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The Million Kilowatt Hour Challenge
An Energy Experts Speakers Bureau has been formed to provide teachers with resource speakers on energy conservation and alternative energy topics. The speakers will come "armed" with educational materials and help teachers, whole schools, clubs, etc. get started "with one of the Action Projects listed on the EarthTeam website‚ or create your own idea and submit it to the MKHC!" Suggested projects include an essay contest, a poster contest, school or home energy audits, a "Green Business" program, a Kids' Flex Your Power Energy Challenge for sixth graders, California Youth Energy Services "retrofits of low-income homes," or other ideas you may come up with. When talking to Ellen by phone last week, she said the hardest part of the project has been "getting the word out." Further information is available on the EarthTeam site, or you can email Ellen or call her directly at (415) 924-6334. One of the things Ellen emphasized is that this is a project where you can opt in for just a little or go whole hog on it, tailoring it to fit your classroom needs. Gray Proposes Cutting Education Funding in California Despite an outcry from education groups around the state, California Governor Gray Davis announced on Friday a proposal to help balance the state's budget by slashing health and education funding.
Space Fix
The STS-112 shuttle mission yielded even a bigger bounty of photographs that can be used to enhance classroom instruction.
Oldies, but Goodies Poking around through the archives of Jay Mathews's Class Struggle column led me to a couple of interesting columns about teachers' views of school administration. Mathews contributed Administrators Are Missing Out on Good Teaching last month. In it, he explores bizarre requirements by school administrators such as requiring "relevant performance standard--with its proper number, title and description--be posted beside any admirable student work teachers put on their classroom bulletin boards." Jay has been working on a series of columns about problems in American education. In a related Washington Post column, Patrick Welsh, an English teacher at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria (VA), tells of his misadventures with school administrators, including his "Pre-Observation and Goal Setting Conference," in which he was told that his "my main goal...to get my students to write clearly and precisely" was unacceptable and should be replaced with "to increase the SOL scores by two points raising it [sic] to 79.65." Welsh takes a pretty accurate look at the requirements of school administration in Same Building, Different Planets and concludes that school administration these days has very little to do with teaching. He concludes his column: "We need to do much more to increase understanding between teachers and administrators if we're to provide reachable goals for every one of our students and their teachers, rather than measurable but meaningless standards for our schools." eMac Quality Questions Stefano Scalia at TheMacMind has a disturbing posting about the quality of the eMac in eMac problems plague Apple. Based on MacFixIt Reports (available only to paid subscribers), the PAV boards (power supply, video board and monitor) are prone to early failure in at least some eMac models with replacement parts experiencing a similar high rate of failure. This isn't good news for educators specifying computer purchases and is even worse for those who already have eMacs they must maintain. Devotion for December 8-14, 2002 Zach Wood's weekly devotional for this week is Worship Service With A Smile. Zach also maintains an archive of previous devotionals. Send Feedback to |
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A Beating for Good Schools A Los Angeles Times editorial, A Beating for Good Schools, takes issue with one of the Bush Administration's No Child Left Behind rules. The editorial states that "Students at the lowest-performing schools can transfer to a better school in the same district even if it's full. Even if that means filling the schoolyard with portables or increasing class sizes." It concludes, "Education Secretary Rod Paige is fond of saying the law aims to aid educators, not be at odds with them. This helping hand is hard to see in mandates that could end up punishing well-run schools." A related Yahoo/AP posting, Education Dept. Offers Guidance on Choice, relates that under federal guidelines, "lowest-achieving students who come from poor families would get first priority to transfer to a new school." The full "guidance" is available for direct download (760K Word document). More on Timeout Room Controversy The Minneapolis Star Tribune's Norman Draper contributes an objective report on the timeout room debate in Parents, schools spar over use of 'time-out' rooms. Draper looks at appropriate uses and the misuses of the timeout room concept. Educational Megacomplexes The Sacramento Bee's Sandy Louey tells of the Elk Grove Unified School District's practice building a middle school on the same site as a high school. In Combined schools put to the test, Louey tells that Elk Grove has plans for four such middle/high school