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This and That Angel Jennings writes in Schools rolling out new fundraisers: food truck nights in the Los Angeles Times that schools in California are using food truck vendors to replace traditional fundraising schemes. Some schools charge vendors a flat fee to park on school property at the end of the school day and in the early evening, while others are holding special "dinner" nights. One school turns on the lights on the football field, with vendors parking on the track, and families having picnics on the field. Matt Richtel writes in the New York Times of a Silicon Valley school with no computers visible or in use by students. He relates in A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute that some movers and shakers in the computer industry would just as leave not have their children immersed in technology at an early age, preferring traditional instruction. He quotes a Google employee parent as saying, "I fundamentally reject the notion you need technology aids in grammar school. The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that’s ridiculous." It appears that Indianapolis Star writer Robert King, who spent last school year chronicling the kindergartens at School 61, will be covering a middle school in a peculiar situation this year. The Indianapolis Public Schools did their own turnaround with Emma Donnan Middle School this year, replacing the principal and most of the teaching staff. But that apparently wasn't good enough for Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett, who ruled a month into the school year that the school will be taken over next year by the for-profit, Charter Schools USA, under Indiana's turnaround strategy. Note that over half of the interventions pushed by Bennett, and in most cases against the will of school patrons, went to for-profit organization, many of which had contributed to Bennett's election campaign. King writes this week about a security officer with a heart at Donnan in Year in transition: "My job is to keep them safe." I found what may prove to be a gem while reading Sebastian M. Patting's A Second Spring for PowerPC Macs on Low End Mac over the weekend. Patting, who like me uses pre-Intel PowerPC Macs with OS 9 and OS X 10.4, seeks to set up a project similar to the one that has preserved the Amiga operating system and applications long after the demise of its "mother company, Commodore, [that] went down in flames in 1994." He writes:
Oh yeah, the gem! The gem for me in Patting's article was his reference to TenFourFox. TenFourFox is a port of the Firefox web browser for PowerPC Macs that employs most of the recent features and improvements of Firefox releases since Mozilla dropped support for PowerPC Macs at version 3.6.x. The open source effort has releases for G5, G4 (both 7400 and 7450 series), and G3 powered Macs running OS X. It obviously takes its name from Mac OS X 10.4, as version 10.4.11 was the last operating system update from Apple, and eventually marked the end of most third party developer support for applications on PowerPC Macs. What gets left out of TenFourFox are plug-ins such as QuickTime and Flash. When a page calls a plug-in, such as our October 7 posting did, you get the image shown at left instead of the desired content shown at right.
While such restrictions may seem a bit extreme, the TenFourFox wiki explains why they are necessary:
I almost immediately liked the more intuitive (for me) arrangement of choices in a context menu placing "Open in a New Tab" before "Open in a New Window." But it did take a couple of wrong clicks for me to catch on. Having read somewhere that TenFourFox took advantage of some new, memory saving code in recent Firefox releases, I was disappointed to find that TenFourFox took a lot more RAM than Firefox to display four, memory intensive news pages (The New York Times, CNN, The Indianapolis Star, and The Terre Haute Tribune-Star). But Firefox's CPU usage was consistently much higher than TenFourFox's was.
I ended up adding a launch icon for TenFourFox right under the Firefox icon in my already crowded dock. And yes, I'm one of those "dock on the left" people. I rarely run out of horizontal screen real estate on my widescreen monitor, but always seem to want more vertical space, so my dock goes on the left. Yet Another Gem Another gem mentioned in the Sebastian Patting article is Classilla, "a port of Mozilla 1.3/Netscape 1.3/Firefox 0.5 for Mac OS 9 with additional features from newer versions." The Classilla web page states:
Jumping at almost any excuse to fire up my old G4 QuickSilver Mac in OS 9, I gave Classilla a short test drive last night. I didn't go far, but found that it accurately displayed the current posting from my Senior Gardening web site. Scrolling caused some "static" in the picture, but that may be due to a really iffy graphics card in my QuickSilver.
