Stephen’s Untold Stories

Good stuff from the Learning in Hand Blog.

Look carefully into Eric Benson’s third-grade classroom at Luray Elementary School and you might mistake it for a conference room.

The children in the class, wearing jeans, Old Navy T-shirts and sneakers, look like average third graders. But they’re using a tool not usually associated with an elementary classroom.

In Benson’s class, pencils and notebooks are replaced with Palm Pilots for lessons in spelling, math and other subjects.

And, apparently, the idea of using a personal digital assistants, or PDAs, for daily lessons is catching on.

Eight years ago, PDAs hit the American business scene. It’s now common to see the machines in the hands of business professionals to take notes during meetings and to organize their daily schedules.

Lately, however, the PDA has made its way into the hands of youngsters.

Earlier this week, Benson’s pupils used the Palm Pilots for an English lesson. Benson asked the students about words from a textbook. If a student has the word and knows the meaning of it, he or she walks to classmates to share their information with others.

“You can send a word to everyone else,” said 8-year-old Jordan Dudley, transmitting information to another student by placing two Palm Pilots near each other and waiting for a small beep.

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You veterans already know about this one, but they have added some new stuff lately. If you are a beginner at web design, you should bookmark this one!

W3 Schools Online

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Thanks to my buddy Jeff from the SEGA Tech blog for this. Lots of great photos of insects and spiders.

Link to photo gallery

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Dave Taylor has one of the best Q & A blogs out there, and I signed up a while back to help answer some questions. I actually found the time to answer one, and it got published. Thanks, Dave!

Here is my answer

I am a big supporter of Wikipedia, but this kind of thing is just part of the process.

The debate over Wikipedia has hit a fever pitch in recent weeks.
Supporters of Wikipedia, the user-edited online encyclopedia, are pitted against traditionalists who call the site inaccurate and irresponsible.

The latest salvo came this week thanks to Rogers Cadenhead, who did a bit of cybersleuthing and reported on Workbench that the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, had altered his own Wikipedia biography. Wired News picked up Mr. Cadenhead’s discovery, and a heated debate ensued on Wikipedia discussion boards.

According to Mr. Cadenhead’s interpretation, Mr. Wales made the changes to play down the role of his former editor, Larry Sanger, by deleting references to him as a co-founder. When other volunteer editors undid his edits, Mr. Wales repeated them twice.

As Wired News points out, Wikipedia warns that editing one’s own bio “can open the door to rather immature behavior and loss of dignity.”

Mr. Wales told Wired News he wasn’t trying to change history, but merely clarifying technical details regarding Mr. Sanger’s role at Wikipedia.

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How often have you felt this way?

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Thanks for the comment. I didn’t know they were doing a daily update!

Dec. 21st

Dec. 22nd

Dec. 23rd

Dec. 24th

Dec. 25th

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Now this is dedication!

When Linda Cerniglia went back to school, it took her almost seven years to get through all the prerequisites, the labs, the research. And it took a thief just moments to grab her purse, with the only copy of her master’s thesis stored on a tiny jump drive inside.

For anyone who’s ever obsessed about a project but forgotten to back up the data, watched a computer screen fizzle just before a deadline or left crucial documents in a cab — here is a story about backing up, and moving forward.

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These guys are behind the new version of Windows. I haven’t seen the entire interview yet (it’s 49 minutes long), but it looks great so far.

Going Deep Interview

I have always been a huge fan of National Geographic. Their photo gallery is one of the most impressive I’ve ever seen.

Link to Gallery

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I must admit that this comes as a complete surprise. This is from the Microsoft Team RSS Blog

This seemed like a very good idea, so in November, Amar and I took a visit down to Silicon Valley to meet with John Lilly and Chris Beard from Mozilla to get their thoughts on it. We all agreed that it’s in the user’s best interest to have one common icon to represent RSS and RSS-related features in a browser. And the winner is…

I’m excited to announce that we’re adopting the icon used in Firefox. John and Chris were very enthusiastic about allowing us (and anyone in the community) to use their icon. This isn’t the first time that we’ve worked with the Mozilla team to exchange ideas and encourage consistency between browsers, and we’re sure it won’t be the last.

We’ll be using the icon in the IE7 command bar whenever a page has a feed associated with it, and we’ll also use it in other places in the browser whenever we need a visual to represent RSS and feeds. Look for more details on the look and feel of IE7 when we post the public pre-release build next year.

Thanks again to the Mozilla team for making the icon available and helping us do the right thing for all browser users. Many thanks to everyone who gave feedback on our earlier post; your comments and thoughts were very valuable!

Link to article

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I can’t say this comes as much of a surprise. Most Mac users probably won’t even notice.

