Stephen’s Untold Stories

I just finished trying this out, and I must say that I was very impressed.

ThinkFree Office!

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These can be very helpful, but some of the cities don’t want their maps to be distributed this way. See the site for details.

iPod Subway Maps

A school in Louisiana has a blog about their experiences using handheld computers. Here’s an excerpt:

Imagine this — 81 degrees - 76% humidity — and 15 students on the parking lot with their Palm Zire 72s! Yes, it was hot; however, the students seemed to enjoy the project. Prior to our journey to the parking lot, I beamed the students an Excel spreadsheet in which they would use to gather data concerning the cars and trucks. Students were to look for makes, colors, and registration hang tags and record their data on the spreadsheet. We synchronized our world clock and set an alarm for 8:45. When the alarm sounded, students were to gather back at the front door of the building.

Back in the building, students synced their handheld to their pc and used several functions to manipulate the data into something more meaningful. Students were also instructed to make their spreadsheet more attractive with graphics, color, shading, and fonts. A graph should also be generated to show their results.

Link to Site

This looks very promising.

The common electric socket will serve as your home’s connection to broadband with a new chip developed by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. — doing away with all the Ethernet cables or the hassle of hooking up to a wireless network device.

The advantage is that the lowly electric socket is everywhere. Right now, a broadband outlet still isn’t usually available in every room, even in homes that have broadband connections.

Attach a special device made by Matsushita into a socket and all you have to do is plug your TV or other gadgets into a socket for instant connection to broadband, which allows for faster transmission of online information than dial-up telephone connections.

Link to Article

How many of these do you remember?

Link to Gallery

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This is some great stuff!

The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. In fact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.

Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied “We are waiting for the rest of it”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.

The name ‘Google’ was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ‘Googol’

Link to Site

This looks very interesting. If you have dyslexic students or children, it seems worth looking into.

There has been growing innovation to combat dyslexia, especially
for children, in the form of computer software. However, relatively
little design research has been done in the area of typography
and type design that might support dyslexics. Read Regular is
a typeface designed specifically to help people with dyslexia read
and write more effectively.

Read Regular aims at preventing a neglect of dyslexia, creating
a more confident feeling regarding the problems that occur
with dyslexia.

Link to Site

Bees are pretty cool! (or hot, I guess)

Honeybees that defend their colonies by killing wasps with body heat come within 5°C of cooking themselves in the process, according to a study in China.

At least two species of honeybees there, the native Apis cerana and the introduced European honeybee, Apis mellifera, engulf a wasp in a living ball of defenders and heat the predator to death. A new study of heat balling has described a margin of safety for the defending bees, says Tan Ken of Yunnan Agricultural University in Kunming, China.

Link to Article

Thanks J-Walk

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I’ll believe this when I see it.

A Windows Vista computer starts and shuts down as quickly and reliably as a television, typically within 2 to 3 seconds. Windows Vista processes login scripts and startup programs and services in the background so you can start working right away. You’ll also shut down and restart your computer less often by using the New Sleep state, a simple one-click on and off experience which not only reduces power consumption, but also delivers and protects user data.

Link to Article

I’ve been a big fan of my Gmail account for quite a while. Here is a site with some great tips.

Gmail Tips

This article is from the Kansas City Star. It requires registration, which is free but annoying. I have posted the entire article.

Since integrating handheld computers into her curriculum at Olathe Northwest High School, Misia Hollenbeck has seen the benefits firsthand.

“Motivation, first of all, to complete assignments has increased,” the special education teacher said.

She’s seen her students meet their goals more quickly, and in some cases, the handheld computers have even helped them overcome writing disabilities, she said.Hollenbeck has found that handhelds help her measure goals better; track data better; give more immediate feedback to parents; and put more energy into class projects rather than paperwork.

The Olathe School District supplies all students and staff at Olathe Northwest and Olathe North high schools with handheld computers.

Olathe East and South provide students with classroom sets, while some of the junior high and elementary schools use classroom sets on a pilot basis.

The cost

The benefits Hollenbeck has seen don’t come without costs.

The district has dedicated hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to purchasing new handhelds, and replacing lost and damaged units.The school district began distributing the technology in 2003, with an initial investment of nearly $424,000. The following year, the district spent more than $402,000 on new handhelds for North High, Prairie Trail Junior High and four elementary schools.

This year, each high school received 30 new handhelds with wireless capabilities. Frontier Trail also received additional handhelds, and five elementary schools purchased handhelds with their building funds.

The cost: $265,000.

At a July meeting, school board member Jim Churchman asked about the loss rate of the handhelds and asked for a review of the benefits of supplying individual students with the technology.

