Wednesday, February 20, 2002

U.S. Supreme Court Upholds "Trade and Grade"

In a 9-0 decision Tuesday, the United States Supreme Court "upheld the common schoolroom practice of having students swap homework, quizzes or other schoolwork and then correct one another's work as the teacher goes over it aloud." A Yahoo/AP report quotes the decision written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy as saying, "Correcting a classmate's work can be as much a part of the assignment as taking the test itself."

Michigan Maintains Special Education Class Size Limits

In a column that brought joy to my heart, Julie Ross reports in the Detroit Free Press that Michigan has agreed to maintain class size limits on special education classes. Ross writes:

The new rules maintain limits on class sizes and how many special education students may be assigned to a teacher. The rules also establish that students with severe and minor disabilities should be separated, as should students by age groups.

In the last major revision of Indiana special education regulations, good class size limits were included right up until the end, when some folks who represent the state's school systems and school boards lobbied them right out of existence. Good for Michigan! I hope the trend swings just bit south.

Education -- Edison Style

Parents and teachers in Philadelphia wonder what may await them if Edison Schools, Inc. takes over some of Philadelphia's public schools. Jacques Steinberg has an excellent column in the Sunday New York Times, Buying in to the Company School (free registration required), that describes the Edison experience in the Garfield Edison Partnership School in Flint, Michigan.

Detroit Sick-Out

Detroit teachers are being encouraged to call in sick today (Wednesday) by some organizations, while their teachers' union advises against it. Detroit Free Press education writer Chastity Pratt tells of protests "in response to layoffs as the Detroit Public Schools district tries to erase a budget shortfall" in Detroit teachers told to sit out the sick-out. Pratt writes, "The district has eliminated about 700 positions since January" while announcing a "$78.5-million maintenance contract with Aramark ServiceMaster during the same week 69 trades workers were laid off."

David Coursey on Mac Voyeurs

David Coursey's latest column in his month-long Mac trial for ZDNet is Mac voyeurs: All talk, no action. Coursey describes Mac Voyeurs as folks who "speculate about what a genius Steve Jobs must be," but suspects "that for these people, the Apple Store would be adult entertainment." This one has absolutely no educational relevance that I can find, but it's an entertaining read.

SchwabLearning.org Updates

New items this week on the SchwabLearning.org site include:

• Dr. Gordon Sherman shares his vision of dyslexia and explores the relationship between giftedness and dyslexia.
• Getting Help in Preschool: Emily's mom shares her daughter's problems with language development and offers tips for other parents.

Software Releases and Updates

Joe Gregg wrote to remind me that Leibniz, a graphical front end to Mathematica for Macintosh and Windows, has been updated to version 1.6.1.

Gary Smith of Polymath Love Software has released a new math freeware, Ten Twenty Thirty (238K) for Macintosh. Players compete against the computer by selecting three numbers that add up to 10, 20, or 30. The sum is the player's score for each round. All of Gary's excellent math freewares are available on his Free Programs page. His entire collection of 250+ math programs on CD is available through his order page.

Robin Landsbert has updated his Mac freeware Flash Cards reading tutor to version 1.0b3. Flash Cards opens text files to be presented as flash cards which are then spoken back to the student. Flash Cards is still in beta version with updates posted "about once every week." Author Robin Landsbert encourages bug reports or suggestions for new features.

Jim Graham has updated Cross Word Search Creator to version 1.1.

Apple yesterday released the Mac OS X 10.1.3 update via Software Update.

Mail

Towards the end of last week, I received an email from fellow columnist and old Mac collector, Adam Robert Guha. He'd been doing some housecleaning of his many older Macs, but his big news was in moving up to a refurbished PowerBook G4/400 from Smalldog Electronics. So far, Adam's pleased enough with his upgrade to write it all up in another of his Apple Archive columns, Replacing My PowerBook.

Then last Friday, Joe Taylor wrote to say his wife had finished their taxes (using TaxCut), and things turned out well enough for him to order a new flat-panel iMac.

I'm a little green with envy both ways, as my recent hardware improvements for my old beige G3 minitower have been limited to replacing the last of its original drives. While I still like the machine, the durability of its drives hasn't been anything stellar. I had to replace the floppy and Zip drives early on, and the original 6 gig hard drive failed shortly after I upgraded to a 28 gig Barracuda. The CD-ROM drive has been failing for some time, but I've gotten by with it by using the external CD burner as a CD player when necessary.

One of the columns I wanted to write last summer, but didn't, was an Illustrated G3 Minitower Teardown. I really wanted to do a sweeping upgrade of the old box, but time and finances prevented it. The "dream upgrade" was to include a 600+ MHz G4 chip (which still aren't available), a better graphics card, a USB/FireWire PCI card, and a dual channel 100 MHz Tempo IDE card (which still aren't available) to support a mirrored RAID array of 80 GB Barracuda drives. If you begin to mentally tick off the prices of the toys I wanted, it comes out to around the price of Joe's new iMac! Also, if you begin to count up the number of PCI slots needed, you'll see I came out one short if I planned to retain my old Orange Micro PC card.

While the teardown column is still a good possibility for next summer, it will have to be more of a basic teardown, cleaning and repair column than an upgrade column, unless PowerLogix, nVidia, Orange Micro, Sonnet, and Seagate become charitable organizations.

TaxCut! No, TurboTax. No, TaxCut Again!

