Stephen’s Untold Stories

I just got through doing two days of training with a school system on Microsoft SharePoint. Their staff was very eager to learn, and I have become a fast fan of the product since getting trained myself back in December. It seems like it has a lot of application for school districts with easy creation of collaborative sites like wikis and blogs. Also, the shared workspaces lend themselves to project-based learning.

How many of you out there are using SharePoint, or do you know of any school districts that are using it? Please leave me a comment or shoot me an E-Mail at stephenksu at gmail dot com.

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September 13, 1916. Henderson County, Kentucky. “Colored School at Anthoston. Census 27, enrollment 12, attendance 7. Teacher expects 19 to be enrolled after work is over. ‘Tobacco keeps them out and they are short of hands.’ Ages of those present: 13 to 5.”

Full sized image here

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I’ve been a big fan of bluetooth technology for several years, and I’ve even done presentations on it at conferences. Here is something that I will be sure to add!

Marine Lance Cpl. Joshua Bleill lost both his legs above the knees when a bomb exploded under his Humvee while on patrol in Iraq on October 15, 2006. He has 32 pins in his hip and a 6-inch screw holding his pelvis together.

Now, he’s starting to walk again with the help of prosthetic legs outfitted with Bluetooth technology more commonly associated with hands-free cell phones.

“They’re the latest and greatest,” Bleill said, referring to his groundbreaking artificial legs.

Bleill, 30, is one of two Iraq war veterans, both double leg amputees, to use the Bluetooth prosthetics. Computer chips in each leg send signals to motors in the artificial joints so the knees and ankles move in a coordinated fashion.

Bleill’s set of prosthetics have Bluetooth receivers strapped to the ankle area. The Bluetooth device on each leg tells the other leg what it’s doing, how it’s moving, whether walking, standing or climbing steps, for example.

“They mimic each other, so for stride length, for amount of force coming up, going uphill, downhill and such, they can vary speed and then to stop them again,” Bleill told CNN from Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he’s undergoing rehab.

Link to article

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I’m glad I found this. My nephew will be safe now.

Here are the rest.

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Amazing story!

After 20 years in the classroom, teacher Juliet Casanova-Perez knows when something isn’t right with one of her kindergarten students. So when Sophie Howell began school last September at Miami’s David Fairchild Elementary, Casanova-Perez became worried.

“The way she ran and climbed and the way that she walked — I felt like it was a little off.” Casanova-Perez said.

She didn’t want to alarm Sophie’s parents, but after she saw Sophie stumble a few times she asked her mother to come in for a chat.

“I was very clear … I’m not a doctor. I don’t know what it could be, but I know in my gut that there’s something that’s not right,” the vigilant kindergarten teacher recalled.

Sophie is the fourth of Betty and Mark Howell’s five very active children. They hadn’t noticed anything wrong, but the teacher suggested they consult a neurologist.

“I was just grateful that she brought it to our attention,” said Betty Howell. “And we did take her to the pediatrician and then to the neurologist and ultimately found out what it was — the brain tumor.”

The tumor wasn’t cancerous, but it was causing a liquid buildup that the neurologist, Dr. David Sandberg, said could have killed Sophie.

“We scheduled the surgery immediately for the next day,” he said.

The tumor was removed, and today Sophie, a shy but curious 6-year-old, has fully recovered.

What Casanova-Perez didn’t tell Sophie’s parents was that her own father died of a brain tumor when she was young and that she recognized the symptoms.

Link to article (includes video)

Does this surprise anyone?

There are two main government studies that shed a light on the current crisis of textbook costs for college students. Both studies do a lot of referring to each other and their researched statistics. The first study was released by the U.S. Department of Education which you can read in full PDF format here.

The DOE study states that full-time students at four-year public colleges spend an average of $893 a year on textbooks and about $10 less a year for two-year students. The most interesting figure from this study is that since 1986, the textbook prices have risen almost 186 percent, or 6 percent a year. When you look at other product prices in the market they all generally rose by about 3 percent. Some public and private universities publish their own figures of college textbook costs for a student per year and they range from $400 - $1,300.

