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SAT Change The New York Times Tamar Lewin today reports that the College Board has agreed to stop flagging SAT scores of disabled students who receive accommodations in taking the test. In Abuse Is Feared as SAT Test Changes Disability Policy (free registration required), Lewin tells that guidance counselors interviewed expressed mixed feelings at the settlement of a 1999 lawsuit against the Educational Testing Service that administers the SAT for the College Board. Newton North High School (Boston, MA) guidance counselor Brad MacGowan's quote was representative of many others quoted in the column:
Column I don't publish many online columns anymore, as I just don't seem to have the time for it. Every now and then, I rip one off that I'm really proud of. Today's column, Out of this World Desktop Pictures (from NASA and Others), is one of those columns. Regular readers of Educators' News know I'm always mucking about the NASA sites and other related pages. In doing this column, I followed a NASA link to the European Southern Observatory's site to check out their copyright and use policy. Just like NASA, ESO is cool about folks like you and me using their copyrighted stuff for desktop pictures and even columns. The European Southern Observatory Astronomical Image Gallery is actually a bit easier to navigate than many of NASA's image galleries, possibly because there's not as much content. I find desktop pictures (bulletin boards, stuff lying around on my desk or teaching table, etc.) can often be valuable educational material. Lots of instructional minutes of are lost daily in our schools when a lesson ends a minute or two before the bell, someone is at the restroom and the rest of the group is waiting on them, or... Knockout desktop pictures often work for me to be a great way not to waste those odd minutes. It might not be part of the regular curriculum, but astronomy or science images seem to inspire my middle school age students and they come up with some very good questions. Software
Apple has posted Security Update 7-12-02 for direct download (841K). This patch fixes the potential security issue with the OS X Software Update panel. The Macintosh News Network notes some updates are no longer available after installing the patch. AAAS Convention The AAAS Annual Meeting (and Science Innovation Exposition) will be held in Denver, Colorado, February 13-18, 2003. The early online registration deadline July 31, 2002. Devotion For July 14-20, 2002 Zach Wood's weekly devotional for this week is The Sweet Aroma of God's Cleansers. I hope it adds a bit of brightness to your week. Zach also maintains an archive of previous devotionals. If you have suggestions, news ideas, etc., please . |
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Genetic Cause of Dyslexia Found? Boston Globe Correspondent Quynh-Giang Tran reports researchers have isolated a gene defect that they believe is responsible for dyslexia! In Gene flaw causes dyslexia, researchers say, Tran refers to a study to be published in Biological Psychiatry, Disruption of Posterior Brain Systems for Reading in Children with Developmental Dyslexia, that "researchers pinpointed the region of the brain activated by reading and observed its disruption in children with dyslexia." Dr. Sally Shaywitz, one of the authors of the study, said, ''This is the definitive study in children that links reading with brain function. Now there's an urgency to identify and provide dyslexic children with the most effective reading tools.'' Lots of New Computers for Florida Students The Gainesville Sun's Cathy Carr reports in 3,000 new computers are being placed in 33 county schools that Alachua County schools will be receiving new computers through $5.1 million in interest-free federal loans from the Qualified Zone Academy Bonds program. The program required communities to come up with 10% in matching funds to receive the loans. Carr reports that Alachua County needed to raise $514,710, "but local businesses and individuals contributed far more - $1.3 million in in-kind, volunteer or cash donations." Schools participating in the program must have had at least 35 percent of their students on free or reduced lunch. Pittsburgh Schools Private Grants Pulled The New York Times Stephanie Strom tells today about the Pittsburgh public schools losing grants from the Heinz Endowments, the Grable Foundation and the Pittsburgh Foundation and the ripple effect of those losses. In Private Groups in Pittsburgh Halt Millions in School Aid (free registration required), Strom tells that such grants are often used to acquire federal matching