As I scanned my newsfeeds this week I noticed that the iTunes U section of the iTunes store now has a K-12 section. So far only a handful of US schools are taking part but no doubt this will be a valuable and growing resource for us all.
Was fortunate enough to get some of the gossip from Andrew today about NECC and one thing he mentioned briefly was Adobe Visual Communicator. I have now spent the past hour going through RobZ’s resources on the Adobe website about how his students complete a daily tv show at their school. 
Again it’s another thing that I would love to try with a class. Now which unsuspecting teacher will I show this too?
I just read an article in the July Readers Digest (my wifes Grandfather signs us up every year as a Xmas gift). It states that “Mac users are arrogant snobs” according to a US study.
Mindset Media, a US branding company that analyses the relationship between consumer behaviour and personality, surveyed 7500 Mac and PC owners. Its finding? Mac users are “snobs”. In comparison to PC owners, they’re likely to visit Starbucks for coffee more often, buy organic products and drive a hybrid car. Mindset Media says that people who purchase Macs fall into what it calls the “Openness 5″ personality category - which means they are more liberal, less modest and more assured of their own superiority than the population at large.
Readers Digest, July 2008
After many years of tinkering with PC’s and windoze I am now on my second Apple iMac (purchased myself) and MacBook laptop (education issue) and feeling quite self assured. I can’t afford Starbucks, organic food or a hybrid car but when using my Mac I feel I have transcended to the promised land of simplicity and productivity.
Quiting windows was, for me, like quiting smoking - it has saved me a whole lot of time and money and I feel better for it. I feel kind of sorry for people who unknowingly put up with crapware and spyware in much the same way that I feel sorry for people who can’t quit the smokes.
So I guess the survey is right, I am a snob, and no one is more critical of smokers than an ex smoker.
Click on The Notation Button which will open a java window (another box)
Have a look at the options and drag and drop to create your equation
Then click on the export button close the java window and paste into whichever text box you wish. And that should be it.
Recently here at Tek_ we have been toying with a few new ideas. I guess we call them Tek_Labs some of these are just a bit of fun others have had some good outcomes that we can then try at school. The latest have been:
Gallery2 - php gallery site that allows you to have a flickr like service of your own, it also has a wordpressplugin.
PHPAuction - Kind of like e-bay, not sure how we would integrate this with school but maybe as a fundraiser or for economics classes.
And then there is Tek_Net - our own moodle site which has some of our own teaching resources and allows me to trial out new ideas as far as moodle blocks goes.
Today I just added the Game moodle block and have been really impressed as it uses our existing quiz questions and allows you to make a number of different style quizzes (thanks to the moodleman for this and of course Sharon for pointing it out :-)) I have started putting links to these blocks in the tek wiki to try and remember what a I have customised. Feel free to check it out and see what we have been adding outside the standard moodle install.
On reading that NSW is going to abandon Microsoft Office in favor of Open Office I was impressed. The path of least resistance was to simply keep on with Office but no, in typical Aussie fashion they are going to thumb their noses and go with change. What does this mean for us? I guess we won’t be far behind especially after Douglas Harre’s statements at the recent edtech meetings. I do find myself agreeing that in 2001 the Microsoft agreement was a good idea as word processing etc was different just like I feel sorry for those clusters that came before us when there was so much less opportunity with ICT. I would like to make the transition sooner rather than later especially as staff are switching to Office 2007 anyway and have been giving OO.org out to staff to use at home or on family members computers. Many of course struggle to believe how can something be good if it is free.
Also in the article was the governments laptop for every student, well it would seem they meant computer access for every student but I digress I enjoyed reading the comments on many of the blogs surrounding this governmental decision and the overwhelming negativity within them. I worry that people don’t get the point.
The June 20th episode of Buzz Out Loud quoted this post from Webware explaining how social networking helps bridge the digital divide and equips young people with relevant skills.
Ironic that nearly all schools block these sites. Someone said to me last week that there is no evidence that technology (ICT) improves learning. It wasn’t until later that I thought that there is probably no evidence that school improves learning.
The point of school is to provide a safe learning environment. If we are really so afraid we could set up “walled garden” social networks, but generally most young people in NZ have a profile with bebo and don’t want to change, so why not let them use it to collaborate at school?
On the other side of the coin is the number of machines running limewire. As with all file-sharing programs, using LimeWire to download or upload copyrighted files without permission from the authors is generally illegal. Using it to distribute files with permission from the authors, or files that are out of copyright, is generally legal. This is of course a Tui Billboard “I Never download copyrighted material, yeah right”. Limewire it would seem without being a scare monger is one of the quickest ways to get adware, spyware and all the other wares, so please if you are going to use it be careful and make sure you have protected your computer with some of the basics like Spybot, Ad-Aware and AVG free antivirus.I guess this falls in the just because I can folder but a few weeks ago a parent dropped off a beautiful indigo iMac 233 Mhz with 192 mb of RAM at Natalie’s school. Now I know that this machine is essentially an anchor and that most IT departments wouldn’t bother but I thought that I’d take it home and turn it into a) A goldfish bowl (That was way too time consuming even for me) b) A cat bed (this may still happen) or c) see how it runs with edubuntu. This photo shows it happily making progress.
And all I did was found the ubuntu site and got the correct powerpc download. Yes I have had to install the old 6.10 version (edgy eft) but all seemed to go very smoothly (like I doubted it). So will see how this goes.
I guess since we found that Microsoft aren’t supporting OS X office 08 for schools alternatives are my flavor of the month. Must say I have yet to miss having office at home. I guess keynote is better anyway, as I read on Presentation Zen the other day as something to take to the powerpoint design team ” copy keynote and improve on that” Excel yeah maybe but I promise I’ll admit it if it ever comes up and I left word behind a while ago. I do still save all my documents in .doc format by default but as more things are done in google docs this is less of an issue.
I’m looking forward to trailing the open office aqua as opposed to neooffice but that might be just being picky.
So enough about me how did ubuntu run on the iMac well…
TEK is Mark Davies, Richard van Dijk and Kelvin Maine. Mark is a Technology teacher in a secondary school, Richard is a Social Studies teacher and an ICT facilitator for two schools with the MOE ICT cluster scheme and Kelvin is a Computing teacher and network administrator for a secondary school.