“This was an issue presented to me by parents and students,” Churchman said during a recent interview. “I don’t claim to be an expert on the value of these handhelds; but we need to take hard look at (it) and question.”

Rita Lyon, director of technology, has said the district replaced about 60 lost or damaged units from last year at a cost of about $12,000.

“That is extremely low,” Lyon said. “We are very pleased with the loss ratio on that.”

With about 4,200 handhelds in the hands of students and staff, a loss of 60 would be lower than 2 percent.Handheld purchases are largely made using bond money or capital outlay money, which is funded from local sources.

Handhelds are issued and managed like textbooks, band uniforms or football helmets, Lyon said. They are issued to students and are to be returned to the school at the end of the year.

Students who do not return their handhelds are required to pay for them at the depreciated value.

Depending on the model, one handheld and keyboard combination averages about $300 or less, she said.

The current handheld/keyboard model used at the high schools and junior high schools is $250.

The handheld/keyboard model used at the elementary level, which includes a digital camera, costs $300.

With those amounts, the 60 handheld computers the district had to replace could have cost as much as $18,000. But Lyon said that sometimes the district must replace only one piece of the combination, making it difficult to pinpoint an exact amount. She estimated the cost was closer to $12,000.

The benefits

Administrators continue to tout the academic benefits of handhelds.

Superintendent Pat All calls handhelds key instructional tools.

She said handhelds benefit students who do not have access to a computer at home.

One of the goals of the Olathe School District is to give each student equal access to technology.

But whether handhelds are being used as intended by the district is a question.

Last school year, a group of students gathered by district staff to help in the search for a new superintendent talked about handheld computers.

A handful of them said they knew of students who didn’t use their handhelds, and one student admitted she used her handheld to play games.

“I think you would have to talk to larger number of students than that for a good feel for their use,” said Superintendent All.

However, she did acknowledge that use of handhelds varies from student to student.

“Like any other technology,” she said.

She also pointed to the element of time, saying that last year was the first year Olathe North students received the handhelds. She said it takes a while for students, as well as teachers, to use the handhelds at the level desired.

“We would see higher levels of use and more pervasive use at Olathe Northwest than at…Olathe North,” she said.

The superintendent is confident teachers at North are integrating handhelds into their curriculum more this year.

For Hollenbeck, at Northwest High, there’s no doubt about the value of the technology.

The teacher’s classroom curriculum is based 90 percent on handheld computers, and the technology has been invaluable for the education of her students with mental disabilities, she said.

“My students have their own opinions about it too,” she said. “But I’m sure none of us would go back to the old way. This is too empowering.”

Link to Article

There are a couple of good free antivirus programs for you home. Here is another one.

The latest version of avast! antivirus kernel features outstanding detection abilities, together with high performance. You can expect 100% detection of In-the-Wild viruses (viruses already spreading between users) and excellent detection of Trojan horses.

Resident protection (the real-time protection of the operating system), is one of the most important parts of an antivirus program today. avast! features a powerful resident module that is able to detect a virus before it has any chance to infect your computer.

Avast! Antivirus

I’ve already moved over some of them, but here they all are on one archive page.

Blog Archive

Dr. Stephanie Clemons from Colorado State University has written a very interesting article on this subject:

Issues concerning student learning involve how they accept, retain and process information delivered in a course. This paper briefly defines and describes brain-based learning, a theory that is under investigation in higher education, and offers suggestions on how that theory may be implemented in the delivery of information and facilitation of online classes in higher education. Implications for online educators are also presented.

Link to complete article

Naomi is an advanced internet filtering program, easy to use and totally FREE, intended for families and parents in particular.

Naomi is able to constantly monitor all internet connections, protecting children from inappropriate online material - such as obscene or violent contents; pornography in the form of images or texts; sites that popularize drugs; gambling games; terrorism; hate propaganda; occultism; sects; blasphemy, etc.

Naomi does not rely on a simple list of banned sites; instead, it examines in real-time all the data being transmitted and received through any internet application - such as web browsers, chat programs, news readers, etc.

The filtering technology employed in Naomi 2.7 features:

• Heuristic analysis capable of recognizing new material automatically.
• Semantic analysis of web pages contents and analysis of their addresses and links.
• Recognizes all the major languages.
• Recognizes ICRA labelling system.
• Monitoring is not limited to web sites, but covers the whole local internet traffic.
• Works with any software application, and does not alter settings.
• Allows blocking of file-sharing applications.
• Password-protected (the password is chosen during the installation).
• Does not require configuration.
• Can be used on slow connections (it does not perform any download in background).

Get Naomi

Simply incredible.

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