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My Life in IT

Nick Peronti, our Network Administrator in D74, just sent over this video from YouTube. It encapsulates the life of a tech in a nutshell. Enjoy!

This is hilarious…Old Timer’s Poem

I rediscovered this poem while pulling together an Excel workshop. It really rings true about how technology has changed the way we think…the way we are!  Don’t know who to give credit for this poem, but it is quite clever. I’d actually rewrite the last stanza – a bit of a downer.

Old Timer’s Poem

A computer was something on TV,
From a science fiction show of note.
A window was something you hated to clean;
And RAM was the cousin of a goat.

Meg was the name of a girl,
And gig was a job for the nights,
Now they all mean different things,
And that really megabytes.

An application was for employment,
A program was a TV show,
A cursor used profanity,
A keyboard was a piano.

Memory was something that you lost with age,
And CD was a bank account,
And if you had a 3-inch floppy,
You hoped nobody found out.

Compress was something you did to the garbage,
Not something you did to a file,
And if you unzipped anything in public,
You’d be in jail for a while.

Logon was adding wood to the fire,
Hard drive was a long trip on the road,
A mouse pad was where a mouse lived,
And a backup happened to your commode.

Cut you did with a pocket knife,
Paste you did with glue,
A Web was a spider’s home,
And a virus was the flu.

I guess I’ll stick to my pen and paper,
And the memory in my head,
I hear nobody’s been killed in a computer crash,
But when it happens they wish they were dead!

Beating Telemarketers

Here is something I read in Wired Magazine a while back (2002). I have this article ripped out and now I want to throw it away (new year cleaning binge). But I want this info where I can reference it. I haven’t tried this idea yet, but it seems like a viable way to beat those pesky telemarketers.

There is this device out there called the Telezapper. But why spend $50 for uninterrupted evenings? The fledgling Telemarketing Resistance has banded together online to help you do it for free. Just follow the steps below. (-Neil McManus, Wired)

1. Get the Audio – The TeleZapper fools telemarketers’ auto-dialing equipment by emitting the ascending three-note special information tone you hear before, “We’re sorry, the number you have reached has been disconnected.” You can download this tone from the Web. Do a Google search for “sit.wav” to find one of these audiofiles.
2. Chop It Down – Open sit.wav in an audio-editing program. Edit out the second and third notes. (You don’t actually need those, and they’re sure to annoy family and friends.) Save the WAV file.
3. Press Record – Play that one note on your computer and record it as the first sound on your answering machine’s outgoing message. Follow with an oh-so-witty greeting.
4. Enjoy the Silence – Now sit back and screen those calls. Over time, telemarketers will get the “zapping” tone and take you off their lists.

Cool, eh? The theory sounds good. I’ll let you know if it actually works.

The Question Is “What’s Next?”

So my question is…what’s next for SD74? Right now we are moving towards mobile labs and teacher 1:1…and we’ll need time to do that well, I think, before we entertain the question of going “One-to-one” – the new trend of technology integration for schools. It is being looked at as the final step, top of the pyramid, nirvana of computing. Is it??? That’s the question to ponder over. Hmmm…

And then the question that derives from that is do we do this when teachers are ready or do we wait until they are ready before investing the dollars? Is it the horse before the cart? Will we be waiting ’til pigs fly before teachers as a whole will have digital classroom? Hmmm…

I’m in Silicon Valley

For the next two days, I am attending a Technology Leadership Briefing at Apple Computers at their headquarters. It continues to amaze me how dedicated they are to the whole business of education and technology integration.

Just some interesting tidbits…did you know…

• Macintoshes were introduced to the public in 1984
• iPods were introduced to the Mac public in 2001 and then to everyone else in 2005
• Apple’s OSX history
• Cheetah v10.0
• Puma v10.1
• Jaguar v10.2
• Panther v10.3
• Tiger v10.4
• Leopard v10.5 (to be released Spring 2007)
• There is an Apple retail store in Manhatten that is totally underground but with a glass enclosure for the lobby. It is open 24/7 and they actually get customers at 3 AM! Check it out on CNET News!

Much of what is discussed is how computing technology impacts the classroom…how we learn. One of the big ideas that keeps coming through is that the 21st century learner is still dealing with school that is stuck in the 20th century…or the 19th century for that matter! Much of what is done in schools, even today, does not address the ever-changing world we live in today. As Thomas Friedman observes in his book , in short there will be plenty of jobs in the future for those with the knowledge and the ideas of innovation – not those who are doing things the way they’ve always been done or have been done already. Students of today will need to be knowledge miners and builders – not knowledge bankers, especially those that use a mattress to store their valuables. So for educators, it is not about how YOU’ve been teaching the last umpteen years. The question is how are you reaching the kids sitting in front of you NOW and in the years to come.

A good thing to read (per Stephanie Hamilton’s recommendation) are the Time magazine articles in the issue called . The link to it is on my del.icio.us page. but one of the main reasons these students have chosen to not continue with school or have trouble finishing our school system is that they are BORED! Not surprised.

Many new technologies are paving the way for the 21st century learner that we in education MUST begin to take advantage of:

• Web 2.0 – read/write technologies that enhance interactivity
• Social Networking
• Googlejockeying – doing searches for additional/clarifying information while listening to a presenter
• Blogging
• Wikipedias
• Mashup – mashing two or more technologies to create something new (see Earth Album USA that takes photos from Flickr tagged for particular places and showed on a Google map to be able to see the images related geographically).
• Multiplayer gaming
• Podcasting – ’nuff said

So all we know about tomorrow is that it will be different from today…and we must empower our students for that everchanging tomorrow.