complexes. However, Louey also reports "The debate is over whether these so-called 'megacomplexes' offer enough educational value to mitigate the problems caused by their size -- or merely give overcrowded districts an efficient way to move more than 3,000 kids through six grades." For those of us teaching "out in the sticks," the practice of a middle and high school being built together is a pretty common practice. My entire school system sits on one site with most of the buildings, K-12, interconnected. Such a model poses some serious problems, but we manage with it. Of course, the entire system has slightly less than 1,000 students! The Rocky Mountain News column, Separating for Success by Holly Yettick, tells of how Manual High School in northeastern Denver split its student population into three separate schools in the same building. The process has not been without stress, but Yettick reports that both teachers and students like the new setup. Merit Pay to Bite the Dust in Florida? St. Petersburg Times staffer Stephen Hegarty reports that Florida Governor Jeb Bush's performance pay plan is under fire by members of a panel appointed in part by Bush. Report revives teacher pay controversy tells that the state's Council for Education Policy, Research and Improvement concluded in a draft report "These programs . . . have been difficult to design, difficult to ensure fairness and difficult to fund over time" in recommending repealing the law and seeking other alternatives such as a "uniform minimum salary level for Florida teachers" and "a system in which accomplished, experienced teachers are rewarded with higher pay." Fun With Hi-Res Photos
Site Silliness and "The Need for Speed" While I'm sure Educators' News probably isn't any sweeter or tastier today than usual, it certainly feels faster on this end. I'd remained adamant for several years that I wouldn't upgrade the old G3 minitower's 266 MHz chip until I could double its clock rate (without overclocking the new chip). I had, however, celebrated the expiration of the G3's warranty by overclocking its chip to 300 MHz with the backside cache running at 200 MHz. That worked for a year, until I toasted the G3's motherboard last March. While the overclocking was probably a contributing factor (there was an ugly brown scorched spot under the chip on the motherboard) the coup de grâce probably was due to my adding just one more "Y-branch" to accommodate another drive to reformat it for another machine. After replacing the motherboard, I abstained from any overclocking and just put up with the pokey performance of the unit under OS X. A MacResQ (Weekly Specials) offering of an Apple G3 450 MHz ZIF chip for $99 finally made me reconsider last week. Even though faster upgrades are predicted for early next year, I went for the instant gratification. Replacing the chip and resetting the jumpers on the motherboard only took about 30 minutes. Running the chip at its rated 450 MHz also required boosting the stock 66 MHz system bus to 75 MHz. So far, the setup is working well. It's quite a lot zippier (notice the precise scientific terminology), and I'm relieved that the new chip actually runs several degrees cooler than its predecessor! Of course, I could end up doing the next EdNews update on my Toshiba laptop while I search eBay for yet another G3 motherboard:-). One of the very first things I tried after the chip upgrade was Dreamweaver MX. Our school recently got a site license for Studio MX, but I'd been disappointed by its performance on my G3. The few times I've had time to open it after school on the 800 MHz G4 tower there, it performed admirably. While I'm sure I'll be tapping my foot at the application sometime in the near future, 450 MHz seems to be enough to drive the application properly. Most of this update was constructed with Dreamweaver, although I'm just beginning the ascent up its imposing learning curve. BTW: The Academic Superstore Reminder! Apple's X for Teachers MacOS X giveaway ends December 31. We got busy today at my school and had all the elementary teachers who were willing to do so to order OS X, whether they would personally use it or not. Those that don't want it are donating their copy to the school so that we can upgrade all of our iBooks. Whether you have Macs new enough to run OS X or not, the enclosed OS 9 license (and earlier systems under that license) may be useful on your older Macs. This really is a no cost, no strings attached offer. More No Child Left Behind Problems The Washington Post's Valerie Strauss explores the many problems involved in implementing No Child Left Behind in Cost, Tutor Shortage Hinder 'No Child' Efforts.She writes, "To President Bush, it seemed simple...the people on the front lines, school administrators from coast to coast, learned swiftly that simple ideas are not always easy to put into practice." Secretary of Education Rod Paige called the achievement gap between whites and some minorities "the most important issue we face in our schools today" in a speech to the National Black Caucus of State Legislators in Indianapolis yesterday. In Achievement gap "un-American", the Indianapolis Star's Kim Hooper relates Paige's comments from the speech and from a press conference earlier in the day.