dollars, according to John Thompson, the district superintendent. Strom notes, "The foundations were concerned about the district's inability or unwillingness to provide reports about budgets, test results and other matters that would allow them to evaluate the effectiveness of their grants." Edison Spins Test Scores? In another New York Times column, Complex Calculations on Academics, Jacques Steinberg and Diana B. Henriques take a hard look at Edison Schools Inc., academic improvement claims. They report experts are questioning Edison's manipulation of test scores in arriving at a "positive" rating for many of their schools. Peter Robertson, the Cleveland district's chief assessment officer, is quoted as saying, "I have schools that look good by this metric that we're very worried about." Net Thinkers Washington Post staff writer Laura Sessions Stepp looks at the phenomena of internet research in Point. Click. Think? Stepp discusses "Net thinking -- a form of reasoning that characterizes many students who are growing up with the Internet as their primary, and in some cases, sole source of research." She writes, "Net thinkers are said to generate work quickly and make connections easily... But they also value information-gathering over deliberation, breadth over depth, and other people's arguments over their own." New from the SchwabLearning.org New on the Schwablearning.org site this week is Coping with a Learning Disability, My Life Long Companion. The Schwablearning.org also offers a new booklet, 25 Fun Ways to Encourage Reading 481K), as a downloadable PDF document. As always, links to all of the new and updated SchwabLearning.org articles are available in the Schwab Learning Online Newsletter (link expires 7-25-02). Past newsletters are now archived in the new SchwabLearning.org Email Newsletter Archive. Desktop Pictures from Outer Space If you missed it yesterday, and I think most did, I put up a column, Out of this World Desktop Pictures (from NASA and Others), that has samples and links to lots of astronomy and space flight photos that would be great to use as desktop pictures. While I optimized all of the graphics and did an HTML trick to speed loading of the text, the page still loads very slowly with a dial-up connection. While it wasn't by design, I did omit any solar desktop picture samples from the column. For some reason, they just don't turn me on as desktop pictures. If you're really into solor flares and such, the SOHO site offers many solar images, many in realtime from the SOHO satellite. They also have a SOHO real time images screen saver for free download. And, if for no other reason than to add a little color to today's drab and graphic challenged update, I'll add a new solar image and some others that didn't make the column that you might like as a desktop photo.
Software With the Macintosh world focused this week on the Macworld Expo convention in New York, there is a deluge of new and updated software offerings. As I looked over the postings on MacUpdate last night and this morning, I really wasn't terribly surprised to find that few, if any, were educationally related. MacWorld tends to generate other types of software releases, and many, of course, are Mac-only. MacMinute.com has a posting that The Mathworks "will be exhibiting MATLAB and Simulinkits...at Macworld Expo in NYC this week." The posting also says that Mathworks products will be available on Mac OS X later this year and the company "will be collaborating with Apple" on workshops to be held later this year. No mention was made in the posting of the Justice Department antitrust complaint apparently still being pursued against The Mathworks. Leading the notable releases yesterday was QuickTime 6 from Apple Computer. The Pro version (paid) makes use of the MPEG 4 codec that has superior compression characteristics over the current music standard, MP3. QuickTime 6 is available for free download for Mac OS 8.6-9.2, X (10.1.3 or later), and Windows 98/NT/Me/2000/XP. As expected, Thorsten Lemke has released GraphicConverter version 4.4.3. I'm still having some problems with the accuracy of moving pasted items with the mouse in the new release. I'm not sure whether it's a GraphicConverter problem, an Apple system problem, or just something I've messed up on my machine! Bob "Dr. Mac" LeVitus discusses corrupted Mac OS X preference problems in his last two Mac OS X Daily Tip postings on OSXFAQ.com:
If you use Mac OS X and everything is going well, the two links above may not be of much use to you. If you install and test lots of new stuff, that all too often doesn't work exactly as advertised, you may find Bob's advice invaluable.