NECC Session: Education & Podcasting

I am at a podcasting workshop run by David Warlick, but I am actually learning all sorts of other things other than podcasting…like this. I have now officially posted my first picture taken with my phone at this workshop using Flickr. This is David Warlick, technologist extraordinaire, taking pictures with his own camera phone. He told me that I could email my photos from my phone to Flickr and then associate this photo to my blog through a posting. Wow! This was easy!

So this is a diversion for now. More on podcasting.

A podcast is actually a blog with a link to an audio file. It is an html link to an audio file. There are several types:

• Content – passions, knowledge
• Reformer – influence, persuade
• Teacher – lectures, communications
• Class – classroom produced

Tony Vincent shared about his endeavors with podcasting with his students. Check out his web site — Radio WillowWeb: Radio for Kids, By Kids — to hear his student-created podcasting. Tony also does his own podcasts regarding handhelds called Soft Reset which you can subscribe to if you are interested. He also supplied us with pdf files to help manage podcast projects which seem quite useful. I’ll definitely be sharing these with the teams back at the district.
Tony also shared with us about synctunes (freeware) – which puts podcasts on SD cards to be used on pda’s and such. So you don’t really need an iPod to do podcasts.

Tony showed us podcasts that 2nd graders created. The podcast was about respect and consists of several segments: vocabulary, manners, character lesson on respect, and tips. It fully showed what a powerful venue podcasting can be for students. These second graders demonstrated their learning and synthesis of the topic of respect in a variety of ways and constructed something of their own for a real audience.

So we then created our own podcasts using a software called Audacity. You can check it out on my partner’s slapcast site. Slapcast is a place where you can store your podcasts and then refer back to them from any website or blog…even iTunes. It is really rough; we did it in about an hour, start to finish. But you could totally see after doing this what a great performance assessment this would be for student projects. We had to create, research, synthesize, summarize, plan, design, construct, and produce – lots of thinking going on!

NECC session: Data-Driven Decision Making

A district in Maryland demo’d their data warehouse/instructional mgmt system called IQMS. I’ll have to do more research on these data warehouse systems since they didn’t give much info about adopting the system in the presentaiton. But it was interesting to see just how many districts are heading in this directions by the full house in this session. The beauty of a data warehouse system like this is that daily teachers can tailor instruction to what their students’ needs are. That is where assessment makes its biggest impact on learning, when teachers use assessments to change their instructional practice or aims.

Click here for what I found about this Maryland district’s data warehouse system.

Thinking Possiblities

What a feast for the eyes! Dewitt Jones, National Geographic photographer, was the keynote speaker for the NECC conference and shared his phenominal photos as he spoke to us about being visionaries. How apropos! As he spoke, he gave visual inspirations to what he was saying. What a thought! To give a visual representation of thoughts, ideas, concepts…for me, a visual learner, that gave me a way to remember what he spoke of. The idea behind being a visionary is to see the world from all angles and perspectives…and to think of the possibilities in a situation, no matter what the circumstance. He spoke of shooting photos and how the next photo, when taken at a different angle or waiting 15 more minutes as the light changes, would give you a totally different outcome, a totally different way of looking at the world. That is something we need to keep in mind as educators….looking at our world and students , embracing the situation before us and looking for the possibilities.

The World Is Flat Indeed

On the way to NECC, I was “reading” the book [The World Is Flat] by Friedman (I was actually listening to the audiobook on my iPod…how cool is that!). Friedman gives his take on the history of the 21st century. It has been a fascinating summary of what has gone on in the world of the Information Revolution. Friedman’s premise is the the world is no longer “round” in that because of technology, the playing field is leveling out or flattening. Our modern economic world today is no longer shaped by the manufacturers of goods, but by knowledge, who has it and who manages it. Intellectual work is disaggregated and then distributed to anyone around the world. The world is flat.
Preparing our students of today for this reality must be our final aim in education. Students need to be prepared for the kinds of jobs that will be out there. Friedman gives this example of the service of accounting. Did you know that hundreds of thousands of tax returns are prepared in India right now? With the digitization of information, straight forward tasks like tax accounting can be done by folks living half way across the globe. Friedman comments that it is these kinds of jobs that are going overseas because of the development of those countires like India. So for accountants in America, this frees them up for more value-added services, more quality time for more creative work. For America, Firedman says, we are at the cutting edge of the next creative wave. The types of jobs our children will be having is uncertain. How should we prepare our children for this?

More reading to come…

iPods in Education

The NECC conference is next week and I am looking forward to exploring the idea of using iPods in education. We are jumpstarting our mobile lab training in August with our 6th grade team and I really want to challenge our teachers to think and discuss how the classrooms will change once these mobile labs are in place. This is a powerful moment. I hope they can see it. I feel like the maverick in this scenario. My sense is that some of the teachers are reluctant, for whatever the reason. I don’t a momentum to die off without a real CHANGE in what we see going on in the classroom. Not that what is currently done is not fine stuff. But it is a continued pursuit of greatness. I am hoping these teachers can have a chance to dream a little.
Now that I can put all this emotional energy down on “paper”, I can let that go off to wherever it may and focus on the adventure of this new thing in education…the iPod. Already I myself am trying to figure out how to take full advantage of this resource. Planning the 4 hours I will have on the plane ride to San Diego, I am about to download the audiobook The World Is Flat by Friedman. I picked up the actual book, but maybe having the audio portion to listen to will also be helpful in reading and taking it in. I am not an auditory learner necessarily, but having a more multi-media experience of something enhances my learning. Let this be my own learning experiment.