Stephen's Untold Stories

Now this is something that really needs to happen.

Forty-six states—representing 80 percent of the nation’s K-12 student population—have formally agreed to join forces to create common academic standards in math and English language arts through an effort led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.

The four states not on board, as of Friday, were Alaska, Missouri, South Carolina, and Texas.

“This is a giant step,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who has been pushing states to adopt common, rigorous standards. “It would have unimaginable, this kind of thing, just a year or two ago.”

As for those states holding out, he said: “I’m not focused on politics, but there’s plenty of time” for them to sign on.

In each of the 46 states, both the governor and the chief education officer signed a memorandum of agreement committing to the process and development of voluntary, common standards—the tangible result of a daylong meeting in Chicago in April. The District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have also agreed to take part.

“It’s going to take both the governor and the chief to get this work done,” said Dane Linn, the director of the education division of the Washington-based NGA’s Center for Best Practices. “This is really becoming an economic and a moral imperative. We can’t afford to keep operating in a vacuum.”

Read the rest here.

The more I use Twitter, the more I like it.

• http://technologizer.com/2009/05/11/ten-twitter-mythconceptions

Maybe my favorite one:

Mythconception #3: People who tweet what they had for breakfast are wasting your time.

Reality: Maybe–but only the first time they do it. After that, it’s your own dang fault for continuing to follow someone who you find boring. Twitter, unlike a crowded airplane, is not a place where anyone is forced to listen to someone else blather; you’ve got complete control over whose tweets you do and don’t read.

If you want to see what I had for breakfast (J/K) check me out at http://twitter.com/stephenksu

These students from New York City did a great version of “Landslide.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2p5augniQA

Simply amazing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BQBE4jkHsg

Something from our friends across the pond.

Spelltube offers a fun, new and exciting way for teachers of 7 to 11 years to teach spelling concepts.Teachers can simply signup for FREE, choose words from our extensive list and let Spelltube immerse your class in a virtual spelling world complete with interactive characters.

Here’s how it works:

• Teachers can create a FREE account and then sign in.
• Teachers create a class within Spelltube and then assign that class a list of words from the vast database of words held by Spelltube.
• Each child in the class is provided with a username and password to access Spelltube.
• When a child signs in to Spelltube, Spelltube helps teach the child the words on their list and associated spelling concepts through video characters.
• Children can then take a test and Spelltube will track their scores, provide encouraging feedback and praise, along with a certificate of achievement.

Spelltube has been developed as a complement to normal classroom based learning and should be used as an extension of such teaching.  Spelltube is by no way intended to replace normal teaching methods.

Check it out here!

Great article by Tony Vincent.

• http://azk12.org/blog/archives/46-10-Things-Teachers-Should-Know-to-Get-Started-with-Twitter.html

If you know of anyone with an autistic child, please forward this to them. It may save them thousands!

Leslie Clark and her husband have been trying to communicate with their autistic 7-year-old son, JW, for years, but until last month, the closest they got was rudimentary sign language.

He’s “a little bit of a mini-genius,” Clark says, but like many autistic children, JW doesn’t speak at all.

Desperate to communicate with him, she considered buying a specialized device like the ones at his elementary school in Lincoln, Neb. But the text-to-speech machines are huge, heavy and expensive; a few go for $8,000 to $10,000.

Then a teacher told her about a new application that a researcher had developed for, of all things, the iPhone and iPod Touch. Clark drove to the local Best Buy and picked up a Touch, then downloaded the “app” from iTunes.

Total cost: about $500.

A month later, JW goes everywhere with the slick touch-screen mp3 player strapped to his arm. It lets him touch icons that voice basic comments or questions, such as, “I want Grandma’s cookies” or “I’m angry — here’s why.” He uses his “talker” to communicate with everyone — including his service dog, Roscoe, who listens to voice commands through the tiny speakers.

It’s a largely untold story of Apple’s popular audio devices.

It is not known how many specialized apps are out there, but Apple touts a handful on iTunes, among them ones that help users do American Sign Language and others like Proloquo2Go, which helps JW speak.