I regularly catch a good deal of flack from the "Apple Can Do No Wrong" crowd when I point out that Macs continue to be priced at a level that drives potential new customers away. (Apple has even called on occasion to express their "concern" with my views.) Saying that I find my 1.1 GHz Satellite to be substantially faster than my 800 MHz G4 in many situations generally brings in more than a few email flames as well. I really do prefer a Mac, but I sure wish Apple, Motorola, IBM, and whoever else is involved would stop pushing the Megahertz Myth story and get about the business of producing faster Macs at an affordable price. Special Report for Educators -- Macintosh Pricing I've once again updated the regular feature, Special Report for Educators -- Macintosh Pricing to reflect new products and price changes from Apple Computer for educational customers. Retail prices are also included for reference. The report contains no analysis, comment, or opinion, it's there as a quick visual reference for you. If you would like to compare price changes, the previous Special Report for Educators is still available. It was last updated yesterday. Several pleasant surprises turned up on the Apple Store for Education after the Macworld Expo keynote speech by Apple CEO Steve Jobs. the price for the top two eMac models and the previous high end flat-panel iMac have been reduced approximately $100 for both individual educators and educational institutions. The 600 MHz CRT G3 iMac is now offered only in the "Snow" case with three different configurations available. MacSurfer's Headline News has their usual thorough listing of reports on all of the new product introductions at Macworld. What Got Left Out In doing a column such as the one I released last Monday, Out of this World Desktop Pictures (from NASA and Others), there are always some images that you'd like to use, but can't because of copyrights and the time (and sometimes expense) involved in getting permission to publish. Two sites I pretty well left out that I would have loved to use images from are the Astro Photo Galleries (1,2) by Tony and Daphne Hallas and the work of David Malin posted on the Anglo-Australian Observatory site. Tony and Daphne describe themselves as "self-taught" with the help of folks from their local astronomy club. Both sites feature some outstanding astrophotography.
High Resolution Apollo Images
Here's part of Scott's email:
Scott teaches fifth grade at the Ronald H. Brown Charter School of Harrisburg and maintains his own domain at ScottSchuyler.com. Mossy Space Spirals With all the hubbub of Macworld, I missed the release Tuesday of a new Science@NASA lesson, Mossy Space Spirals. Mark Marcantonio on Apple Ed and ADD Mark Marcantonio gives Apple some thoughtful advice about the education market in his column, Apple Education's Blind Spot, on MyMac.com today. Mark advocates Apple bring in educational software developers for a University of X to get the ball rolling on getting educational software rewritten for OS X. You'll have to scroll down a bit, or do a find for "ADD, My Two Cents Worth," to find Mark's discussion suggesting psychologists and physicians overdiagnose ADD and ADHD. His comments follow two June editorials by MyMac.com publisher Tim Robertson on the subject, It does not ADD up, and It does not ADD up, Part 2. Apple Ed Price Lists Updated When I published Special Report for Educators -- Macintosh Pricing, Apple had not as yet updated their Education Price Lists page. I noticed late Wednesday evening that the page has now been updated. I find the downloadable PDF price lists carry a good deal more information and are a bit easier for me to use than the Apple Store for Education. Software The flood of software releases and updates associated with the Macworld Expo continues. Be sure to check MacUpdate and/or Version Tracker for a full listing of new releases, especially all of the Apple application updates. Travis East has updated his excellent freeware cross-platform FractionCalc application to version 1.3. Synergy Creations has updated their sharewares, Periodic Table (version 3.1) and Alchemist's Challenge (version 1.1). Roger Clary of MacMuse Software has released QuizMaker Pro 4.2 for OS X. I think this is the first of Roger's applications that has been rewritten to function natively in Mac OS X. Roger also has Windows and Classic versions of QuizMaker Pro available for download. Macworld Comments I had a good bit written about yesterday's Macworld Expo keynote, but decided just to pull it under the old adage, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." Educators' News isn't a Mac site, anyway. If you don't believe that, just try to find a link on Mac sites, other than MacSurfer's Headline News (Thanks, Ladd!), to any of the recent EdNews postings, features, or columns! But