We're almost to this article's end-of-life as it gets pushed to the bottom. I easily have 40 recommendations here, and I can't thank you all enough. Now my only problem is I have to read all of these books!
I think you're mistaken. I also live in this area, and work nearby.
While I'm sure there may be a few Amish/Mennonites, they certainly aren't there in any large number. The area around is airport has some farming, but has just as many housing developments and undeveloped land (with trees). It is also isn't flat. Map here http://tinyurl.com/8otcxn
Let's not try to play armchair quarterback too much. He obviously had an incentive to not crash. He lived in Bath, so he flew into the airport a lot and was probably familiar with the area. If safely landing in a field was available to him, I'm sure he would have taken advantage of the opportunity instead of crashing into a residential neighborhood like he did (he hit a vacant house). It was night, so he probably would have had a hard time spotting a field.
I taught in a laptop school several years ago. The technology was JUST maturing then, but most of my problems were person-driven rather than technology-driven.
Here are my tips 1) Firmly establish who actually owns what, because that determines the scope of your reach. If the computers are still school property, you have a lot more reach than if the kids buy them up front or buy on an installment plan.
2) Either way, you're going to have to amend your Acceptable Use Policy to address issues brought up by the laptops. I would do some research into other laptop schools and download their AUP. In fact, contacting other laptop schools is probably a good idea in general. It's always better to make your first mistakes vicariously through someone else.
3) Partition the laptops so that user data is stored on a separate partition, and invest in a good disk-imaging system. You're going to be imaging a lot of laptops after a few weeks. No matter how hard you lock them down, someone is going to screw something up so royally that you can spend 6 hours fixing it or 10 minutes imaging the disk, and it will happen frequently (how frequently depends on school size). In fact, you may want to get clever and make 3 partitions. 1 main, 1 user data, and 1 unmounted that holds a local copy of your image file. Image your main partition only, copy it to your "hidden" partition, and image the whole thing for deployment.
4) Figure out a theft-protection mechanism. This will eventually become an issue. Laptop insurance/warranties will also be an issue. If 15% of the laptops begin malfunctioning near the end of a 4-year-run, that will be enough to make it difficult for teachers to rely on those machines for classroom exercises. Nothing it more frustrating than having a whole lesson plan come to a stand-still because 4 kids' computers won't work. I've had it happen to me plenty of times. These also tend to be the kids who don't need any additional distractions.
5) If these are school-owned laptops, then you have a great deal of latitude in locking them down. Remote monitoring is another issue, and I would consult your district's attorney. As far as locking them down, the guiding question should be "what level of security supports the curriculum." Most slashdot users will think of these laptops as computers, with all of the implied potential. Thus any lockdowns curb that potential, and in turn the student's freedoms and opportunity. While this is a valid mode of thinking for personal machines intended for personal purposes, it is the wrong mindset to have in an educational environment. For starters, most students will never come close to tapping that potential (they want to surf the web and IM).
These laptops are being purchased to augment your curriculum, and should be configured in a way that makes it a platform for your curriculum. This may involve lots of restrictions, or just enough to keep a kid from accidentally breaking something. While you'll probably learn as you go, you should already have some idea of where that line is. If you don't, I'd recommend more research and consultation/training your teachers before writing that big check.
With totally unlocked computers, it is likely that a significant portion of the machines will begin malfunctioning due to user-abuse: "I'm going to install every piece of crap software I find! Isn't it great?" While it won't be a majority, it will be enough to make it difficult for teachers to rely on the machines to function properly during an activity (see above).
It's a great example of belief creating reality, however. If people believe that the Monday after Thanksgiving is the biggest online shopping day of the year, then retailers are going to start offering "Cyber Monday Specials." This, in turn, will drive more people to shop that day. Rinse and repeat.
From a marketing point of view, it is actually quite clever.
To provide a counter-point, I've been teaching beginning programming to high school students for several years now. My classes are usually mixed between the kids who would get an A if I gave all of my lectures in pig-latin, the "normal" kids, and the kids whose greatest aim in life is to play the same stupid flash game every day. I'm also in a public school environment where I cannot assume that students are able to program at home. All of my labs consume several days of class time. This definitely slows me down, but it also lets me get really picky with their coding styles. I can harp on things like making easy-to-read code, picking good variable names, comments, etc.
