Stephen’s Untold Stories

This is one of the better articles I’ve read about this topic. The author seems to actually KNOW what he is talking about. How refreshing!

The Internet is evolving. Whereas once it served mostly as a conduit for data, today the World Wide Web is turning into something more akin to a giant operating system, an immense interactive platform on which full-blown applications run in your browser and collaboration occurs in real time.

New technologies — and new ideas — are helping to shape the Internet into what some are calling Web 2.0. MySpace.com, ThinkFree.com, and Digg.com represent a wave of dynamic sites that take full advantage of new models of collaboration. Today’s Web can facilitate sharing as easily as it can accept your blog about what you ate yesterday, upload your vacation photos, or post your book review on Amazon.com.

In addition, shrink-wrapped software, traditionally installed one disc at a time on individual machines, is in danger of becoming a late 20th-century anachronism. On the evolving Internet, software is becoming a service, not a set of products — similar to buying a seat on a flight rather than owning an airplane.

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I find myself in a strange situation. I’m between jobs, and I don’t have a laptop. I don’t want to buy one right now just to present at NECC, so a former colleague who will also be attending has agreed let me borrow his during my presentations. The rest of the conference I will have to fend for myself by using E-Mail/Kiosk stations and my five mobile devices. Here they are:

My Sprint PPC-6700. Has EVDO wireless Internet so I don’t have to rely on having WiFi. It does allow for WiFi if present, and the slide out keyboard works really well. The majority of blogging I do at NECC will likely be done with this device.

My Palm TX. A great device. It has WiFi, so I will use it for browsing and E-Mail. The graffiti text entry is not something that I enjoy, so I do very little typing with it. The Blazer web browser works great for most sites, so I will get a lot of use out of this.

My old friend, the Dell Axim. It has WiFi, but I will likely just use it as a backup to the TX. It’s battery life is very limited, but it has always been a reliable device.

My XM radio. I usually listen to this in the car, but it will be with me at the conference. I can listen to Major Leage Baseball games with it, and it has lots of great music channels.

I also have a photo iPod, but no pic for that. Hopefully these gadgets will get me through the conference.

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Good news!

Maine has signed off on a $41 million contract with Apple Computer Inc. to provide new laptop computers to more than 30,000 seventh- and eighth-graders and their teachers, extending the laptop program for another four years.

Maine was the first state to equip students statewide with laptops, and officials say the initiative remains the biggest of its type in the nation.

The deal announced Thursday is similar to the one reached when the project was originally launched in 2002. It works out to an annual cost of $289 per laptop.

It calls for Apple to equip 32,000 students and 4,000 teachers with iBook notebook computers and upgraded wireless networks. The four-year contract also includes warranties and perks like professional development for each of Maine’s 241 public middle schools.

The program, aimed at eliminating the so-called “digital divide” between wealthy and poor students, has been deemed a success by administrators.

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Very funny and cool stuff!

Click here for the video site

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Little girls should hate this site. Just kidding! It has lots of close up shots!

Link to gallery

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Here is a very thought-provoking (if not a bit bleak) take on the future of teacher education.

Question: What big idea of 2006 will be extinct in 2036?
Answer: Modern teacher training

By 2036, the forms of teacher preparation that currently prevail in Western nations will have sunk into oblivion. We will have discarded schools of education, the pedagogies they teach, and the certification apparatus that they serve. Such schools, pedagogies, and certifications have clung to life stubbornly for the better part of a century despite ample evidence of their unsuitability. Why predict that in the next 30 years they will finally follow the giant ground sloth into the La Brea tar pit of history?

In an era when jobs that require a high level of trained intelligence flow easily to India and other countries, Western countries are awakening to the awkward reality that we are not very good at basic schooling.

Mediocre teaching isn’t the only reason we aren’t very good at basic schooling. A distressingly large and growing percentage of children grow up semi-parentless; increasingly children are lost in the buzz of electronic distractions; and we preoccupy kids with group grievances at the expense of learning. Every few years our governments launch ambitious new programs of school reform, each of which seems to create a maelstrom of new kinds of educational misfeasance.

But after we have sifted and weighed all these contributory maladies, the main problem remains that we just don’t do a very good job at encouraging talented people to become teachers and equipping them along the way with the right kind of preparation. The single biggest cause of the deficiencies in our schools is the risible system by which we train teachers.

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I can’t say this is much of a surprise.

Link to official bid award

Google also wrote a letter (pdf) explaining its committment to user privacy.

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I haven’t posted any baseball pics in a while, and I found this great one of Clemente. I wish I could have seen him play in person.

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Here is a fantastic story about how technology saved two bright kids from dropping out of school.

At the beginning of this school year, two students were put into my Digital Production class that really didn’t belong there. One of them had never taken a class from me, while the other had, but had shown little interest in the assignments and mostly kept to himself. These kids were goths: They dressed all in black and hung out with others who did the same. They liked heavy metal music that had decidedly dark overtones.

I had recently weaseled my boss into buying two laptops not designated for anything in particular, so I approached these two kids with a proposition: I gave them a computer, a video camera, a DVD burner, and all the tape and DVDs they could handle, and told them to make me a movie. They wanted more direction, I but replied that if that I told them what to do it would be my movie, not theirs. I told them I would help them with whatever they needed — equipment or guidance, or to run interference — but I wanted a movie at the end of the semester.

From that point on, I couldn’t get rid of them. They came early; they stayed late. When they neglected their other classes to work on the film, I told them I would get in trouble if they didn’t keep up with their schoolwork. They wrote a new script, recruited actors, and shot and edited what turned out to be a two-and-a-half-hour movie about Bigfoot going to high school.

