Senior Gardening site has commanded a lot of my attention over the last year as well. But the hits have encouraged me to go back and update the links on some of my older columns that are still popular.

If you're wondering about why so many circa 1999 columns are in the list, many of those columns originally appeared on Dan Knight's Low End Mac site and received a bit more publicity than my current columns. The View from the Classroom series was hosted there for its first year, and Dan has been kind in linking to many of my other Mac-related columns. The full index to most of the stuff I've written over the years is available on my Columns & Editorials page.

Friday, April 3, 2009

Sweet 16 Graduation Rates

I guess you could call today's posting a blog watch, as most of the entries come from various blogs. A posting entitled Madness on Eduwonk leads to The Higher Ed Watch blog's Third Annual Academic March Madness. They rate the NCAA Sweet Sixteen participants by graduation rates.

Eduwonk also lists a link to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s blog.

Good Article on Randi Weingarten and School Reform

A link on the Edwize blog led me to an excellent article by Dana Goldstein in the American Prospect, The Education Wars. Goldstein writes initially about Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. Goldstein writes that Weingarten's current conciliatory tone "is a public-relations strategy clearly crafted for the Obama era: an effort to focus on common ground instead of long-simmering differences." Goldstein later expands her focus to include a well organized look at the whole education reform picture in America.

On Science@NASA

Dr. Tony Phillips has big more scholarly posting on his excellent Science@NASA site this week, Deep Solar Minimum. While Phillips discusses the current, but expected, lull in the sunspot cycle, he also writes about the "50-year low in solar wind pressure...a 12-year low in solar, 'irradiance,'" and "a 55-year low in solar radio emissions."

Here's just one paragraph of the interesting read:

Careful measurements by several NASA spacecraft show that the sun's brightness has dropped by 0.02% at visible wavelengths and 6% at extreme UV wavelengths since the solar minimum of 1996. The changes so far are not enough to reverse the course of global warming, but there are some other significant side-effects: Earth's upper atmosphere is heated less by the sun and it is therefore less "puffed up." Satellites in low Earth orbit experience less atmospheric drag, extending their operational lifetimes. Unfortunately, space junk also remains longer in Earth orbit, increasing hazards to spacecraft and satellites.

Pretty cool stuff!

Stimulus Funds for Education May Not Save Jobs

While an ED.gov press release Wednesday says that $44 Billion in Stimulus Funds Available to Drive Education Reforms and Save Teaching Jobs, the San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that Federal funds may not stave off classroom cuts. I've noticed over the last month or so the disconnect between what President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan say about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act saving teachers' jobs from budget cuts, and the seemingly endless articles from around the country reporting teacher layoffs. An Associated Press posting appearing in Teacher Magazine, Stimulus Funds May Not Get to Teachers, echoes my fears and notes:

President Barack Obama promises his economic stimulus law will save hundreds of thousands of teaching jobs, but some states could end up spending the money on playground equipment or wallpaper — and the president might not have the authority to stop them.

Have a great weekend!

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