Microsoft will stop supporting the Mac version of Internet Explorer at the end of 2005. The move follows a decision in June 2003 to end code development for the browser. At that time, Microsoft had predicted it would end support within a few years of letting the product sit idle.

Although users still can download Internet Explorer for Mac from the Microsoft site, the company has recommended that users move to other Web browsers, such as Apple’s Safari.

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Yayyy!!!!!

But now Bloglines is down for 24 hours.

So sad!!

Update: They’re back online!!!!!

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The other day their message said that they would be down for an hour. Several hours after I first saw it, it was still there.

The current message is more accurate. “del.icio.us is down for emergency maintenance. we’ll be back as soon possible.”

Update: They have a blog (which is working) that explains the problems they’re having.

http://blog.del.icio.us/blog/2005/12/continued_hiccu.html

Since this requires registration, I will post the entire article. From the Sioux City Journal.

MITCHELL, S.D. (AP) — Providing laptop computers to high school students could be one way to address the problem of falling standardized test scores, according to Gov. Mike Rounds, who proposes a cost-share program with schools to provide 39,000 laptops.

Schools, if they elect to participate in the laptop plan, would provide $2 for every $1 provided by the state. If the plan is fully realized, it will cost $39 million, with $26 million coming from schools and $13 million from state government.

“The reality is that if you want to provide a good education, a laptop is going to be part of it,” Rounds told The Daily Republic of Mitchell in an interview. “It’s like saying that you’re going to be able to provide a good education, but you’re not going to provide advanced mathematics.”

Rounds unveiled his proposal in his budget address to the Legislature last week. It’s part of his 2010 Education initiative.

The state would buy or lease the computers at a bulk rate on behalf of the schools. The governor said he expects to pay less than $1,000 apiece for computers with three-year leases, software and warranties. In future years, Round hopes, schools could continue the program as the price of laptops decrease.

“If we can just for a few years get started on this and give the schools an incentive to get started on it,” Rounds said, “I think that they will be able to afford to do a one-year purchase in the future each year.”

Rounds hopes the presence of the laptops would encourage schools to utilize wireless technology so students could access a school-supported network from anywhere in the school building. Community leaders also could join with schools to provide a wireless network for laptop users in a small town, Rounds said.

The governor acknowledged that the laptop plan will put additional financial pressure on some school boards, especially in rural districts where finances are already tight because of dwindling enrollment.

This is pretty funny.

Scientists analyzed the portrait of the Mona Lisa, a woman with famously mixed emotions, hoping to unlock her smile. They applied emotion recognition software that measures a person’s mood by examining features such as the curve of the lips and the crinkles around the eyes.

The findings? Mona Lisa was 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful, and 2 percent angry, according to the British weekly “New Scientist.”

Still, scientists will probably never know what made her feel the way she did.

The computer software, developed by Nicu Sebe at the University of Amsterdam and researchers at the University of Illinois, examines key facial features, the journal reports.

Link to article

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This is a unique solution to a problem I experienced with many students when I was a classroom teacher.

Reprimands did not work. Neither did detentions or suspensions. Frustrated over their inability to stop high school students from cursing aggressively, educators and police officials decided it was time to get tough.

In November, they authorized police officers assigned to two of the city’s public high schools to begin issuing tickets to students who hurl expletives. The fine: $103.

The officers have issued about 60 tickets to students at Bulkeley and Hartford High Schools in what several experts think is the first such effort in the country. There are already signs that the new approach may be working, some teachers and principals said. Fights have decreased, classrooms are calmer and there is less cursing in the corridors.

“Has it gone away completely? No,” said Zandralyn Gordon, the acting principal of Hartford Public High School. “It is helping a whole lot.”

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If you have ever thought about using WiKis in a classroom, you might want to take a look at this.

I’ve put this screencast together to show how easy it is for wikis to radically change the way writing is done in a secondary classroom. Wikis in education are still new, and many teachers seem unsure about how to use them. Most of what I read and hear on ed-tech blogs and podcasts is that wikis seem like a potentially exciting technology, but there are too few examples out there to demonstrate their power. I’m going to tell one of our wiki stories because I think it shows two things: both how simple it is to begin composing together with students, and how profoundly paradigm-shifting a wiki can be in the writing classroom.

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I am a big fan of the Oakland A’s, and one of their fan sites (Athletics Nation) has worked with the A’s to put together a t-shirt honoring recently deceased A’s broadcaster Bill King. It’s a great design.

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This is fascinating!

The Michigan State Board of Education is set to approve a new graduation requirement today that would make every high-school student in the state take at least one online course before receiving a diploma.

The new requirement would appear to be the first of its kind in the nation. Mike Flanagan, the Michigan state superintendent of public instruction, said he proposed the online-course requirement, along with other general requirements, to make sure students were prepared for college and for jobs, which are becoming more technology-focused.

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