late Wednesday evening, actually very early Thursday morning, I found that John H. Farr had once again summed up my feelings about the Expo offerings without being terribly nasty about it in Comments: Here I Go Again. This week's Spencer F. Katt Kattoon (July 15, 2002) says an awful lot about the current problems of online content providers. Spencer F. Katt's host publication, eWeek, has several interesting articles on their Macworld Coverage page. Getting Under the Hood of Apple's Jaguar, by Think Secret's Nick dePlume, tells of the return of spring-loaded folders to the Mac OS, and "an interesting piece of Unix functionality: When a minimized window in OS X's dock is dragged onto the rest of the screen, it will be left in that spot as a miniaturized window icon, scaling back to full size when clicked." Pertinent Columns The Los Angeles Times Henry Weinstein spins an interesting story in Tension Over Court's Pledge Ruling Defused (free registration required). He tells of the 9th Circuit Court's annual judicial conference where Judge Michael R. Hogan, following a naturalization ceremony, produced a few chuckles when he said, "For many of us, it's traditional to recite the Pledge of Allegiance." Those in attendance and saying the pledge without any change of volume at the phrase "under God" included Judge Alfred T. Goodwin. Weinstein quotes Goodwin as saying, "It's not a schoolhouse, you can say anything you want." Christian Science Monitor staff writer Marjorie Coeyman discusses block scheduling pros and cons in Popular reform draws mixed reviews. Another Christian Science Monitor posting, If it's Thursday, this must be UNC by Mary Kuhl, tells of commercial college-tour groups that take would be college students on regional college tours for a fee. Companies such as College Visits "arrange for meetings with admissions counselors and provide lodging and meals, as well as advice and materials," while visiting "as many as 12 campuses in a week." Michel Marriott writes about the Intel Computer Clubhouse Network in Not Just Closing a Divide, but Leaping It (free registration required). The Network is a program designed "to help young people in low-income areas apply digital skills to creative use," and "to foster not only computer skills but collaboration and leadership as well." An AP posting tells about a daring, but possibly criminal attempt at better grades in Delaware Student Charged With Hacking. I'd noticed a potential great deal on the Apple Store for Education some time ago, but had held off on posting anything about it. With the announcement that Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2) will be a full-price (no upgrade path) upgrade from Apple, the deal may be something of interest to readers interested in picking up the Adobe Design Collection. Jaguar is priced at $69 for either schools or individuals at the Apple Store for Education and an existing offer for the Adobe Design Collection + GoLive/LiveMotion Academic runs through October 15. If you buy a new Mac, or in this case, just OS X 10.2, you can add the Design Collection for $399. 
While we're talking some pretty serious bucks here, if you're already in the market for Photoshop, etc. and would be buying the Jaguar upgrade anyway, this could be a great deal. The Design Collection includes Adobe Photoshop 7.0, Illustrator 10, InDesign 2.0, Acrobat 5.0, and the Adobe GoLive/LiveMotion Pack with a special training CD. The total comes out to $468. Jaguar Pricing: Where Does It Leave Schools? While the story of Apple dropping the free iTools package in favor of the new fee based .Mac has been widely circulated, there's another nasty little Apple pricing story that has gone virtually unnoticed. With the announcement of the Mac OS X 10.2 upgrade being a full-price, no upgrade path upgrade, educational institutions are left in a bit of a pickle. The steep pricing of the upgrade has been noted with dismay around the Mac web, but no one has written anything about the potential effect on schools. While Jaguar retails at $129, it sells for $69 for either K-12 schools or individual teachers through the Apple Store for Education. The Apple Education Volume License Agreement Price List (33K PDF document), offers the upgrade as a full, new license purchase only, discounted for 10 licenses or more (10-99 seats - $59, 99-999 seats - $49, 1000+ seats - $39). Just as with the general public, there really is no "upgrade" path for financially strapped educational institutions. Another option for schools is the Mac OS X Maintenance Program. The program guarantees updates for three years for $207 ($147 for education) with a minimum purchase of "10 seats" (licenses) and with the total fee due up front in most cases. A call to our Apple Ed rep and a quick check of the EVLA (linked above) confirmed that option still exists.