After all of my online bellyaching last week about H&R Block not producing a timely state version of TaxCut, I finally ended up using that product to complete my taxes this weekend. (Now you know the real reason there was no Monday update.) I'd given up on Block getting the Indiana state version out in time for me to complete our taxes in time for my wife to do FASFA forms by the Indiana March 1 deadline. I ordered TurboTax from Amazon on February 9. Their site advised 5-9 days for free delivery. Even at the maximum, that gave me plenty of time to get the taxes done and avoid the wrath of my significant other.

When Block got the Indiana state version out on February 15, I checked the order status at Amazon and found that delivery wasn't scheduled until February 22-28! So, I canceled the order for TurboTax, bought the Indiana state version and finished my taxes with TaxCut.

Now, please don't read this as an indorsement of TaxCut. Whether it was my Mac or their application, I found the application to be difficult to use and generally unfriendly in the "help" areas. It even locked up my Mac under System 9.2.2, something that usually only Internet Explorer can do.

As for Amazon, you can blame them for all of the new, sparkly banner ads on this page. Disgusted with their sluggish shipping, I went online in search of new affiliate advertisers with thoughts of banishing Amazon's ads forever. I thought better of it when I considered how convenient it is to click through one of my own ads when purchasing from Amazon and receiving a small commission for it. But, I also added a number of new affiliates to go with the holdovers, Amazon, MacResQ, and Sunburst. Alphabetically, the new affiliate advertisers to date are:

• A&E/The History Channel (I've gotta get the satellite fixed.)
• Buy.com (They sold me my last Barracuda drive.)
• Club Mac (Always has something really cool to suck up your extra cash)
• Computers4Sure (A frequent low price leader on DealMac)
• Dell Home (Hey, Apple doesn't have an affiliate program!)
• Disney Blast (It's tough to ignore anything with the Disney name on it.)
• Iomega (I'd love a couple of 20 gig Peerless drives.)
• Journey Education (Great education discounts on software)
• The Learning Company (The folks with tons of educational titles.)
• MacMall (Always has something really cool to suck up your extra cash)
• Office Max (I buy all my cardstock for printing flashcards from them.)
• The Space Store (I couldn't resist a site selling Apollo patches.)
• Teacher Created Materials (Lots of cool teacher stuff and the most beautiful ad banners I've seen)

• Tech Depot (Good digital camera selection and prices)

I could have put this list into a nice, tidy table across the page and saved a lot of space. But running it as a bullet list considerably extends the length of the page, thus permitting more room for what else but more ads down the side of the page. (Next week, maybe I should carry a review of freeware ad-blocking software.:-) Of course, if you're on a dial-up connection, the page will take forever to load.

Actually, there are some serious vendors represented in both the old and new affiliates, with a few more coming. And no, I'm not going to run this many ads all the time. But if you're going to buy something really, really expensive from one of these vendors, why not click through my ad on your way there! And that, of course, is a great lead-in to remind you to read my last column from last week, The Tin Cup Syndrome or Computerworld's Intrusive ads a sign of online advertising evolution, analysts say.

Thursday, February 21, 2002

Pertinent Columns

The Macon Telegraph's Ellen Lord tells of the efforts by Lee E. MacWilliams to provide older Macs to her students at Hamilton Elementary (Ohio) in Bridging the divide: Educator helps Hamilton students get computers.

I don't often get to link to the excellent columns by Paul Shields on The Business Mac, as they generally don't fit the rather narrow niche I'm pursuing in Educators' News. After my comments yesterday about advertising on the Mac web, Paul's most recent column is a perfect fit! Lessons for small business owners: Why the Mac web is struggling so much gives a good look at why so many web sites are having a tough time right now.

Software Releases and Updates

Dana Baggett on MacsOnly reports good results with the recent Mac OS X 10.1.3 update issued yesterday. In addition, Apple has released a downloadable updater to update any version of 10.1 to the current 10.1.3.

Friday, February 22, 2002

Ohio School Voucher Case

Two columns published recently suggest the U.S. Supreme Court is leaning towards upholding the Ohio voucher law. Previously, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals concluding that it was unconstitutional. Both Justices Indicate Choice Crucial in Vouchers Case by Washington Post staff writer Michael A. Fletcher and Justices lean toward school vouchers by Fredreka Schouten say questioning and comments by key justices "that taxpayer-funded vouchers for religious schools might survive constitutional challenges if parents have access to a range of choices." Predicting decisions by the Supreme Court can be riskier than visiting Las Vegas with the mortgage money, however. We'll probably have to wait until July for a decision to be announced.

Good Idea, Rotten PR

Talk about bad press for education: Teachers at Erie Central High School (PA) got a special inservice day described by Central Principal Jerry Mifsud as "a wellness day." Unfortunately, folks in the community saw it otherwise, as reported in CNN Education's Officials question in-school spa during teacher in-service day.

Shame on Mac Publishing LLC.

Brothers Don and Dave Engstrom, co-authors the MacReviewZone and MacSpeedZone sites, have posted related articles concerning Mac Publishing LLC. protesting their use of the page name iMac Central. Don's A Cease And Desist Letter? Gee, We Were Hoping For A Box Of Chocolates... and Dave's "Sosumi!" - MacSpeedZone Faces Lawsuit From Mac Publishing LLC, or Why COO Stephen Daniels Wasn't Invited To Stay For Tea are both revealing reads of what appears to be a big, bad, corporate web site throwing its weight around.

Software Releases and Updates

Travis East has released updates for all three of his excellent educational freewares. FractionCalc 1.2.1, TeacherTool 1.0.1, and Geometry 2.6.1 have received a variety of bug fixes and added or improved features. All of Travis's freewares are available in both Mac and Windows versions from his download page.

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Have a great weekend!

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