Stephen’s Untold Stories

May 15th, 2008

My new favorite toy - Sierra/Sprint Wireless Compass 597

I bought this little guy a couple of weeks ago so I could stay connected on the road without having to worry about finding WiFi or dealing with the content filter of the schools I visit. Yes, there are schools that still block all things Google!

After using it for two weeks, I have to admit that it has been one of the best things I’ve bought in quite some time. It doubles as a flash drive, and the installation software is loaded right on the device. It is also GPS enabled, and it lets you locate nearby restaurants, banks, and gas stations. The connection speed is comparable to standard DSL, usually about 1.5 mbps.

David Pogue did a nice review for the New York Times, but the prototype device he had didn’t have the functioning GPS. Mine works great!

I bought the device for $50, and I pay another $50 a month for unlimited access. Easily worth it to me!

May 14th, 2008

Tybee Island Photos

We got to spend a little time at Tybee yesterday. It’s grown up a lot since I moved from that area.

Click each image for a larger version.

May 13th, 2008

Savannah River Bridge at Sunset

I got lucky with the lighting here.

May 12th, 2008

More Savannah Photos

I got to take a few shots around Monterey Square.

Click each photo for a larger version.

May 11th, 2008

Wormsloe Plantation - Savannah

I’m in Savannah for a few days, and I managed to get out to the entrance of Wormsloe Plantation. It was closed, but I still got a couple of decent shots through the gate.

Larger version

Larger version

May 11th, 2008
May 10th, 2008

Cats on a treadmill

Very funny…if you’re into that sort of thing.

May 9th, 2008

802.11n Expected To Be in 99% of North American Campuses by 2013

Good news for students who want to watch YouTube during class.

Although the wireless standard 802.11n is found in less than 3 percent of North American universities currently, it will be available in 99 percent by 2013, according to a new study by ABI Research. According to the research firm, the increases are driven by a variety of needs and demands in both K-12 and higher education.

The IEEE standard is expected to be officially ratified in 2009, although vendors are already releasing compatible products based on early drafts of the specifications.

“ABI Research believes that wi-fi access point and controller equipment revenue in the global K-12 market for wi-fi equipment will grow from $47 million in 2007 to $644 million in 2013,” said Stan Schatt, vice president and research director.

Link to article

May 7th, 2008

Cuteness Overload

Nice photos of animals who have been able to overcome their differences in species.

Link to gallery

May 6th, 2008

In2Books To Be Free for Economically Disadvantaged Schools

Good news for those of you who work in Title I schools.

ePals this week announced that it will make its In2Books series of digital literacy tools available to Title I schools at no charge beginning in fall 2008. The company has also announced some enhancements to the 2008-2009 classroom edition of In2Books.

In2Books is an online literacy curriculum based around a dialog between a student and an adult mentor. Designed to improve student achievement on standardized tests and increase critical thinking and writing proficiency, it combines digital books with collaborative technologies linking students, mentors, and teachers.

Link to article

May 4th, 2008

How are we spending our money?

Here is an excellent interactive Flash-based tool that shows how much Americans spend on various things.

Link to full graphic

May 4th, 2008

Against Odds, New Orleans Schools Fight Back

Very nice story from an area which needs good stories.

No road leads to George Washington Carver Senior High School here. It sits on no street and has no address. No sign announces it.

It is little more than a collection of prefabricated steel-and-wood classrooms floating in a no man’s land by the highway, and its vague location and bootstrap atmosphere sum up the problems and promise of the big education experiment now under way in this city nearly three years after Hurricane Katrina. There is no gym and no auditorium at Carver, and at breaks the school’s 350 students congregate on unshaded strips of concrete between the trailerlike boxes.

Carver’s only context is ruin — it sits across a field from the flooded-out pre-Katrina Carver High — and yet it is trying all over again, with new teachers and new methods, at what largely failed before the storm and immediately afterward: educating its students. Carver High is hope’s challenge to bleak circumstance.

And it is beginning to meet that challenge. Though there is disorder in many classrooms, there is also learning going on, amid the struggle. In an English class taught by Courtney Stuckwisch, the searing hard-times images of a Langston Hughes poem touch a chord, and the students look up eagerly. In Colleston Morgan’s social studies class, students beetle earnestly over textbooks for a lesson on supply and demand.

All around the city there is a similar would-be alchemy. Dozens of new charter schools, a flood of idealistic young teachers from elsewhere around the country — now as many as 17 percent of the total here — and a hard-charging reform superintendent from Chicago are all arrayed to rescue one of America’s most needy student bodies, which ranked at the bottom of a bottom-dwelling state even before Hurricane Katrina.

Only in the last year, with the marshaling of new forces, has anything like a coherent poststorm strategy for the shaky schools here emerged. It is too early for results — standardized-test scores are out in May — but educators here insist that there are some promising signs. At the very least, early shortages of teachers and space for students have been overcome.

Link to article

May 4th, 2008

Border Patrol!

Thanks, Aunt Cathy!

May 1st, 2008

YouTube University gets failing grade from prof, students

Very interesting. I don’t think I would have been ready for such a course.

The ease of video production has greatly expanded the academic world’s ability to communicate, and has been used successfully as a supplement to the classroom experience. Most people who have taught in the college environment, however, would argue that there are limits to what can be accomplished outside the classroom environment. Alex Juhasz, a professor of media studies at Pitzer College, decided to explore those limits in detail by holding a class on YouTube entirely within the confines of YouTube’s video and comment systems.

It would be easy to dismiss this as a gimmick or publicity stunt, but Juhasz’s analysis of the experience provides a good perspective on what’s provided by the classroom experience in an era of distance learning and easily accessed podcasts of entire courses. The key features of a class, as she sees it, involve an interaction among the students, controlled and directed by the professor, that relies on preexisting communications skills.

Link to article

Link to the Professor’s YouTube Page

April 30th, 2008

Fox News has a Problem

Looks like they got the wrong Douglas.

April 30th, 2008

So What’s a Blog?

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

 
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Here is their blog.

April 29th, 2008

Teens See Disconnect Between Personal and School Writing

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

April 28th, 2008

Remember the (tiny) Alamo!

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

Story and more pictures here!

April 28th, 2008

Service Pack 3 for Windows XP

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

April 28th, 2008

Humor from Georgia Tech

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

 
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