With our limited budget, it's a sure thing that our machines will have to run Mac OS X 10.1.5 for the foreseeable future, unless Apple does a quick and unlikely reversal on the 10.2 upgrade pricing for schools. While that may not sound too bad, and I'm really looking forward to using the iBooks in the classroom next year, it also means that the operating system on those units is already outdated. Will future OS X bug fixes and updates require the 10.2 update? They almost certainly will! You might think our Apple Education representative might be able to rectify the situation, but in a phone call today, he had to defend 10.1.5 as a useable operating system. While he was sympathetic to our plight, he could not offer a free upgrade on the virtually new machines purchased last April and said he did not expect any modification of the educational pricing on the OS X 10.2 upgrade. He did offer to send me literature on the Mac OS X Maintenance Program. Let's see, $147 per machine for three years of guaranteed upgrades times 30 comes out to... I linked yesterday to Mark Marcantonio's column, Apple Education's Blind Spot. Mark points out that "The slow adoption by education software developers of OSX...is costing the company true growth in education." He writes:
If and when those developers of which Mark spoke produce OS X versions of their educational applications, will they read "Minimum System Requirement, Mac OS X 10.2" on the side of the box? I don't think my school's situation is all that unique. I suspect that teachers and IT people around the nation who use Macs and are responsible for their care and upkeep are wondering like me, "Now, what am I going to do?" Apple has outdated our operating system before we even put the new machines into serious use. (Many schools purchase computers at the end of the school year in anticipation of having everything ready to go for the next school year -- now, with an outdated OS!) How unhappy am I? When we were in the hardware purchasing cycle for the grant that produced our new Macs, I had to make it very clear to our Apple representative that while I wanted to specify iBooks for purchase, without a competitive price, I'd back off and let the school go totally PC! The rep responded with a competitive bid that we could accept, but only because we had some serious leverage at the time to specify at least some Macs be purchased. When I return to school next month, I'm sure the point will be made that the PC laptops purchased still have a current operating system at no additional cost. Many folks have effectively made the point that many school IT people are hostile to the Mac platform. Apple CEO Steve Jobs frequently has stressed Apple's "commitment to education." I've taken a lot of flack from Apple and readers over the last few years for questioning any commitment by Apple or Steve Jobs to education, beyond milking that market for as much as possible. I was impressed last spring to find that Apple Education finally could and would deal on a small number of Macs for a small school system. Apple's successes in Henrico County, the Michigan Teacher Technology Initiative, and with the Maine Laptop Initiative appeared to be translating into aggressive pricing for all schools, regardless of size. The addition of the excellent PowerSchool school management software was welcome news. It actually appeared for a time that Apple was truly taking the education market seriously. With one incredibly shortsighted and greedy decision, Apple has wiped away any lasting favorable impression of a company committed to education by those who must maintain Apple products for schools. The pricing decision on the OS X 10.2 upgrade to schools just puts more valid ammunition into hostile IT directors' arsenals against having anything to do with Macs or the Macintosh platform. But beyond that, the decision will tie the hands, not to mention alienating, many school Mac supporters like myself who drive the Macintosh educational purchases at their schools. While our Apple rep offered to try to help with the upgrade "on the back end" of any new purchases we make, I'm currently not willing or able to specify or recommend any Apple products at my school in light of the OS X 10.2 school rip-off. Note: Jaguar Pricing: Where Does It Leave Schools? also appears online as a View from the Classroom column today. I would have just put it here, but in a bit of Mac web snottiness, I can't seem to get any links beyond MacSurfer's Headline News to Educators' News postings on Mac web sites, where a View or Busman's Holiday column gets posted around the Mac web. Go figure! Have a great weekend!