The next government study was carried out by the Government Accountability Office and is referred to many times in the Department of Education Report. This report is even more in depth and all 51 pages of research can be viewed here. One of the most interesting facts derived from the GAO report is the admission that in most cases identical textbooks are actually cheaper in foreign markets. Stated directly from the report, “Traditionally, the geographical separation of markets has made it difficult for U.S. students to acquire lower-priced textbooks from other countries. More recent developments in Internet commerce have reduced the costs for buyers in the United States to acquire textbooks from other countries, causing publishers to reexamine their distribution arrangements.”

Link to article

One of their best!

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Not sure how I feel about this.

Grade school students this month are scrawling essays in answer booklets to prove their language arts skills.

Then educators will have to grade all those handwritten responses for things like reading comprehension and sentence structure.

But researchers at the University at Buffalo say they have software that allows a computer to do the work instantly.

Automated essay scoring that uses artificial intelligence to mimic the human grading process is not new. Likewise handwriting recognition programs.

But computer scientist Sargur Srihari said putting those together to score essays handwritten by children was uncharted territory.

In preliminary testing, his team’s computer program graded sample essays within one point of the way human graders did 70 percent of the time. The results will appear in the February/March issue of the journal Artificial Intelligence.

Link to article

Here is a very thought-provoking article which raises some interesting questions. One thing that we educators need to remember is that just because access to information is so much easier, it doesn’t mean that analytical skills will magically become developed. That is often the hardest thing to teach, and we can’t gloss over it. Technology is wonderful, but these analytical skills must be enhanced.

While the so-called “Google Generation” grew up with the Internet, having a sizable chunk of the world’s information at their fingertips has failed to make them better thinkers, according to a university study.

Young people born after 1993 are certainly familiar with computers and the Web and use both with ease, but a study conducted by the University College London found that they lacked the critical and analytical skills necessary to assess the information they found mostly through search engines.

Along with young people, older generations — including professors, lecturers, and practitioners — have been affected by having so much information so easily available. “Everyone exhibits a bouncing, flicking behavior, which sees them searching horizontally rather than vertically,” said the study, which was released this week and commissioned by the British Library. “Power browsing and viewing is the norm for all.”

The purpose of the study was to help libraries in Britain better understand how people conduct research in the digital age, so the institutions can serve the public better. While research into how young people become competent in using the Web is patchy, the study did find some consistent themes.

For one, information literacy has not improved with the widening access to technology. Instead, the speed of Web searching means little time is spent evaluating information for relevance, accuracy, or authority.

Young people also have difficulty in developing an effective search strategy. As a result, they have a strong preference for using natural language in searching, rather than analyzing which keywords might be more effective.

Link to complete article

Each photo is linked to a larger version.

Kennesaw Hall - Kennesaw State University

Yes, that’s Kennesaw Mountain taken from the campus of Kennesaw State University.

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What an amazing way to share these amazing pictures with the world. Here is the entire gallery.

A few favorites.

Crowds of French patriots line the Champs Elysees to view Allied tanks and half tracks pass through the Arc du Triomphe, after Paris was liberated on August 25, 1944.

Woman aircraft worker, Vega Aircraft Corporation, Burbank, Calif. Shown checking electrical assemblies - June, 1942.

Tris Speaker - 1911.

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Who will win?

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I recently rediscovered the Shorpy Photo Blog. It has some of the best vintage American photos I’ve ever seen. Here is a shot of the crowd during game 1 of the 1912 World Series between the New York Giants and Boston Red Sox. This is the old Polo Grounds stadium in New York.

Here is a link to the full sized version.

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This is something I’ve been saying for years. High schools need to begin at a later hour. I taught these kids for 12 years, and they just weren’t ready to learn until almost 9:00 most days.

IT’S Monday morning, and you’re having trouble waking your teenagers. You’re not alone. Indeed, each morning, few of the country’s 17 million high school students are awake enough to get much out of their first class, particularly if it starts before 8 a.m. Sure, many of them stayed up too late the night before, but not because they wanted to.

