Stephen's Untold Stories

Once was something…twice might indicate a very good trend.

A man was arrested after a 17-year-old Cape Cod boy he met on MySpace.com sent a text message to his family back home claiming he was being held against his will on the man’s west Georgia farm, police said.

When the boy was left unattended after several hours in the home, he was able to send a text message from his cell phone to his family, asking for help and giving the address of his location, Massie said. The family told local police, who notified Troup County authorities.

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I really like the new layout, and I might consider using it instead of bloglines. The old layout was really clunky, but it looks more like the bloglines and newsgator layout now.

Google Reader

The University of California-Berkeley has decided to put some of its lectures on Google Video. Now if you miss class you can at least see how much you missed!

Link to videos

Yes, our little Google has grown up so fast!

It would be really cool if this turns out to be true.

The elusive ivory-billed woodpecker may be living in Florida, according to new evidence.

The birds, long believed extinct, may survive along the Choctawhatchee River in the state’s panhandle, scientists report today in the online scientific journal Avian Conservation and Ecology.

Geoff Hill, a biologist at Alabama’s Auburn University, and a team of researchers say they found the Florida birds on a kayak trip in May 2005.

The research trip came just after the news broke that the ivory-bill had been reported in the Big Woods region of eastern Arkansas.

The Arkansas sighting was later challenged by ornithologists, who argued that it was impossible to rule out the more common pileated woodpecker.

Because the last confirmed sighting of an ivory-bill was in Louisiana in 1944, the Arkansas “discovery” was hailed at the time as the ornithological equivalent of finding Elvis alive, and the event catapulted the birds to celebrity status.

Link article

I am a HUGE Beatles fan! Easily my favorite group of all time.

From August of 1969. The group didn’t know it would be their final shoot.

Link to photos

I am glad that Georgia is doing this for our students and parents. Applying to colleges is stressful enough.

With her first child headed for college this fall and two more soon to follow, Carol Wright was lost. Campus tours, applications, financial aid forms, transcripts, SAT scores, class planning and that was just the beginning.

“It’s unbelievable,” the Carrollton, GA., mother said. “You don’t know where to start or what to do. It’s trial and error, at the mercy of everybody telling me what to do.”

Then she heard about Georgia’s year-old Web site, gacollege411.org a one-stop shop for applying to the state’s colleges and requesting financial aid. Modeled after a similar site in North Carolina, Georgia’s has already registered more than 100,000 students and families in just 18 months.

Georgia is now among about 35 states with such sites, an effort by education officials to make college more accessible by demystify the daunting application process while making it easier for students to enroll in schools within their borders.

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We only get to see this twice a year. Glad I saw the photo.

Explanation: Today, the Sun rises due east at the Equinox, a geocentric astronomical event that occurs twice a year. To celebrate, consider this view of the rising Sun and a lovely set of ice halos recorded on a cold winter morning near Green Bay, Wisconsin, USA, planet Earth. Produced by sunlight shining through common atmospheric ice crystals with hexagonal cross-sections, such halos can actually be seen more often than rainbows. The remarkable sunrise picture captures a beautiful assortment of the types most frequently seen, including a sun pillar (center) just above the rising Sun surrounded by a 22 degree halo arc. Completing a triple sunrise illusion, sundogs appear at the far left and far right edges of the 22 degree arc. An upper tangent arc is also just visible at the very top of the view.

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Some of these are pretty good.

Better Fonts

As an educator, I am strongly opposed to plagiarism. Here is a good article that shows a different perspective that I hadn’t really considered.

When McLean High School students write this year about Othello or immigration policy, their teachers won’t be the only ones examining the papers. So will a California company that specializes in catching cheaters.

The for-profit service known as Turnitin checks student work against a database of more than 22 million papers written by students around the world, as well as online sources and electronic archives of journals. School administrators said the service, which they will start using next week, is meant to deter plagiarism at a time when the Internet makes it easy to copy someone else’s words.

But some McLean High students are rebelling. Members of the new Committee for Students’ Rights said they do not cheat or condone cheating. But they object to Turnitin’s automatically adding their essays to the massive database, calling it an infringement of intellectual property rights. And they contend that the school’s action will tar students at one of Fairfax County’s academic powerhouses.

Link to complete article

Here is an amazingly good way to explain RSS to someone.

