The current Time magazine cover story (“How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century,” December 2006) highlights the need for students to learn 21st century skills in order to compete in the global economy. Specifically, we should be teaching our children to: Know more about the world in which we live Become innovative and creative thinkers and problem solvers Develop information literacy skills … Continue reading Teaching for Tomorrow

We’re working on some new site designs for our district web site. It’s part of a bigger project intended to make the site easier to use, provide more useful and up-to-date information, and improve the visual design of the site. With a school web site, color decisions are generally pretty easy to make. Our school’s colors are crimson and gold. Two years ago, we spent … Continue reading Painting a Web Site

You can’t divide by zero. Everyone knows that. Well, almost everyone. University of Reading professor Dr. James Anderson doesn’t know that. Neither do the year 10 kids he’s been teaching. It seems he’s “solved” the problem of dividing by zero. It’s simple, really. Just say that anything divided by zero is nulity. Pick a Greek letter to represent the concept. Then, get a film crew … Continue reading Dividing by Zero

A few weeks ago, I posted a short item about how useful the EdTechWeekly (ETW) podcast is, especially compared to EdTechTalk (ETT). Both podcasts can be found on the EdTechTalk site. ETW is a roundup of interesting online resources, news, and events in the world of educational technology. In the half-hour show, the hosts easily go through a dozen or more topics. They highlight the … Continue reading First Webcast Experience

Last week, I showed a prototype of a thin client solution to my district tech team. This particular test was just to show proof of concept and to get some feedback from the team on whether this is worth pursuing. I installed the K12 Linux Terminal Server Project on an old 800 mhz P3 with two network cards. That’s nowhere near enough horsepower for a … Continue reading Thin Clients

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