Research shows that teenagers’ body clocks are set to a schedule that is different from that of younger children or adults. This prevents adolescents from dropping off until around 11 p.m., when they produce the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin, and waking up much before 8 a.m. when their bodies stop producing melatonin. The result is that the first class of the morning is often a waste, with as many as 28 percent of students falling asleep, according to a National Sleep Foundation poll. Some are so sleepy they don’t even show up, contributing to failure and dropout rates.

Indeed, no one does well when they’re sleep-deprived, but insufficient sleep among children has been linked to obesity and to learning issues like attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. You’d think this would spur educators to take action, and a handful have.

In 2002, high schools in Jessamine County in Kentucky pushed back the first bell to 8:40 a.m., from 7:30 a.m. Attendance immediately went up, as did scores on standardized tests, which have continued to rise each year. Districts in Virginia and Connecticut have achieved similar success. In Minneapolis and Edina, Minn., which instituted high school start times of 8:40 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. respectively in 1997, students’ grades rose slightly and lateness, behavioral problems and dropout rates decreased.

Later is also safer. When high schools in Fayette County in Kentucky delayed their start times to 8:30 a.m., the number of teenagers involved in car crashes dropped, even as they rose in the state.

So why hasn’t every school board moved back that first bell? Well, it seems that improving teenagers’ performance takes a back seat to more pressing concerns: the cost of additional bus service, the difficulty of adjusting after-school activity schedules and the inconvenience to teachers and parents.

Link to article

This should keep you busy for a while.

Here you will find webcasts of the Internet pioneers, scholars and regulators who have spoken at the Oxford Internet Institute, covering areas such as: social media, Internet regulation, safety and security online, e-government and democracy, civil society, open access, e-learning, citizen journalism, and the future of the Internet itself.

Oxford Internet Institute Webcasts

Another great resource for you teachers!

Video in the Classroom was founded in 2003 by Mathew Needleman to focus on video production in the elementary grades.

The site was recently relaunched to showcase the work of elementary educators from across the country and provide additional how-to information, additional links, and a complete redesign.

Video in the Classroom

Thanks to Daniel Rivera of the SEGA Tech Blog for alerting me to this and also for hosting on their blog so people can see it!

This project was created to inspire teachers to use technology in engaging ways to help students develop higher level thinking skills. Equally important, it serves to motivate district level leaders to provide teachers with the tools and training to do so.

http://segatech.us/archives/2247

I remember this case pretty well, but I never knew about this guy.

Atlanta’s death toll was approaching two dozen, and the calls were pouring in.

It was 1981, and thousands of people were flooding the city’s phone lines with tips about what had been dubbed the “missing and murdered children” case.

Most of the calls yielded no useful information, but investigators feared that a crucial clue might be buried among them.

And experts on criminal psychology said the killer might even be among the callers.

“They said that guy will either call in or his name will be there,” Samit Roy recalled recently. “How will you put it all together?”

At age 31, Roy, who had been running the city’s computer systems for three years, was handed one of the most important tasks of his life.

Years before laptops and spreadsheets were commonplace, Roy developed a system to put data in detectives’ hands. His work at the heart of the investigation helped build a case against Wayne Williams, who was convicted in two of the 27 deaths authorities attributed to one serial killer.

In the missing and murdered children case, Roy created a searchable database from the information typed in by call takers, and linked it to numerous other databases, such as police files and vehicle registration records. Investigators who wanted to follow a tip on, say, a brown van, could use the technology to zero in on other calls that mentioned such a van, and pull up vehicle ownership records or anecdotes from police officers’ reports.

The young computer expert gave detectives what was then a novel power: the ability to search instantly across multiple databases for key words. Such boolean searches are instinctive even to children nowadays after a decade of exposure to search engines such as Google. But in 1981 they were a revelation for investigators who learned to assemble files in minutes that might have taken hours or days with paper documents.

Roy said police timed a stakeout of a bridge over the Chattahoochee River where Williams was sighted in part because the data indicated many of the bodies had been dumped from there during full moons. A police recruit heard a splash that night and saw Williams drive away. Police stopped him down the road, and more data from Roy’s network eventually made Williams a prime suspect.

Link to complete article

In order to make this list, the blog has to have a Technorati rank of 50 or higher.

Some blogs here I’ve been following for a while, some new ones I need to check out.

http://www.livemocha.com/education-blog-list.htm