Stephen's Untold Stories

Looks like they got the wrong Douglas.

Let these six and seven-year-olds from New Zealand explain it to you!

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Here is their blog.

Did we really need a study to prove this?

Students see a distinction between the writing they do for school and the writing they do in their personal lives. While the vast majority of 12- to 17-year-olds (85 percent) engage in some form of electronic writing–IM, e-mail, blog posts, text messages, etc.–most (60 percent) don’t consider this actual writing. That’s one of the findings from a study released last week by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools and Colleges.

The study, Writing, Technology and Teens, involved 700 students aged 12 to 17 and their parents, who were polled via phone in November 2007. It also included data collected from focus groups conducted in summer 2007 in four different cities in the United States.

According to the study, 73 percent of the teens surveyed said their electronic communications have no impact on on their formal (school) writing, and 63 percent said that “using computers to write makes no difference in the quality of the writing they produce” outside of school assignments. A full 93 percent of students do engage in some form of writing outside school, whether electronic or otherwise.

However, 57 percent of the teens surveyed said they do edit and revise their work more when they write on a computer–whether that writing be for school or not–and 64 percent admitted that conventions from their informal writing do creep into their formal writing occasionally (such as the use of emoticons and common abbreviations, like LOL).

Link to article

A Georgia man has made an amazing mini replica of the Alamo.

Story and more pictures here!

It hasn’t been made available for automatic downloads yet, but you can manually download it at the following link.

• Windows XP Service pack 3 ( direct download for314 megabyte file)

Who knew the guys down on North Avenue were so talented?

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The Atlanta Hawks won their first playoff game in nine years last night. Josh Smith was amazing.

I am not a global warming alarmist, but I found this to be a bit disturbing.

You know when climate change is biting hard when instead of a vast expanse of snow the North Pole is a vast expanse of water. This year, for the first time, Arctic scientists are preparing for that possibility.

“The set-up for this summer is disturbing,” says Mark Serreze, of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). A number of factors have this year led to most of the Arctic ice being thin and vulnerable as it enters its summer melting season.

In September 2007, Arctic sea ice reached a record low, opening up the fabled North-West passage that runs from Greenland to Alaska.

The ice expanded again over the winter and in March 2008 covered a greater area than it had in March 2007. Although this was billed as good news in many media sources, the trend since 1978 is on the decline.

Link to article

I certainly hope so. I’m getting one!

The 3G iPhone will be announced June 9, the likely date of Apple CEO Steve Jobs‘ keynote at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference, analysts said in research notes on Thursday.

The 3G iPhone will be the “first of an impressive wave of new products” from Apple, wrote Citi analysts Richard Gardner and Yeechang Lee. They also expect an updated Mac laptop and iPod lines. The Apple conference is scheduled for June 9-13 in San Francisco.

Those predictions are consistent with a February prediction Gardner made that 3G iPhones will be announced by midyear. The 3G iPhone release will help Apple meet its target of shipping 10 million iPhones in 2008, Gardner wrote at the time.

Apple is confident it will sell 10 million iPhones this year, officials said during a conference call on Wednesday to discuss the company’s second-quarter earnings.

When asked about the possible release of a 3G iPhone, Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer declined comment. Apple has new products in the pipeline that the company is excited about, Oppenheimer said.

Link to article

While I have issues with the importance we put on standardized tests, refusing to administer them is a bit far to go to make a point. This teacher did just that, and was suspended.

When it’s time each spring for Carl Chew to give his Seattle sixth-graders the federally required standardized tests, he can feel their anxiety.

They complain about stomachaches, they get sick and some of them just start to cry. Even the straight-A students.

For both teachers and young children, the annual Washington Assessment of Student Learning test creates an atmosphere “rife with fear,” the science teacher at Nathan Eckstein Middle School told ABCNEWS.com.

“The WASL is presented in a secretive, cold and inhuman fashion,” he said. “The teacher is not allowed to read the questions, or help, and the kids have to maintain silence for hours and hours. They are only allowed a bathroom break once in a while.”