A Bright Light Shining in Virginia...or just another politician's promises? Whether it was just politics as usual or a sincere expression of belief, it was good to read in Lt. Governor Pushes Full School Funding that Virginia'sLt. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine proposed a "state constitutional and statutory changes that would force Virginia to fully fund its educational standards and raise teacher salaries to the national average." IEPs for All? You've probably heard or read somewhere along the line that someday, every child in every classroom will have an Individual Educational Plan (IEP), whether they're in special education or not. Seattle Times staff reporter Matthew Craft tells of a school where that prediction is becoming a reality today in Lessons tailored to fit the learner, not vice versa. SchwabLearning Online The SchwabLearning.org has added a "panic button" to all of its pages that links to its Panic Pages. The Panic Pages are designed for parents with pressing questions about their children with disabilities. Notes: I'm still playing around with Dreamweaver MX for page design, and did today's update entirely in the application. If something doesn't render correctly in your web browser, please let me know. I'm just learning the basics right now...bells and whistles to follow:-). Also, the G3/450 MHz upgrade is working quite well. In a world of 2+ GHz computers, I'm tickled pink to be "zipping along" at 450 MHz! Training Counts San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Nanette Asimov tells about a new study from the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, in Santa Cruz, that says that high schools with the fewest credentialed teachers had the highest failure rates on the math portion of the California exit exam. In More uncredentialed teachers' students fail, Asimov notes that the No Child Left Behind act "requires all schools to employ only fully credentialed teachers" by the 2004-05 academic year. While The Center is urging earlier adoption of the "all certified" provision, both state officials and the California Teachers Association president believe that is not possible. Troops to Teachers The Los Angeles Times' Erika Hayasaki writes about a program that does produce credentialed teachers in Sgt. Sanchez Reports for School Duty. She writes about the newly revived Department of Defense Troops to Teachers program. Ohio Policy Change Ohio has "adopted a set of science standards that makes Ohio the first state to require students to examine criticisms of biological evolution," according to a Scott Stephens column in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Policy resolved on origin of life. The decision is sure to add fire to the evolution vs. intelligent design controversy nationwide...and make teaching science more difficult than ever! Ohio Supreme Court Again Rules Against State Funding System Joe Taylor sent along this link: Ohio Court Nixes School Funding System. The Ohio Supreme Court has once again ruled against the state's system of funding its schools. A decision in September, 2001, appeared to have settled the long-running issue in Ohio, but the court has re-entered the fray as the state of Ohio apparently has not complied with the court's earlier directives. Regular readers of Educators' News may remember that this story filled these pages throughout the summer of 2001. Managing iBook Carts Jeff Adkins has added another volume to his excellent series of columns about setting up and managing iBooks for the classroom. In Cloning iBooks for Classroom Use, Jeff gives step-by-step directions on how to set up a "master iBook" and use it to clone its contents to another iBook in no time at all. Jeff is managing eight carts of iBooks, so he's a bit ahead of most of us in experience in dealing with the laptops. Besides his cloning directions, Jeff includes many time (and trouble) saving tips for teachers setting up and/or using iBooks. We've gone a slightly different way than Jeff at my school for cloning iBooks. We set up a master iBook and then use Mike Bombich's excellent Carbon Copy Cloner to transfer the master iBook's contents to a partition on an external Firewire drive. We then connect the iBook to receive the cloned files to the external drive, select the external as the start-up drive, reboot, reformat the iBook's drive, and again use Carbon Copy Cloner to transfer the entire contents of the "master" partition to the iBook. This process allows us to keep one or more master copies of our iBook setup on the external drive in case we mess up the iBook we use as a master via a bad install or a disk-corrupting crash. Either method should get the job done. Jeff's method is considerably faster. It won't work with OS X, however. (Thanks to Dan Knight of Low End Mac for reminding me of that one.) You can still get by without an external drive by just using two iBooks and a crossover cord as Jeff suggests if you employ Carbon Copy Cloner. The downside is that CCC is slower, but it will accurately reproduce an OS X boot volume (which we have on our iBooks even though they boot to OS 9 by default). Joe Taylor passed along a timely tip that I haven't as yet shared here, but find it fits today. After a system install or upgrade (especially with OS X), Joe runs Alsoft's DiskWarrior, followed by a defragmentation by Norton Speed Disk. When we make changes in our "master," I find that following Joe's routine seems to make things go a little more smoothly. Some New Macs to Boot to OS 9 After January, 2003 Several postings over the last few days report that Apple Computer has relented from their earlier decision to produce machines that only boot to the new MacOS X after January, 2003. Two of the postings noted that concerns from the education market and desktop publishers using QuarkXPress drove the decision. Apple apparently has not revealed exactly what hardware models sold in 2003 will still boot to OS 9, but has stated that some new eMacs, iBooks, and CRT iMacs sold until June, 2003, will still boot to OS 9.
Reports around the web have indicated for some time that there wasn't any technical reason for new Macs sold after January to boot only to OS X, but that it was an arbitrary decision by Apple Computer to force users to the new operating system. For educators, several tough questions remain. Will educational software developers will have their wares rewritten or ported to OS X by the new June cutoff date, and possibly more importantly, will schools have the funds to buy the OS X upgrades? A Teacher in Space NASA announced this week that Barbara Morgan has been officially slated as "a crewmember on a November 2003 Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station." Morgan was backup to Christa McAuliffe in 1986 in the Teacher in Space Program and has continued working with NASA over the intervening years.
Freeware Mac Drivers for QX3/QX3+ USB Computer Microscope If you use or wish you could use the QX3/QX3+ USB Computer Microscope with a Mac, be sure to check out a posting on Scienceman.com about freeware Mac drivers for the unit! Have a great weekend!
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©2002 Steven L. Wood