I start with a broad overview of the architecture of a computer. We discuss the classical von Neumann machine, and how it applies to a modern computer. I spend some time discussing the significant bits of a modern computer, discussing a modern CPU in the broadest terms, and usually crack open a machine and have the kids huddle around while I point out various parts on the motherboard. That takes 2-3 days.
We then do a very broad overview of the history of computers, and I usually make them watch a video just to change things up. In the past, we worked our way through the better part of a lengthy series on the history of computers, and I made them write papers. This year is much more modest, with a 1-hour Modern Marvels episode and some class discussion. That takes 2-3 days.
I then go through the general hierarchy of programming languages, from machine code on up, and an overview of the compilation process, naming the different files that are produced along the way. My goal is to simply give kids an idea of how things work and enough information that they could learn more on their own if they wanted to. That takes 1 day.
The rest of the year is programming.
When we get into actual programming, I use the Eclipse IDE and C++. I know people on Slashdot have VERY STRONG opinions about these choices, but I find that those tools really meet the needs of my course. In short, teaching unix makefiles and gcc is NOT part of my course's scope, and I have to act both as a feeder for our AP course and a prep for seniors going off to college.
My general curriculum goes something like this
1) Datatypes and variables 2) Arithmetic 3) Input and Output (cin, cout)
**I do those topic twice. I go through once to give the kids enough information to write some basic programs. Then I go through again more in depth, talking about the sizes/limitations of the datatypes, ints vs doubles, iomanip, the cin streametc etc.
4) Conditionals, if, if/else, switch 5) Loops (for and while)
My first semester usually ends somewhere between for and while loops. Second semester goes like this
6) Review of concepts for kids who took the first semester last year 7) Loops, again and with greater complexity 8) Functions (I really agonized over when to teach functions. I finally decided to do it after loops so that students can write meaningful and substantial functions for more substantial and complex programs) 9) File I/O 10) Arrays 11) Searches, sorts and some basic runtime analysis.
I usually spend between 40-60% of my class time in labs. At the beginning of the semester, I usually have to "invent" reasons for labs. Once we get past that initial hump and kids can write basic programs on their own, I assign a lab when I think I've covered enough material that I ought to make them practice something. This usually works out to be about 5-7 days of lecture, followed by 7-10 days of lab.
Whenever I introduce a new topic, I usually start by posing a problem, and use the new concept/syntax as the solution to the problem. I spend some time talking about what happens inside of the computer when to use that new syntax, and what kind of "real world" situations would require its use. We then discuss the concept in depth, with multiple examples and what-ifs. At this point, we're usually writing a little dem
Because you can do a little at a time, when you have the time (10 free minutes. Let's see what my college buddy did today)
Because its really not that much work (you make it sound like it takes hours and hours)
Because there is an entire social norm set up around calling people that doesn't necessarily fit into a person's schedule. (why do you think people spend 2 minutes sending a text message that would have taken 20 seconds to call and say). This is doubly true for far-flung friends that you haven't talked to in a while.
Because you can't show someone pictures of your trip to Spain over the phone.
Because reconnecting with lost friends is both fun and difficult. "YAY! I found you. Do we have anything to talk about now, or are we just warm memories from days gone by"
Because of any number of other reasons that make perfect sense to the person doing it. If they don't make sense to you, well, that's completely irrelevant. It's not about you.
I resisted Facebook for a long time. As a high school teacher, my profile is completely private and a religiously de-tag myself on people's albums. I joined it this summer at the urging of a friend, and have really enjoyed being able to reconnect with far-flung friends. It's a poor surrogate for that shared experience that underlays many friendships, but it is better than nothing when someone is several time zones away.
If a student gets a 20 percent in a class for the first marking period, he or she would need a 100 percent during the second marking period just to squeak through the semester.
There isn't a teacher out there who wouldn't pull the 20% kid aside and say "Look. You bombed. But, over next quarter/semester, if you do all/most of your homework and manage to get a C/B/whatever, I'll pass you."
My school district is looking at a similar policy, and I'm not happy with it. I don't mind putting a "floor" under students in freefall (especially when there are out-of-school forces in play), but its something that you do on a case-by-case basis according to the needs of the student.
If a district's teachers are not looking out for their kids this way, you have a deeper problem than a grading policy.
I own a Mac, so I had to boot into XP to run VMWare Server and finish configuring the FreeBSD "machine" for my class. The disk image will eventually be run on the school's servers, which I believe are running Windows Server 2003.
