Lately, I’ve been thinking about how many classroom computers it takes to make a difference. When the Ohio SchoolNet Commission (now eTech|Ohio) started the SchoolNet Plus program in 1996, the goal was to have a 1:5 student to computer ratio in Ohio’s classrooms. Entitlement grants were provided to Ohio schools to buy computers to meet that goal. Significant strings were attached that stipulated which grades … Continue reading Making a Difference

For the last few weeks, I’ve been listening to the EdTech Weekly podcast. The show is an informal roundup of news, links, resources, and ideas relating to technology in education. It’s hosted by Wordbridges veterans Jeff Lebow and Dave Cormier, along with educational technologist Jennifer Maddrell. In typical Worldbridges fashion, the show is webcast at 7:00 PM EST on Sundays. The three hosts go round-robin … Continue reading EdTech Weekly

The Music and Neuroimaging Laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess and Harvard Medical School studies how music is perceived and processed by the brain. They’re investigating the use of music and music stimuli as therapudic and educational tools to aid in recovery from brain injury. As part of his work there, Jake Mandell created a simple online test to screen for tonedeafness.  It’s a pretty good … Continue reading Two Music Resources

We’re reopening a discussion that was resolved years ago. When schools first started using the web, a prolonged debate followed regarding content filtering. On one side, we had to protect our children from the inappropriate content on the Internet while allowing them to take full advantage of the wealth of information available online. On the other side, whenever you’re “protecting” someone from information, some entity … Continue reading Filtering Debate is Back

Dean Shareski blogged a few weeks ago about being busy, and  Ryan Collins picked up on it.  Dean’s point is that eveyone’s busy all the time. It’s a badge of honor that we all wear from time to time. We must be pretty important if we have all of these things to do. Or, maybe, pretty inefficient. But telling someone how busy you are is … Continue reading Busy

I was reading usenet a while back, and came across a creative solution to an annoying problem. A person had posted some fairly technical, hard-to-find information that he had finally found after a fairly exhaustive search. The post looked something like this (though this is not the actual example): The extract potential of Belgian Biscuit malt is 35. I’m posting this here so I can … Continue reading The World is My Knowlegebase

Dan showed me this. In Windows XP, right click on the desktop and choose properties. Select Appearance, and then Effects. In the second drop-down box, change the font smoothing method from “Standard” to “ClearType.” Then click OK a couple times to dismiss the windows and apply the changes. It took me a while to notice the difference. Sure, it looks a little different, but is … Continue reading Clear Type

It has been a rough start to the school year this year. It seems like just about every day, my to-do list is interrupted by the emergency du jour. They’re never little things. No one can send email. The web server just crashed. We can’t get to the Internet. We’ve been hacked. Who deleted all of the files on the server? When asked if we’re … Continue reading It's Not Just Me

About a month ago, I started listening to the Immigration Tales podcast. The show features interviews with people who came to the United States as immigrants. The program is produced by Cuban American Vitor Cajiao, who came from Cuba at age 11. The first episode tells his story. Since then, he has interviewed people from El Salvadore, Montenegro, Poland, and England. Each talks about his … Continue reading Learning English with Podcasts

When we dispose of old computer equipment, we generally keep most of the parts that we can use elsewhere. We pull out hard drives, memory, CD-ROM drives, etc. We then use these as replacement parts in newer computers, and reduce the amount of money we have to spend on parts. Keyboards are a problem, though. They’re generally pretty durable, and we often find that the … Continue reading In Search of a Cleaner Keyboard, Part 1

My blog receives a lot more traffic when I update it . Can you tell how many times I’ve updated it in the last nine days? These little graphs are called Sparklines. They’re easy to make and embed in a document. They can also be used (as you can see) on web pages and blogs. They’re not full-blown, data-intense graphs. Sure, I could (and would) … Continue reading Sparking Interest

Old books are everywhere. We buy books, or receive them as gifts. We read them, and put them on the shelf. In our house, we have a separate room for them. We’ve lived in the same place now for ten years, because no one will help us move any more. We try to get rid of them. We take a pile to the church book … Continue reading BookMooch