The Oprah definition

The technical acronym for RSS is “Really Simple Syndication”, an XML format that was created to syndicate news, and be a means to share content on the web. Now, to geeks and techies that means something special, but to everyday folks like you and me, what comes to mind is, “Uh, I don’t get it?”

So, to make RSS much easier to understand, in Oprah speak, RSS stands for: I’m “Ready for Some Stories”. It is a way online for you to get a quick list of the latest story headlines from all your favorite websites and blogs all in one place. How cool is that?

Link to complete post

Our graduation rate is getting better. A lot of hard work is being done in this state to make things better, and I’m glad that we are getting some data to support it.

Governor Sonny Perdue and State School Superintendent Kathy Cox announced today that Georgia’s high school graduation rate has surpassed 70 percent for the first time in state history – jumping nearly eight percentage points since 2003.

This year the state of Georgia had an official high school graduation rate of 70.8 percent, an increase of 7.5 percentage points.

The state’s official graduation rate was 70.8 percent after summer school graduates were counted, according to the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement and the Georgia Department of Education.  This year’s percentage is Georgia’s official rate under the No Child Left Behind Act.

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Another stupid (or careless) teacher trick.

School officials apologized after an X-rated font was used on a third-grade spelling packet handed out to parents. The font showed male and female stick figures in provocative poses to form the letters of the alphabet.

Officials with the Monroe-Woodbury School District in Orange County apologized last week after parents at Pine Tree Elementary School were given the spelling packet at an open house.

Administrators said the teacher did not use the font intentionally.

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National Geographic comes through again with some amazing photos. Here is the Snake River.

Link to gallery

Again, no shock to me.

Blog tracking website Technorati.com lists 848 teacher blogs; a few boast thousands of hits a week. Bloggers say readers include state or local education officials – even gubernatorial and congressional aides. College education professors have added blogs to aspiring teachers’ reading lists. And, when a school is identified or otherwise known, parents, students and colleagues read them to find out what’s really going on.

“It’s the equivalent of a dispatch from the front lines or a letter written in a foxhole,” says Alexander Russo, a former teacher and congressional education adviser who tracks the trend in his own blog, This Week in Education.

But free speech can get messy. In Winona, Minn., in March, school administrators blocked in-school access to a blog that let teachers and administrators criticize, among others, their superintendent.

A young teacher in Arkansas lost his job after blogging about having to teach wood shop without any equipment.

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This is great news for her family. Smart girl!!

A text message sent by a kidnapped 14-year-old to her mother led to her rescue Saturday, when police found her in a hand-dug, booby-trapped bunker.

Elizabeth Shoaf’s message also led investigators to name a suspect in her kidnapping more than a week ago police were searching a wooded area where the girl was found for 36-year-old Vinson Filyaw, said Kershaw County Sheriff Mike McCaskill.

The sheriff said the text message the girl sent to her mother came from Filyaw’s cell phone and deputies began looking for him Friday night.

Investigators used cell towers to determine a general location of the phone used to send the message. “That was the first break,” McCaskill said.

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This is a fantastic idea.

The “K12 Online Conference” is for teachers, administrators and educators around the world interested in the use of Web 2.0 tools in classrooms and professional practice! This year’s conference is scheduled to be held over two weeks, Oct. 23-27 and Oct. 30- Nov. 3 and will include a preconference keynote. The conference theme is “Unleashing the Potential.”

Link to site

Microsoft has released details about its “iPod killer,” the Zune.

Endgadget.com has a nice rundown.

An ancient stone tablet dated to around 900 B.C. (right) is the oldest known example of writing in the New World, scientists say. The tablet contains 62 symbols in 28 shapes arranged in horizontal patterns (left).

Most Mesoamerican scripts are arranged vertically, however, one of several reasons some archaeologists remain unconvinced of the tablet’s authenticity.

Link to site

All you frequent travelers should enjoy this one. I wish I did more traveling so I could enjoy it with you!

From top US airports like Atlanta Hartsfield International to smaller airports like El Paso International, we provide the most complete listing of wireless Internet access, service providers, airport coverage areas and Internet subscription pricing plans available. With TravelPost.com’s guide to airport wifi, travelers can easily determine which airports offer wireless Internet access and which airports offer free wireless high speed Internet access.

Some good free cities include:

• Las Vegas
• Phoenix
• Birmingham, AL
• Orlando
• Pittsburgh (I got to use theirs a couple of years ago…it worked great!)

Airport Wireless Internet Access Guide