I was a newlywed (the first time:-( who took an early break with other night crew dockworkers at a milk company in Indianapolis to watch the first moonwalk. We stared in amazement. Everyone was strangely quiet the rest of the shift. Last Monday's column, Out of this World Desktop Pictures (from NASA and Others), has links to lots of space photos suitable for use as desktop photos on you computer, or better yet, on computers at school. While NASA's Apollo Gallery has lots of shots, Scott Schuyler sent in a link to Kipp Teague's Apollo Image Gallery, which generally has higher resolution photos than those currently posted on the NASA site. Since posting the column, I've been busy collecting, cropping, and sizing a set of photos to adorn the desktops of the 24 new iBooks we'll be using at school this fall. I decided to give each laptop a unique desktop photo for aesthetic purposes and also to provide a unique visual identifier for each machine. Software While I didn't find any new or updated educational software this morning, I did notice that America Online has posted another OS X beta, America Online X 10.2 14D. AOL should be pretty well through their beta series for OS X, at least until the $129 Mac OS X 10.2 update ships August 24. The link above is to the MacUpdate descriptor of the beta, but to download the file, you must be logged into AOL and use the keyword "macbeta." I used a limited hours AOL account for years as my backup ISP, but finally had to go to unlimited service while Annie and I were in Cleveland last month. Although my local ISP is still my primary logon, I have been pleased with the "B" and "C" betas of AOL X, other than the irritating popups inviting you to chat with "women of the night." (How the heck did I get on their mailing list?) Remy Davison's Jobs: .Mac Monthly Fee "Maybe". . Fees-Based Software Downloads? on Insanely Great Mac touched yesterday on something I'd worried about in print two years ago in Improving the User Experience? I concluded the column:
Apple wasn't nearly so brash and bold at that time in its treatment (mistreatment?) of its customers, but the recent iTools rip-off is probably just an initial step down a road that will end up costing the loyal Mac user more. Remy speculates on something that I've been surprised to see so clearly stated recently, "And it's a sure-fire way to encourage piracy." The Register's Andrew Orlowski put it bluntly in Mac users outraged at iTools, upgrade taxes when he wrote, "Widespread sharing of Jaguar CDs this Fall will surely encourage Apple to introduce stepped upgrade pricing when 11.0 is ready next year." Dejal Systems has released Narrator X 1.0. Narrator "utilizes speech synthesis to read out the contents of a text document, using different voices for different parts." I'd linked to the beta last June. Currently, Dejal offers a free version of Narrator X 1.0 (344K) and a $25 shareware version. Their site documentation currently is incomplete on the differences between the two versions. Note on Amazon iBook Link I blew it! But, if you clicked on the ad links this week, you already knew that. Amazon does indeed currently have the lowest price going for a 14" iBook with the CD-RW/DVD drive, but until today, the ads linked to one of the entry-level iBooks. Somewhere along the line in setting up the ad, I copied the wrong 10-digit identifier. So...if you're in the market for the top-of-the-line iBook at the very best price, click here. Links My thanks to Ladd Morse at MacSurfer's Headline News and Heng-Cheong Leong at MyAppleMenu for the links yesterday to the column Jaguar Pricing: Where Does It Leave Schools?
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My
school just purchased its first new Macs in over five years
last April. It was an incredible struggle to even get Apple
products considered. We ended up buying 24 iBooks and 6 G4
towers, along with some server software to push updates out
to the new machines. Even with Apple's education price of
$59 per license ("10-99 seats"), we're looking at $1770 to
upgrade all the new units to 10.2. Unfortunately, we're
struggling to purchase the applications we need for the new
computers (the grant purchase also included 24 faster IBM
ThinkPads at a substantially lower price than the
iBooks).
Thirty-three years ago today, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon's surface while fellow Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins orbited the moon in the command module Columbia. With an excellent sense of history, the | Previous Week |
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