I'm not sure what the big deal is with FreeBSD and OpenBSD. VirtualBox outright claims that OpenBSD should work no problem, but my attempted install of OpenBSD was nothing but total carnage. FreeBSD worked fine until I tried to track their stable tree. Apparently there are some I/O timing issues that make an I/O intensive operation (like "build makeworld") a risky endeavor. I don't even think I got through make buildkernel, and recommended solutions did nothing.
I'm not ideologically wed to FreeBSD (in fact I quickly grew tired of running it as a desktop environment), but I do understand its layout pretty well. Most importantly, I know how to create a highly restrictive jailed environment for my students, which allows me to make the server accessible from home. I'm sure you could do something similar under Linux, but most of the solutions I found were too generous for my liking, and I couldn't be arsed to repeat the process of figuring stuff out.
I spent a lot of time trying to get VirtualBox to play nice with FreeBSD. I'm much more familiar with BSD-flavored *nix (esp re: creating jailed environments), so I run a FreeBSD box as a cvs server for the programming classes I teach. I planned on migrating this function to a virtual machine this year. Unfortunately, VirtualBox would go down in flames every time I did a build-world. Web searches availed little.
I tried using OpenBSD instead, but that ended up being worse. The install looked something like
Making devices... Segmentation Fault Segmentation Fault Segmentation Fault...
I eventually had to migrate my partially-finished FreeBSD disk to VMWare and finish my work there. It's a bit of a bummer, because VirtualBox does appear to have some really neat features, especially for XP guests. Still, I gotta use what meets my needs.
I think the concerns revolve more around how the technology was developed and deployed than the concept of using technology itself. No voting system is tamper-proof, but the current batch of voting systems fail the most basic tests for reliability and security.
If a system was developed/deployed that was as resistant to electronic manipulation as (for instance) my banking information, I'm sure most of the people here would have few objections (except for the handful who always think they know better than everyone else).
Well, optical scan voting systems are a business as well. Diebold even has a line out. Don't indulge too much in the "evil corporation and corrupt government" line of thought. While I'm sure it is accurate in some cases, using it as a sweeping analogy just weakens your overall argument.
Optical scanning seems to be currently in vogue in Ohio. After some controversy, Cuyahoga county (metro Cleveland) is in the process of abandoning its touch-screen voting machine for optical scanning. It won't be ready for the primary, but will hopefully be ready for the general election. Unfortunately, optical scanning also has some semi-legitimate objections. The biggest objection is that optical scanning systems don't warn the voter is s/he made a mistake.
At first glance, it is baffling how an intelligent person can screw up something as idiot-proof as filling in a bubble. It isn't too hard, however, to imagine situations where an otherwise intelligent person could make a mistake. Intelligence isn't a legal requirement for voting anyway. Unfortunately, reasonable and commonsense solutions to this issue will probably play backseat to elaborate and expensive solutions that create twice as many problems as they solve. That's pretty much how we got here in the first place, and wasted millions of dollars of taxpayer money on an unreliable system.
I believe she addressed this when she discussed how different families have different values, and no one can dictate what content parents should allow in their homes.
Now clearly, she (like anyone) has some bias. She's nice enough to make it fairly obvious in her writing. It is the reader's job to filter it out.
High school lab computers are there for learning and exploration. If you have them locked down like a supermarket checkout kiosk or bank teller terminal, you may as well not have a lab in the first place.
As an IT admin, it's your job to make sure the computers you administer are configured for the role they serve. In this case, it's your job to make sure the students cannot intentionally or inadvertently interfere with the education of other students. Specifically, students should not be able to: -Disable the machine beyond a point from which it easily restored to a working state by a teacher or other students -Degrade the network performance to a point that affects other school activities -Put the school in legal jeopardy
You're correct when you say "learning and exploration," but you take it in the wrong direction. In a school environment, "learning and exploration" happens within the confines of the pre-existing curriculum. Why teach students about a cell when they can have one-on-one time with a interactive flash animation of a cell? Why just talk about the Civil War when students can play with a 3D Civil War simulation? Why play tapes of French speakers to a French class when they can be connected via VOIP with real French speakers who are learning English? Why teach the unit circle when students can play with it on a screen?
