Stephen’s Untold Stories

It will be nice to be able to watch the Olympics and see someone the same age as I am. Congrats to Dara Torres!

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Okay, I must admit that I’ve never really had a need to generate some white noise, but it’s good to know that this is available if I ever do.

• http://www.simplynoise.com

What’s up, doc?

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I can’t think of a much better incentive. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.

Freshmen at Sunnyside and Desert View high schools will get a big incentive when they begin classes in August - a promise of a laptop computer.

The new laptop is for keeps. They can take it home and use it throughout high school. And, district officials hope, into college.

All the freshmen need do in their first semester is:

• Be there the first day of school Aug. 11
• Have at least a 2.5 grade-point average
• Have at least a 95 percent attendance rate - which means no more than four excused absences, and none unexcused
• Have no major suspensions
• Participate in at least one extracurricular activity, such as a sport or club

The hope is to raise the graduation rate at the two Sunnyside Unified School District high schools from the current 63 percent.

Superintendent Manuel Isquierdo said the district would help students bring up their grades, especially in the first semester of freshman year.

“First semester is the championship game,” he said. “If you don’t get the computer at the end of the first semester freshman year, you don’t get it at all.”

The computers will be distributed before Christmas break.

Link to article

Outstanding news for Georgia!

Six states are getting the OK to write their own prescriptions for ailing schools under the Bush administration’s signature education law.

It’s a softening from how No Child Left Behind currently works — with schools having to take certain steps at specific times for missing math and reading testing goals. Critics have complained that the approach is too rigid and treats schools the same regardless of whether they miss the mark by a little or a lot.

Indiana, Illinois, Maryland and Ohio. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings plans to make the announcement during a speech Tuesday in Austin, Texas.

The states that won approval have come up with plans to more closely tailor solutions to individual schools’ problems and focus resources on schools in the worst shape.

“We expect to see a closer fit between the causes of school underperformance and a focused attention at repairing those sources of failure,” said Margaret Raymond, director of an education think tank at Stanford University and the chair of a panel that reviewed the state proposals.

Examples of changes the states plan to make include requiring schools to offer tutoring earlier than is currently called for and a greater reliance, in Indiana for example, on testing throughout the year to catch academic weak spots.

In Georgia, schools will be able to become charter schools, which are public but operate with broad independence, earlier than is currently called for, said the state’s superintendent of schools, Kathy Cox.

Some critics worry the changes, specifically the focus on the worst-performing schools, will take the pressure off schools that are generally doing well but having trouble with one group of students — such as a minority group or kids with disabilities.

“I don’t think it’s taking the pressure off. I think it’s allowing focus,” Cox said.

Spellings has said up to 10 states will be allowed to try to participate in the pilot program. The Education Department plans to review additional state proposals this fall.

The six states that won approval were among 17 that sought it.

The states that didn’t win approval were Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

Link to article

You’ve probably seen Professor Michael Wesch’s famous video Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us, (if you haven’t, go see it now!) He recently spoke at the University of Manitoba and you can view the entire presentation online.

“It’s basically an ongoing experiment to create a portal for me and my students to work online,” he explains. “We tried every social media application you can think of. Some worked, some didn’t.”

Watch his presentation here.

Keeping kids in school is a great benefit of having these laptops. If they aren’t careful, they might even learn something before it’s done.

Immokalee, Fla., is the largest center for migrant farmworkers on the East Coast. Juan Medina, a former agricultural worker, worked the fields with his family, planting onions in west Texas and picking tomatoes in Homestead, Fla.

Medina now works for the Florida Department of Education, trying to help the children of migrant workers deal with the challenges of migrant life.

He is part of a town effort to help the children in school. His new tool is free laptops.

Link to article and radio program

An actual research study on social networking? Really??

Outstanding!!

In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered the educational benefits of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. The same study found that low-income students are in many ways just as technologically proficient as their counterparts, going against what results from previous studies have suggested.

The study found that, of the students observed, 94 percent used the Internet, 82 percent go online at home and 77 percent had a profile on a social networking site. When asked what they learn from using social networking sites, the students listed technology skills as the top lesson, followed by creativity, being open to new or diverse views and communication skills.

Data were collected over six months this year from students, ages 16 to 18, in thirteen urban high schools in the Midwest. Beyond the surveyed students, a follow-up, randomly selected subset were asked questions about their Internet activity as they navigated MySpace, an online forum that provides users with e-mail, web communities and audio and video capabilities.

“What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today,” said Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher in the university’s College of Education and Human Development and principal investigator of the study. “Students are developing a positive attitude towards using technology systems, editing and customizing content and thinking about online design and layout. They’re also sharing creative original work like poetry and film and practicing safe and responsible use of information and technology. The Web sites offer tremendous educational potential.”

Link to article

This is nothing short of amazing.

WebAnywhere is a web-based screen reader for the web. It requires no special software to be installed on the client machine and, therefore, enables blind people to access the web from any computer they happen to have access to that has a sound card. No $1000 software program required!

