Stephen's Untold Stories

I am normally loathe to recommend anything put out by AOL, but I found an exception. CNET has given a 5-star review to the AOL Active Security Monitor, and I downloaded a copy and it seems to be working pretty well.

Active Security Monitor

I’m probably a little late with this one, but I was browsing the National Geographic website and noticed that they have an RSS feed for news and also podcasts available!

I have posted about their photography section, so don’t forget about that one!

Thanks Vicki for putting this together!

What’s Wrong with DOPA

I can’t say that I completely agree with the author, but this at least shows that RSS is gaining in popularity. I think he expects a bit too much at this point from RSS. It does exactly what I want it to do. While I’m open to seeing other possibilities, I think some of his ideas are a bit far-fetched. Example:

Today’s RSS readers are dumb; they simply pull the content I’ve told it to pull.

Tomorrow’s will have to do better. Rather than offer me articles and blog entries based on sites I’ve selected, a version 2.0 RSS reader will serve up stories based on my interests.

It will have to take the source into account, but unlike today’s RSS the source won’t be the be-all and end-all of deciding a feed’s worthiness.

For example, I’ll tell my reader I’m interested in stories about solar energy.

It will then serve me solar-related content each day using the entire Internet as a library. It will learn the stories I prefer as I rate each one on a scale from 1 to 10, probably by using a Bayesian algorithm.

Eventually, my 2.0 reader will have compiled a list of trusted and preferred resources for each topic I’m interested in. It will create for me a custom news page that displays the latest about every topic I’ve told it to, not simply every site I like.

I think he’s talking about a different application, which is not a bad thing. It seems like he wants a feature like TiVo has where it suggests other programs you might want to record based on what you’ve already recorded. I had a TiVo and I hated that feature because I hated all the suggested shows. I just wanted it to record exactly what I wanted it to record, and nothing more. Maybe a better algorithm would have helped.

Anyway, I highly recommend the article.
Link to complete article

Okay, I knew that Alaska is our largest state, but I had no idea it was THIS BIG.

Here is what it looks like superimposed over the lower 48.

Thanks Brandon!

From the Official Google Blog:

Google Help site (very good!)

Google A-Z (outstanding!)

I found this over at the Weblogg-Ed Blog. Good stuff!!

Free RSS Guide (pdf 164 kb)

I wish I lived in Mountain View.

Google WiFi will be available in the summer of 2006. To deliver the best user experience possible, we will make the WiFi service available on a rolling basis, beginning with trusted testers, and opening to all Mountain View residents and visitors shortly thereafter.

Link to Google WiFi FAQ site

Thanks to Assorted Stuff for alerting me to this. This is a report based on survey results given to teachers and their technology use in the classroom.

CDW-G employed QED to conduct the fourth-annual in-depth research study into what K-12 teachers are saying about technology in the classroom. Quantifiable teacher input helps parents and administrators understand the importance of technology investments. Teachers are often in the best position to see the true impact of technology on learning and know what it can and cannot do. Thus, feedback from classroom educators can be essential in helping communities make academic and technological choices that are in the best long-term interests of students and schools.

Specific objectives of this study were to:

• Learn how K-12 teachers use computers in their jobs
• Evaluate technology’s role and efficacy in education
• Give K-12 teachers a voice regarding computer technology
• Assess the effectiveness of computers in preparing students for the 21st century work environment

Link to complete report

This is some very powerful real life journalism from some of the people living in the chaos that is the Middle East right now.

A civil air raid siren can be heard in the background.

“I was home alone with my mom during the alarm,” Galya wrote in an e-mail message. She has since fled Haifa to stay with her brother in Tel Aviv. “Since my camera was right next to me, I made a short clip of my running down to the shelter. Once I saw the clip, I decided to post it online so people could get a glimpse of what we go through when under attack.”

Call it an entry in the diary of Galya Daube, for whom the self-generated distillation of daily life online is, after all, as it is for most people her age, a given. “We don’t really have a chance to speak our minds and share our thoughts on TV and in newspapers,” she said.

From the ravaged parts of Lebanon, meanwhile, several young scribes have been documenting Israel’s relentless pounding from their point of view in English-language blogs.

“Six blasts in the past 10 mn made this building rock,” wrote Mana, a diarist blogging from Beirut at cedarseed.livejournal.com, on July 15. “The sound of the jets is so faint I don’t think they’re very close.”

An hour later, she wrote: “I don’t want to become a refugee.”

Another Lebanese blogger, using the screen name Finkployd, delivers regular dispatches from the streets of the country’s capital city at BloggingBeirut.com.

Link to complete article

Here are some amazing photos of this magnificent park in Alaska. Alaska is on my list of places I can’t wait to visit.

Link to gallery

Yikes!

Microsoft issued an advisory on the company’s security Web log on July 17 about the virus, which is carried out when a user launches a PowerPoint attachment to an e-mail or opens a file provided to them by the attacker.

Hackers could also lure users to a Web page that offers content or advertisements containing a file that exploits the PowerPoint software, Microsoft said. The vulnerability applies to PowerPoint 2000, 2002 and 2003.