The list goes on and on! That's the kind of learning and exploration that technology allows, but it only works when the computers are in a reliable state. 8 years experience have shown me that this is only possible when the computers are sufficiently locked-down and students use the machines with minimal privileges. Back in the day, I ran a Win 98 lab. My school was on the late edge of the tech curve, and so sufficient security software was lacking. I ended up having to reimage the lab every few weeks as machine after machine went down to student after student loading useless crap on them. If I wanted to fix the machine during class, I'd have to burn 5-10 minutes (up 25% of my teaching period) silently cursing at a monitor instead of teaching or helping students. Over the years, we've gone from Win 98 to XP to Linux w/XP over rdesktop. Students now have a network store where they can keep files, but no install privileges on the machines. Now learning and exploration *is* happening in my lab, because when I try to show my students something cool, the machines remain working. They don't labor under the weight of god-knows-what installed and running in the background.
Here's the heart of this issue: I've taught a lot of cool things over the years. C++, Java, web design, 3d-modeling, image manipulation. We would spend some time talking about TCP and IP and how the Internet works. We would learn about fractal terrain generation and modeling natural phenomena. All of my classes were centered around open-ended projects with lots of opportunities to play, explore and push the limits of your understanding on your own. Given all of this cool stuff and all of the opportunities to challenge oneself and grow, the average kid on the average day would rather spend 1.5 days of a 5 day project doing the bare minimum, just so they could play jewelbox for the remaining 3.5 days. There were plenty of kids who stood out and really pushed the boundaries on their own. A number of kids surprised me, and quite a few kids experienced a lot of success in my class while struggling in other classes.
Still, when the average kid on the average day would rather stare at a monitor and surf the web for screen savers instead of actually learning the material, leaving the computers in an unsecured state is asking for a lab filled with malfunctioning machines. This is true regardless of who is leading the class and how expert s/he is at maintaining discipline in a classroom. The teacher can't be everywhere.
In every (Ohio) public school district that I've worked in, teacher pay was determined by a very simple grid of years experience vs education. The district had a base salary, and every cell on the grid was merely a percentage (over 100%) of the base salary. Stipends for coaching/advising were also percentages (albeit much smaller) of the base salary.
I'm not sure how salaried pay could be MORE simple. Starting this school year, I knew exactly how much I was going to be paid (gross) and was able to calculate by hand (within $20) how much my net would be.
I'm reading a lot of skepticism from folks who think that armchair quarterbacking is equivalent to real intellectualism. Obviously the OP is experienced as a teacher (already has something that works), familiar with all of the plusses/minuses of technology (not a technophobe), and wanting to do right by his students. I find it tremendously unfortunate that people would rather wag their finger than help. We're on the freaking Internet! The least you can do is link to something that isn't goatse.
Anyhoo, I've been using a Smart Board and Airliner Slate in my high school math classroom for a year and a half now. I'm still trying new ways of using the technology to enrich my lessons and grab kids who aren't already enthralled with my magnetic personality and fantastic sense of humor. The best piece of advice I can give you is to have appropriate expectations. We all have this vision of clicking a button and seeing something zoom across the screen as the class begins cheering. That's not going to happen.
Here are some things I've learned over the past 18 months
The first time you do anything, it will take 4 times longer than normal. Plan accordingly
For the first week or so, you'll go a little slower than you normally do. Keep at it. You're just on the learning curve. After 2 weeks or so, you'll find that you're actually being more efficient
Technology is great for speeding up all of those little logistical things that we have to do in class. Erasing the board is my bugaboo, because I use lots of board space. Now I just hit "next page," and I save 2-3 minutes a period. That's another example, or extra one-on-one time with the kids who need it.
If you can, don't work from the front of the class. The thing that I loved the most about my slate is that it allowed me to cruise around the room as I lectured. By breaking that invisible wall, students became more focused, horseplay dropped off, and I could more easily identify those students who were lagging behind or struggling. Some kids just NEED you to be their extra-special buddy and stand by them for the period.
You have colors now. GO NUTS! I use colors to highlight important terms or to discriminate between steps in a math problem. Don't neglect the potential of the on-screen highlighter either (it's for more than just highlighting words the way you did in your college textbook).
Any easy way of spicing up your lessons: You have a diagram. Go on Google Images and find a real-world picture that illustrates the diagram. Fade it and put the diagram over top of it. Now you have a diagram, and the kids immediately see how the diagram could exist in the real world. I do it for slope, by browsing the Mars Rovers page for pictures of a hill. I put the hill on a grid, and we talk about slope. I take a minute to talk about the challenges the Rover team faces as they plan the route for each rover.