WebAnywhere’s will run on any machine, even heavily locked-down public terminals, regardless of what operating system it is running and regardless of what browsers are installed.

Please read our WebAnywhere Paper for more information about the system.

Link to WebAnywhere

If YouTube is blocked where you are, you can hear the audio here. (MP3 file)

Now this would really be something.

George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars franchise and head of a nonprofit group designed to encourage innovation in schools, called on lawmakers June 24 to create a free, “third internet” that would be used solely for educational use, PC Magazine reports. “As we move into the future, most everything’s going to end up wireless and as it ends up wireless, [the government is] going to be auctioning off bandwidth,” Lucas told the House Energy and Commerce’s subcommittee on telecommunications and the internet. “As you auction this off, why don’t you just hold some back for schools and libraries?” Lucas appeared at a hearing about the federal Universal Service Fund (USF), which is intended to provide all Americans with access to telecommunications service.

Link to article

I’ve used several of these, but a few were new to me.

• http://www.investintech.com/articles/tenwordalternatives

I use Google Docs almost daily. Zoho is also very good. ThinkFree is very powerful, but seems to be a bit sluggish at times.

Very cool story from New Mexico.

Students at a rural New Mexico school made a unique pledge last winter: Right hands raised, they promised to take care of their Zunes.

This past semester, nearly every one of the roughly 100 students at Fort Sumner High School was outfitted with the Microsoft media player, similar to Apple’s iPod, enabling them to watch videos and listen to recorded lectures created or recommended by teachers and fellow students. Fort Sumner High was one of two schools nationwide taking part in the project.

The students were encouraged to use their devices during class hours, on bus rides home, and on school trips. Teachers got a $400 bonus for coming up with lessons to identify 20 downloadable digital lectures that supported their lessons and to develop five of their own.

“My main hope is it’s going to save us lost class time,” said English teacher Pam Richards. “We are small, and the kids are involved in so many things.”

Link to article

Saw a bunch of them on Springer Mountain. Please leave a comment if you know.

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I took a trip up to Springer Mountain, which is the southern terminus for the Appalachian Trail. The weather was perfect!

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PicLens turns your browser into a 3D slide show of some of your favorite sites (including this one!). You can install it on either FireFox or Internet Explorer, and it works on sites like Amazon, Flickr, and Google Image Search. You can even launch it when you’re not on a supported site and it will present you with a gallery of movies and images from a variety of categories.

You can also enable it on your blog. If you look at the Flood Photos post right beneath this one, you will see a link that says “Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite.” Even if you haven’t installed PicLens in your browser you can still see a slide show of the photos in that post. In addition to enabling it on this blog, I enabled it on the Georgia Photos Blog I share with three fellow Georgia educators.

If you have installed PicLens in FireFox and you find yourself on a PicLens enabled site, you will see a small icon in the bottom left corner of photos on that site. You can click that icon to launch the full slide show, or you can click the PicLens icon in your browser toolbar. In Internet Explorer you’ll just need to click the icon in the toolbar.

Get PicLens here! (Yes, it’s free!)

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I am at a complete loss for words.

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I expect (and hope) to see more of this in other states.

Minnesota Virtual High School (MVHS) graduated its first class of 43 students last Friday. The school, a partnership between Minnesota Transitions Charter School of Minneapolis and Advanced Academics, was launched in 2007 and serves more than 1,000 students from all over the state.

A free online public high school, the program serves state residents in grades 9 to 12, offering a flexible schedule, a free laptop to new full-time students, as well as a monthly Internet stipend. Students also have the ability to participate in the Passport2College program offered by DeVry University. The program allows eligible juniors and seniors to take up to two college credit classes tuition-free at DeVry.

In addition to one-on-one access to Minnesota certified teachers, around-the-clock student support, and a full curriculum, students graduating from MVHS earn their high school diploma, issued by a local Minnesota school district.

Link to article

Yes, it’s a somewhat unfortunate name, but it does some cool stuff.

Here is a Rubik’s Cube effect of a photo I took of the Tybee Island Lighthouse.

http://www.dumpr.net

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Great work!

Denisa McBee’s fifth-grade class was just perfect this year.

All 21 of the students in her Mathis Intermediate School class in Corpus Christi earned perfect attendance honors, answering a challenge that began after no one missed class for the first two weeks. McBee challenged them to make it six weeks, then a semester, then a year.

And they did it — for 175 days.

“The kids felt awful some days but were determined to do this,” McBee said in a story for Monday’s Corpus Christi Caller-Times. “One child was in a car accident with his father on a Sunday. We had Monday off, but he came limping in on Tuesday,” McBee said.

She said the students learned about dedication and commitment, their grade-point averages increased and she never had to re-teach a lesson to absent students.

McBee said she never had to bribe the students.

“It wasn’t like if you do it, you get this,” she said. “All they got was recognition, and that was enough for them.”

Link to article