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Monday, October 8, 2001

Travis East has updated his freeware Geometry application. Geometry was "designed for math teachers to easily calculate the volume and surface area of common geometric figures." Version 2.4.4 corrects a problem with the rectangular prism, triangular prism, and rectangular pyramid and changes the rectangular pyramid fields to include only the height and side. Geometry is available in a variety of versions for different operating systems: DOS (24K); Windows (549K); Power Mac (611K); 68K Mac (491K); and OS X (689K).

The Washington Post's Michael A. Fletcher hints that the Bush administration's "President 's Commission on Excellence in Special Education" may really be a smoke screen to perform a hatchet job on special education in Bush Administration Gears Up To Revamp Special Education. Fletcher points out that unnamed administration sources indicate "that the landmark legislation has spun out of control since it was enacted more than a quarter-century ago.," and "Bush administration officials have stressed that special education students too frequently achieve poorly in school despite the vast amounts of money spent to educate them." Fletcher notes that Lynda Van Kuren of the Council for Exceptional Children feels that while special education has problems, many of them would be solved if the federal government fully funded its share of the program's costs. "The one area that gives us concern is that this commission may thwart efforts to gain full funding for special education. We simply can't wait any longer."

It doesn't take a whole lot of reading between the lines to see that the President's Commission may be an effort to forestall full federal funding of the special education sections of the current education reform bill. While almost no one would argue that our special education mechanisms couldn't use a whole lot of improvement, the current actions of Republicans in Congress and the Administration are suspect at best.

Related columns and postings include:

San Francisco Chronicle staff writer John Batteiger has some good links to homework helper sites in his online guide, Homework, Study Aids: Some Web sites can make learning fun.

Lou Malfara, president of Ember Consulting, Inc., wrote this weekend and asked if I'd pass along the demo url for their School Days web-based student record keeping system. I listed several other such management tools in reference to a CNN Education column in the Educators' News June 22 posting.

Epson has posted a schedule of release dates of print drivers for Mac OS X. Note that the printers supported are all USB or network (Ethernet) printers. Apple's continuing intransigence in not providing support for serial port printers under OS X makes it an unattractive choice for many schools (and other users) with substantial investments in serial port printers.

I received a forwarded email from my school's "Evil NT techie" that contained a promo from Premier Programming Solutions. It announced the release of their Talking Word Processor. The email stated, "Users can easily find their grammatical errors by having the talking word processor read the document back to them."

The read-back function is an excellent tool that I regularly use for my columns and have my students use in editing their writing. Along with a good spellchecker, this practice can really help those who have trouble with words to produce literate documents. If you're stuck in a Windows only environment, Talking Word Processor might be a good option. Of course, since I'm primarily a Mac user, I couldn't resist sending the following back to the techie:

Hmmm...
This capability has been built-in to every Mac produced for the last ??? 5-10 years. My eleven year old IIfx reads documents with ease:-).

I really think Apple's text-to-speech software got started somewhere around system 7.5 with Plain Talk, although it really does work well on the ancient IIfx that functions as a file server in my upstairs sunroom/computer workshop. An easier way to get both text-to-speech and some other functions is to install SpellTools 1.3 (1821K). For compatibility with system 9.x, you'll need to go to SpellTools' author Craig Marciniak's site for the SpellTools 1.4 upgrade (144K).

My wife, Annie, and I have been playing around with a Compaq Deskpro that she uses for practice for her Novell and MCSE classes. I noticed that Windows Professional 2000 (NT5) is able to read dialog boxes and such. I couldn't get it to read documents, however. Of course, I thoughtfully took the time yesterday to install some of my favorite cross-platform applications on the Compaq. AppleWorks 6 for Windows and StuffIt 5.5 for Windows both went on and worked without a glitch.

Beginning today, Educators' News will go to a Monday-Wednesday-Friday update schedule. More frequent updates may be made at times as pertinent educational news dictates.


Wednesday, October 10, 2001

Science teacher Jeff Adkins tees off on MacAddict Magazine's plan to charge shareware authors $500 for inclusion of their programs on the Disc in Freakin' Awful. (See the September 6 Educators' News' posting for all the gory details.) While Jeff usually writes the excellent Mac Lab Report on Low-End Mac, he takes Imagine Media to task in this piece, saying, "Come November, they're going to have to start calling it The Coaster, 'cause that's all that it'll be good for." Jeff also offers the folks at Imagine Media this piece of sage advice, "Geeze, these authors are doing you a favor, folks...Take away a healthy collection of files, and what's left?"

This week the SchwabLearning.org introduces a new writer to their expert series in the person of Priscilla Vail. Her initial column involves Detecting Learning Problems and the implications of assigning labels.

The Schwab site continues their update of the Assistive Technology Guide this week with the update, Writing Tools - High Tech: Keyboards and Keyboarding; Spell Checkers; Word Prediction; and Word Processing. The AT guide update began a few weeks ago with an excellent column on low tech assistive technology.

Schwab Learning Director Richard D. Lavoie reminisces about some of his former students in Thoughts from the Road: Amanda and Teddy.

Other highlights from The SchwabLearning.org this week include:

In case you missed the announcement on Monday, Educators' News is now being updated on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule.


Friday, October 12, 2001

The Washington Post's David S. Broder and Michael Fletcher have a pretty good summary of the current status of the education reform bill in State Officials, School Groups Worried About Education Bill.

Jeff Adkins reviews Mimio for the Macintosh in this week's Mac Lab Report. The cross-platform application allows one to capture things written on a whiteboard on a computer for later play back or export to other programs.

I missed it somewhere along the line, but Dan Knight, longtime publisher of Low End Mac, has branched out and launched a companion site for users of older Windows boxes, Low End PC. On the "about" page Dan states:

The mission of Low End PC is helping users get the most value from their computers. We're not concerned with having the fastest, most tweaked out computer possible. We're not concerned with keeping ancient PCs in use long after they've become a bottle-neck. We are concerned about value: getting the most use from your hardware for the money -- and sometimes that means an upgrade or a newer computer.

A sampling of current columns include:

I wish Dan and his writers well in this new and much needed endeavor.

Casady & Greene have updated their Grammarian 2 grammar checker to version 2.1.4. The full version runs $49.95 (download) with updates for users of previous versions running $19.95.

Changes continue here at Educators' News. Today marks the beginning of advertising on the site. Since this is my toy, there are obvious links to some of my favorites -- the movie Teachers, which often reminds me that I teach "to make a difference," and The Princess Bride, just because it's a really great movie! Ads contained here do not represent an endorsement or any warranty of products shown.


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©2001 Steven L. Wood