Note that the Classilla folks don't recommend use of Classilla exclusively. Their web page has a section titled "Classilla isn't a replacement for iCab ... yet." They recommend using "Classilla where you can, and iCab where you must," and registering iCab to help support its continued development. I've sprinkled links throughout this section, so let me pull them together here for your convenience.
Odds 'n' Ends
And since I'm way off education news with most of today's posting, I'll just continue that trend with a photo of our latest addition. I often write of caring for all of my wife's "rescues," but I actually pulled this little guy off the back porch a few weeks ago where one of our outdoor cats had him cornered and cowering. He's definitely a cutie who excels at eating, pooping, knocking things off of tables, and worming his way into your heart. He doesn't have a name as yet, as both Annie and I are hoping to find him a better home than our already cat rich environment. And those sweet potatoes shown above in the Classilla browser image are from just one hill!
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Since I'm still a proud owner and user of a 
On both my G4 Powerbook and my G5 tower, I found TenFourFox to be a bit quicker than Firefox 3.6. I haven't had a chance as yet to test it on my G3 tower. 
And like a kid lost in the tall corn of a cornfield (City folks probably can't relate to that one, but you just follow a row to the edge of the field.), I had to work a bit to remember just how to get back to OS X while in OS 9! 
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Diane: NCLB: End It, Don't Mend It The title of Diane Ravitch's most recent posting to the Bridging Differences blog says it all: NCLB: End It, Don't Mend It. Mini-Grant Opportunity A CSTA email brought word of a mini-grant opportunity "for collaborative projects to efficiently increase the participation of K-12 youth with disabilities in computer science." The Computer Science Collaboration Project (CSCP) is offering grants of up to $3,000 "designed to build collaboration between participants from K-12 settings, community-based organizations, higher education, and industry to encourage youth with disabilities to explore and/or pursue computer science educational programs and careers. Mini-grant applications are due on November 30, 2011." Winners will be announced on December 30, 2011. On the Blogs - "He Chose Poorly."
Maybe next week.
Looking ahead to next month, November has several important dates to observe. Remembering that Daylight Saving Time ends on Sunday, November 6, may save you from getting to work an hour early the following Monday (Spring forward, fall back). Mary Forgione, the Los Angeles Times Daily Travel & Deal blogger, shares some interesting trivia about Daylight Saving Time in Daylight saving time ends November 6, but not everywhere.
While poking around the NEA site (co-sponsor of American Education Week), I noticed an ad for the U.S. Mint's Parents and Teachers page. If you do anything on coinage or the mint in the classroom, it might be worth a look. For Teachers in Indiana The Lilly Endowment is again running its Teacher Creativity Fellowship Program this year. Indiana teachers (including guidance counselors, library/media specialists, principals and assistant principals) may apply for summer renewal grants of up to $8,000. The deadline for proposals is next Friday, however (November 4, 2011). Odds 'n' Ends I really wish I'd found a lot more to write about today, as when I'm done here, I have to replace our kitchen faucet...and I'm a lousy plumber!
While most of our garden will succumb to the first hard frost (We've already had a couple of very light frosts.), we continue to pick frost hardy crops like broccoli and kale. We usually cover our fall lettuce with whatever we can find to protect it from frost. I invested this fall in what are called floating row covers, which allow light in and also provide several degrees of protection to the plants growing under them. Unfortunately, one of our dogs always thinks the blankets, paper paint tarps, and even the expensive, new floating row covers are bedding for him to dig and hunker down in. And we have a gorgeous crop of fall lettuce coming on that should, dog willing, last well into November.
And for the eagle eyed, yes, that's spinach at the back of the lettuce bed. We've been enjoying baby spinach salad with poppyseed dressing a lot this week.
Have a great weekend!
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, I must have chosen poorly in selecting blogs to follow this year on Educators' News. I searched both this year's and last year's list of education blogs to find something insightful, of use in the classroom, or just mildly interesting to use in today's On the Blogs section. I can only hope the bloggers are all working very hard at teaching to the exclusion of good blog posts, as none had anything newsworthy or even very interesting to report here. 
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©2011 Steven L. Wood