But after agonizing about the detrimental effects of standardized testing for several years, Chew did something about it last week. He refused to administer the test, which is the key measure of academic progress under the federally mandated No Child Left Behind law.

The WASL is just one of numerous high-stakes tests that now dominate the curricula of elementary schools across the country. A growing number of teacher and parents are rejecting these kind of tests, which have increased in frequency and gravitas after No Child Left Behind.

They rebel at their own peril, however. Chew was suspended for nine days without pay by his principal. But today — sitting at home while a substitute teacher takes his place — he is a rock star among parents and teachers who have blamed the testing for stamping out the love of learning in children.

Link to article

Credit: F Minus by Tony Carrillo, Dist. by UFS, Inc.

Looks like the folks in Cupertino are on the upswing.

Signs of a consumer slowdown abound in the United States, but Apple customers appear not to have noticed.

Buoyed by unusually strong Macintosh sales, the company grew notably faster than the rest of the computer market worldwide in the first three months of the year. Revenue increased 43 percent from the same period a year ago, the company reported. Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, characterized the quarter as the strongest in Apple’s history.

He attributed the growth to higher traffic in the company’s 181 stores in the United States. The company reported that it had 33.7 million visitors to its stores in the United States, up 57 percent from the same quarter a year ago. Mr. Jobs said that belied the gloom that was being expressed about the American economy.

“We’re not economists, so we don’t have any more insight than everyone else, but there were sure a lot of people in our stores last quarter,” Mr. Jobs said in an interview.

Link to article

Great move by the software giant.

The Microsoft DreamSpark student program makes available, at no charge, a broad range of development and design software for download. The program is now available to more than 35 million college students in Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S. Broad global coverage, as well as an expansion of the program to high school students around the world, potentially reaching up to 1 billion students worldwide, will continue throughout the next year.

Link to article

This would be worth a look for those of you working in school systems.

Now that’s some good camouflage.

Larger version here

Fellow northwest Georgia blogger Professor Marvel also had some suggestions.

1. A story behind some of your favorite pictures
2. Tips on taking good photos
3. Using photos in the classroom – Going beyond VoiceThread use.

I’ll tackle the 2nd question here and try get to the others in future posts.

I’ve never had any formal training in photography. I do spend a good bit of time looking at other people’s stuff for ideas. I’ve mentioned Thomas Hawk in a couple of previous posts, and he’s probably my favorite.

I do try to look at things from different angles. For example, look down a one-way street in the opposite direction from oncoming traffic. That’s a view most people never notice. You can see buildings and other landmarks from a different perspective.

This photo is taken from a corner where few people ever stand.

This is the view that most people shoot from.

Since storage cards are so inexpensive now, I take lot of shots without much concern of running out of space. I’ll sometimes take multiple shots of the exact same thing in the same spot just in case I get lucky on the lighting.

I’m not afraid to kneel down, climb up on something, or stand at an awkward angle for a shot. I was practically hanging over the water when I took this snake photo.

When possible, I try to frame an object against a great background. I saw this boat, but I waited until it had the right background for both shots.

Okay…that’s all I can come up with for now. Feel free to share any tips you have!

I can always count on my blogging buddy Rick for some good ideas. He suggested:

1. It’s baseball season. You could discuss the chances of Oregon State once again beating North Carolina in the CWS in a couple of months.
2. Go through your archives and re-publish some of the ones that stick out to you for one reason or another.

Okay, I realize it’s baseball season but I don’t watch a lot of college baseball. I could tell you about the problems that the Braves and A’s are having right now, but nothing about Oregon State and/or North Carolina.

But not knowing anything has never stopped me in the past, so I will unequivocally say that OSU will earn a three-peat by whipping the Tar Heels at Rosenblatt Stadium in June. Go Beavers!

I’ll start looking through the archives and see if I can find anything worty of a repost.

Thanks, Rick!

I have no idea what to blog about. I’m open to suggestions.

Fire away.

I would of course not recommend violating any copyright laws.

Now that I’ve said that, here they are.

• http://lifehacker.com/380702/five-best-dvd-ripping-tools