The app also aids children and adults with Down syndrome, cerebral palsy and Lou Gehrig’s Disease, or ALS — even stroke patients who have lost the ability to speak, says its co-developer, Penn State doctoral student Samuel Sennott.

Using the iPhone and Touch allows developers to democratize a system that has relied on devices that were too expensive or difficult to customize, Sennott says. “I love people being able to get it at Best Buy,” he says. “That’s just a dream.”

He also says that for an autistic child, the ability to whip out an iPhone and talk to friends brings “this very hard-to-quantify cool factor.”

Link to article

Hey Hey Hey!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFDBW7Xgagg

I’d love to see some students who are doing things like this with iPhones or iPod touches. Be sure to check out the video down below.

Jorge Colombo drew this week’s cover using Brushes, an application for the iPhone, while standing for an hour outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square.

“I got a phone in the beginning of February, and I immediately got the program so I could entertain myself,” says Colombo, who first published his drawings in The New Yorker in 1994. Colombo has been drawing since he was seven, but he discovered an advantage of digital drawing on a nighttime drive to Vermont. “Before, unless I had a flashlight or a miner’s hat, I could not draw in the dark.” (When the sun is up, it’s a bit harder, “because of the glare on the phone,” he says.) It also allows him to draw without being noticed; most pedestrians assume he’s checking his e-mail.

There’s a companion application, Brushes Viewer, that makes a video recapitulating each step of how Colombo composed the picture.  Colombo leans heavily on the Undo feature: “It looks like I draw everything with supernatural assurance and very fast—it gets rid of all the hesitations.”

Colombo’s phone drawing is very much in the tradition of a certain kind of New Yorker cover, and he doesn’t see the fact that it’s a virtual finger painting as such a big deal. “Imagine twenty years ago, writing about these people who are sending these letters on their computer.” But watching the video playback has made him aware that how he draws a picture can tell a story, and he’s hoping to build suspense as he builds up layers of color and shape.

Link to article

Okay, this looks like a lot of fun….NOT!!

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2009/05/25/nat.uk.cheese.rolling.itn

Head over to the Big Picture Blog to see more of these.

This is really amazing. You do need to have Google Earth 5.0 installed in order to view the project.

This Memorial Day I would like to share with you a personal project of mine that uses Google Earth to honor the more than 5,700 American and Coalition servicemen and women that have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have created a map for Google Earth that will connect you with each of their stories—you can see photos, learn about how they died, visit memorial websites with comments from friends and families, and explore the places they called home and where they died.

Check it out here.

This is from the University of Virginia, but I also see a lot more Macs nowadays at the university where I work.

Link to article.

I’ll let you guess which one applies to me!

Here’s the story.

No animal theme this time. Just a cool song about a boy and his sister.

Lonely Boy – Andrew Gold

I don’t normally post things like this, but I decided to make an exception. What happened to this man really angers me, and it should do the same for you.

My name is George C. Joseph.  I am the sole owner of Sunshine Dodge-Isuzu, a family owned and operated business in Melbourne, Florida. My family bought and paid for this automobile franchise 35 years ago in 1974. I am the second generation to manage this business.

We currently employ 50+ people and before the economic slowdown we employed over 70 local people.  We are active in the community and the local chamber of commerce. We deal with several dozen local vendors on a day to day basis and many more during a month.  All depend on our business for part of their livelihood.  We are financially strong with great respect in the market place and community.  We have strong local presence and stability.

I work every day the store is open, nine to ten hours a day. I know most of our customers and all our employees.  Sunshine Dodge is my life.

On Thursday, May 14, 2009 I was notified that my Dodge franchise, that we purchased, will be taken away from my family on June 9, 2009 without compensation and given to another dealer at no cost to them. My new vehicle inventory consists of 125 vehicles with a financed balance of 3 million dollars.  This inventory becomes impossible to sell with no factory incentives beyond June 9, 2009. Without the Dodge franchise we can no longer sell a new Dodge as “new,” nor will we be able to do any warranty service work. Additionally, my Dodge parts inventory, (approximately $300,000.) is virtually worthless without the ability to perform warranty service.  There is no offer from Chrysler to buy back the vehicles or parts inventory.

Our facility was recently totally renovated at Chrysler’s insistence, incurring a multi-million dollar debt in the form of a mortgage at Sun Trust Bank.