Link to complete article

I just love this stuff!

Link to Galleries

Interesting news from the Official Google Blog

Like most of you, when I search the web, I want to find relevant information with a minimal amount of distraction. But because I can’t see and I use a device that converts web text to speech, I’m even more in tune with the distractions that can sometimes get in the way of finding the right results. If the information I’m after is on a visually busy page, I have to sort through that page to find the text I want–an extra step that can sometimes be very time-consuming.

That’s why I’ve been passionate about a project I’m working on at Google called Google Accessible Search. Accessible Search adds a small twist to the familiar Google search: In addition to finding the most relevant results as measured by Google’s search algorithms, it further sorts results based on the simplicity of their page layouts. (Simplicity, of course, is subjective in this context.) When users search from the http://labs.google.com/accessible site, they’ll receive results that are prioritized based on their usability.

In its current version, Google Accessible Search looks at a number of signals by examining the HTML markup found on a web page. It tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully–that is, pages with few visual distractions, and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off. Google Accessible Search is built on Google Co-op‘s technology, which improves search results based on specialized interests.

Google Accessible Web Search for the Visually Challenged

Oh, how these take me back!

Sesame Street Videos

A while ago we were given the Eagle Cam. Now it’s time for the Bear Cam!

The 114,400-acre McNeil River State Game Sanctuary in a roadless area about 250 miles southwest of Anchorage is one of the best places in the world to view brown bears, especially for a few peak weeks each summer when dozens at a time show up to snack on salmon.

The bear cam is turned on from 5 a.m. until 11 p.m. and has eight presets to zoom in on where the bears are likely to be at any given hour. During the afternoon, an interpreter at the Pratt Museum in Homer controls the solar-powered camera to get the best views.

Link to Site

Google is doing some early testing of its WiFi network in Mountain View, California. Here is a map of their access points.

Link to official map

Andy Carvin strikes again. Here is a great post about accessibility of technology.

The quality of online content is in the eye of the beholder – quite literally when it comes to people with disabilities. While the rest of us may take the Internet for granted, it can be a daily struggle for someone with visual, hearing or motor skill impairments. Imagining having a chronic disability and navigating a virtual environment based on visual cues, or highly accurate control of a mouse. It’s not easy. With more people than ever accessing the Internet over high-speed connections, it’s no surprise that content providers are creating an increasing amount of websites utilizing interactive interfaces, audio and video. But how often do you find a podcast with a transcript? Or a closed captioned video blog? Or a photo gallery with embedded descriptions for people who can’t see the photos? Sadly, they’re few and far between.

Ironically, the Internet is reaching a point where the tools available to content producers are making it easier than ever to make content accessible to people with disabilities. For example, podcasters and video bloggers could utilize free tools like MAGpie, which creates captions for multimedia content. But the fact of the matter is that most people don’t even think of accessibility as a major issue. Try going to a video sharing site like YouTube and count the number of videos that are captioned. I dare you. Don’t hold your breath.

Link to full article

This is the first in a two-part article. I learned a lot from this one, and I can hardly wait for the next one.

Why is a big-screen view so important? Put yourself in your students’ place. Imagine going to a professional-development session where the presenter is sharing a Web-based resource that would meet a critical need in your classroom. You are really interested, and hungry for the knowledge. But the only screen available is the presenter’s laptop, and though it has a nice 15-inch or even 17-inch screen, there are twenty-four other participants in the room, and you happen to be sitting toward the back. That means that as everyone leans toward the screen in order to see this great utility, your view is blocked completely.

The presenter could regain order, and establish equity, by turning the screen away from the audience and using words to describe what he wants you all to see, but that would leave everyone frustrated. Perhaps he could stop presenting and give everyone time to file past the screen in order to see and try out the Web site, but that would cause too much commotion and seriously interrupt the pacing of his delivery. Or, if he was better prepared, he could pass out printed screen shots of what you would have seen if you could view the Web resource live.

Link to full article

UPDATE!!

Here is the second part of the article

Thanks to The Education Wonks for this one. I’m old enough to have attended a Junior High, not a Middle School.

Increasing numbers of Denver parents are rejecting middle schools, taking their children instead to kindergarten-through- eighth-grade buildings, or leaving the city altogether, according to enrollment numbers.

This has left many of the existing middle schools poorer, emptier and lower-performing than the K-8 schools.

The parents of almost 2,000 sixth-graders decided against sending their kids to traditional middle schools – which have sixth-, seventh- and eighth- graders – last year, according to a Denver Post analysis of Denver Public Schools numbers.

Although parents seem to be moving away from traditional middle schools, education experts say good teaching and sensitivity to this age group are more important.

Children in these so-called “middle years” tend to lack maturity; they may not be ready to handle the responsibility needed at a middle school where they’d have several teachers and classrooms, experts say.

“The reality is grade configuration alone does not affect student achievement,” said Sue Swaim, executive director of the National Middle School Association.

Nationally, school districts struggle with students when they hit adolescence. Test scores fall in reading and writing during the middle years.

Link to article