Late in the semester, I heard from the school’s work-experience coordinator that there was one internship at an editing company. I sent both of these kids, and the one job turned into two jobs — the folks at the company said those two knew things about editing the people at the company didn’t.

These two kids, Fredy and Catelyn, graduated this year, and they intend to go to film school. When I asked them what turned them around, they said that when they began working on their movie, I looked at the first rough cuts and said I was proud of them. They said nobody had ever said that to them before.

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This is not too far from where I live. I’d like to meet this lady.

Occassionally, an educational battle will dominate national headlines. More commonly, the battling goes on locally, behind closed doors, handled so discreetly that even a teacher working a few classrooms away might not know. This was the case for Pat New, 62, a respected, veteran middle school science teacher, who, a year ago, quietly stood up for her right to teach evolution in this rural northern Georgia community, and prevailed.

She would not discuss the conflict while still teaching, because Ms. New wouldn’t let anything disrupt her classroom. But she has decided to retire, a year earlier than planned. “This evolution thing was a lot of stress,” she said. And a few weeks ago, on the very last day of her 29-year career, at 3:15, when Lumpkin County Middle School had emptied for the summer, and she had taken down her longest poster from Room D11A — the 15-billion-year timeline ranging from the Big Bang to the evolution of man — she recounted one teacher’s discreet battle.

She isn’t sure how many questioned her teaching of evolution — perhaps a dozen parents, teachers and administrators and several students in her seventh-grade life science class. They sent e-mail messages and letters, stopped her in the hall, called board members, demanded meetings, requested copies of the PBS videos that she showed in class.

Link to article

Check this out!

Blogger meet up at NECC

This looks intriguing. I’ll be reading the entire report in the next day or so.

Research examined 12 randomly selected blogs from a population of 38 teacher-created, teaching-centered blogs to determine whether they were useful reflective devices for practicing middle school teachers. The amount and depth of reflective practice, as measured by a researcher-created rubric, was examined as well. Results indicated that all participants engaged in some level of reflective writing. However, the depth and level of reflection varied within and among the blogs. The results reported here are useful for framing future research on the efficacy of middle school teacher blogs.

Link to study

My sister took my nephew to a Thomas the Tank Engine event, and it was a big success.

He turned four in March.

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“Creative teachers mix unconventional methods into their lesson plans.”

On May 1, the ninth graders in Camsie Matis’s South Bronx classroom were supposed to study how to graph and solve inequalities. The teens would need those skills to pass the state exit exam and, ultimately, secure a diploma.

But on that particular day, hundreds of thousands of people were marching in cities across the country to protest a pending federal immigration bill. Matis dropped her original lesson plan to launch a project in which students explored the impact of immigrants in the United States,sidestepping political spin for mathematical certainty.

Such spontaneity in the classroom is even bolder now than it would have been five years ago, before the No Child Left Behind Act accelerated the push toward what National Education Association (NEA) president Reg Weaver calls a “one-size-fits-all” approach to teaching. While some teachers tap the Web for unconventional, engaging lessons, others prove there are myriad ways to break the mold — as long as you have the courage and determination to try.

“The public school system doesn’t motivate urban kids,” Matis asserts. “The drill style of teaching to a test ends up defeating many kids who just can’t keep up with the torrent of problems thrown at them. I find that kids will do more work, better work, if they care about what they are learning. And they care about what they can relate to.”

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Here is a fantastic article on how laptops are allowing the homeless to stay in contact with their families and stay connected to the rest of society.

Happy Ivy doesn’t have a bathroom or a kitchen in the bus he calls home. He does, however, have a video-editing station.

Living in a squalid, Woodstock-style bus parked in a Fillmore, California, orange grove, the 53-year-old homeless man charges a power generator from a utility shed and uses Wi-Fi from a nearby access point. From this humble camp, he’s managed to run a ’round-the-clock internet television studio, organize grassroots political efforts, record a full-length album and write his autobiography, all while subsisting on oranges and avocados.

Helping the homeless get e-mail addresses has been a priority for years at shelters across the country. And in an age when most every public library in the nation offers internet access, the net has proven a perfect communication tool for those without a firm real-world address.

“Because of technology, people are able to keep in contact with their families,” Stoops said. And perhaps most importantly, they are able to get some footing in society regardless of how removed from it they may feel.

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I look at this as a good thing. Clunky old CRT monitors are going away!

The finding has important implications for web site designers because most web sites are designed for a screen resolution of 800 x 600 pixels.

The screen resolution 1024 x 768 has reached an all time high  of 56.15 percent.  Users with monitors set to the most common resolution 800 x 600 for web sites have an approximate 12.04 percent global usage share. Almost a year ago this percentage was 18.23 percent.

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I love these kinds of stories. Justice acheived through savvy technology use!

A New York City man retrieved a friend’s cell phone with the help of the New York City police and thousands of Internet supporters.

Evan Guttman set up a Web site, with the heading How Not To Steal a Sidekick after his friend Ivanna left her Sidekick in a taxicab. The pair sent text messages to the phone, but no one answered.

Soon after, Ivanna replaced her mobile device and discovered that someone had used the old one to take pictures and sign onto an AOL account. She discovered the pictures and e-mails because T-Mobile backs up data on remote servers.

Guttman said he used instant messages to contact the person in the photographs and emails but said she told him he was not getting the device back. That’s when he decided to use old-fashioned shame, but a modern twist.

Link to article

Link to the guy’s site