HOW IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CAN THIS HAPPEN?

THIS IS A PRIVATE BUSINESS NOT A GOVERNMENT ENTITY

This is beyond imagination!  My business is being stolen from me through NO FAULT OF OUR OWN.  We did NOTHING wrong.

This atrocity will most likely force my family into bankruptcy.  This will also cause our 50+ employees to be unemployed. How will they provide for their families?  This is a total economic disaster.

HOW CAN THIS HAPPEN IN A FREE MARKET ECONOMY IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA?

I beseech your help, and look forward to your reply. Thank you.

Sincerely,

George C. Joseph
President & Owner
Sunshine Dodge-Isuzu

Link to original letter

Very interesting post from the Apophenia Blog.

In Atlanta, I met a shy quiet 14-year-old girl that I’ll call Kaitlyn. She wasn’t particularly interested in talking to me, but she answered my questions diligently. She said that she was on both MySpace and Facebook, but quickly started talking about MySpace as the place where she gathered with her friends. At some point, I asked her if her friends also gathered on Facebook and her face took on a combination of puzzlement and horror before she exclaimed, “Facebook is for old people!” Of course, Kaitlyn still uses Facebook to communicate with her mother, aunt, cousins in Kentucky, and other family members.

Cross-town, I met up with Connor, a well-spoken 17-year-old who is more than comfortable in sharing his opinions with me. His manner of speaking and attitude means that he would’ve fit into Eckert’s “jock” category even though he plays no sport. In fact, Connor is more interested in gadgetry (Macs to be precise), but that no longer has the same geek ring as it once did. Connor tells me about how Facebook is the new thing that everyone is using and that, while he prefers MySpace, he now primarily logs into Facebook. His girlfriend deleted her MySpace profile and most of his friends now spend their time on Facebook. In fact, he can’t think of anyone at school who still actively uses MySpace. Connor is also aware of the presence of adults on Facebook. He messages with his mother and his youth pastor on Facebook and he waxes elegantly about how he thinks that Facebook is just as popular among adults as it is among teens. He believes that the reason that people switched to Facebook was because it was more “mature.”

These two narratives reflect different views about the salience of age in social network site participation. At one level, we can simply read Kaitlyn as rebellious, anti-authoritarian. Yet, that doesn’t quite work. Kaitlyn is not rebelling against her parents or teachers; she simply doesn’t see why interacting with them alongside her friends would make any sense whatsoever. She sees her world as starkly age segregated and she sees this as completely normal. Connor, on the other hand, sees the integration of adults and peers as a natural part of growing up. The difference in their ages is part of the story – Connor is two grades ahead of Kaitlyn.

Read the rest here.

The tech world is buzzing about this new service which lets you ask questions. There are some pretty clever Easter Eggs, as Mashable has discovered.

• http://mashable.com/2009/05/17/wolfram-easter-eggs/

Might want to watch what you put on Facebook or MySpace.

Students, be careful what you post about yourself online: That’s the key lesson taken from a recent survey suggesting that many college admissions officers are looking at students’ online profiles before they make their final decisions.

About a quarter of the colleges and universities polled in a recent survey by the National Association for College Admissions Counseling (NACAC) said their admissions officers research prospective students’ social-networking profiles before extending admission or scholarships. That means a Facebook picture from a weekend party might cost a student a spot on a premier campus.

NACAC released the results of its study last month, documenting how the ubiquity of online social networking–especially on industry giants Facebook and MySpace–is helping campus officials decide which students are rejected and accepted every year. The research did not mention how often a social networking faux pas might influence an admissions decision.

College officials and social-networking experts said reviewing applicants’ online profiles is becoming commonplace in higher education, but a rude comment or questionable picture won’t single-handedly remove a student from consideration.

“I believe most colleges will do whatever it takes to recruit the right type of student to their respective institution,” said Mark D. Weinstein, dean of enrollment and marketing at Grace College in Winona Lake, Ind. “Like anything else, our decisions all have consequences attached to them. If we make a bad decision, there is a consequence we must face. … [But] I would not think we would decline a student based solely on Facebook posts or blogs.”

Read the rest here.