Another easy way: Pick a concept that the kids have difficulty getting. Google the concept with keywords like flash or applet. See if you can't find some kind of interactive doo-dad that let's you play with the concept. Figure out how you can use it in class. If possible, have a weak student do the button pushing when you demo the app in class. I do some variation of this when I teach Trig transformations (precalc) and writing a line to connect two points (Algebra). Don't overdo it though. I go for one flashy lesson each unit.
Recording notes has been a mixed bag for me. I recorded them and put them online for kids to download. I had no problem getting kids to continue taking notes in class, because I made them. Since I had the slate, I could see who was NOT taking notes and get them working again. I even did notebook checks where I made my [freshmen] produce/turn in notes from two weeks ago. My problem was that no one would take advantage of the on-line notes. I use Googl
The holy grail for me has been software that deals with speech impediments. I stutter. I'm fluent enough that I function fairly well in real life (I'm a high school teacher), but speech recognition software has universally failed to meet my needs.
1) Bill Gates the individual is doing this, not Microsoft the business. They actually do have separate bank accounts. 2) You are assuming that all of Microsoft's profits are somehow coming from the "public works" budgets of federal, state and local governments. This is a staggeringly incorrect assumption. 3) You forget the AIDS is killing an entire generation of Africans, with 20% of some countries' population being infected with HIV. You can tut-tut all you want about how AIDS is avoidable, but it isn't so simple in regions where education is scarce, protection is more scarce, and free time is plentiful.
If I understand the article correctly, it is thinking solely in terms of revenue generated rather than popularity. For instance, Google Maps/Earth is wildly popular and there really aren't too many applications like it, but can you say that those products have made Google a substantial amount of cash? In comparison to their ad business, I don't think so.
From a Wall Street point-of-view, this is troubling. You have a large business in a fast moving market hanging its entire hat on a single technology.
I'm sorry, but I own the trademark rights to the words "inane" and "lawsuit". Lucky for you I have very generous liscening terms that will keep you out of court.
Interestly enough, this search leads to several other Stealth trademarks. I checked for torrent but couldn't find registered to this individual...though I didn't try looking too hard. However, it is obvious that the faster a knowledgeable judge can issue a smack down to this guy, the better.
Slashdot Mirror
We're almost to this article's end-of-life as it gets pushed to the bottom. I easily have 40 recommendations here, and I can't thank you all enough. Now my only problem is I have to read all of these books!
Many thanks!
-T
God help us if the SAT is "life".
Fortunately, most of my students have completed the SAT before I get them.
And here I thought "Extreme Hosting" was just a slogan.
I think you're mistaken. I also live in this area, and work nearby.
While I'm sure there may be a few Amish/Mennonites, they certainly aren't there in any large number. The area around is airport has some farming, but has just as many housing developments and undeveloped land (with trees). It is also isn't flat. Map here http://tinyurl.com/8otcxn
Let's not try to play armchair quarterback too much. He obviously had an incentive to not crash. He lived in Bath, so he flew into the airport a lot and was probably familiar with the area. If safely landing in a field was available to him, I'm sure he would have taken advantage of the opportunity instead of crashing into a residential neighborhood like he did (he hit a vacant house). It was night, so he probably would have had a hard time spotting a field.
I taught in a laptop school several years ago. The technology was JUST maturing then, but most of my problems were person-driven rather than technology-driven.
Here are my tips
1) Firmly establish who actually owns what, because that determines the scope of your reach. If the computers are still school property, you have a lot more reach than if the kids buy them up front or buy on an installment plan.
2) Either way, you're going to have to amend your Acceptable Use Policy to address issues brought up by the laptops. I would do some research into other laptop schools and download their AUP. In fact, contacting other laptop schools is probably a good idea in general. It's always better to make your first mistakes vicariously through someone else.
3) Partition the laptops so that user data is stored on a separate partition, and invest in a good disk-imaging system. You're going to be imaging a lot of laptops after a few weeks. No matter how hard you lock them down, someone is going to screw something up so royally that you can spend 6 hours fixing it or 10 minutes imaging the disk, and it will happen frequently (how frequently depends on school size). In fact, you may want to get clever and make 3 partitions. 1 main, 1 user data, and 1 unmounted that holds a local copy of your image file. Image your main partition only, copy it to your "hidden" partition, and image the whole thing for deployment.
4) Figure out a theft-protection mechanism. This will eventually become an issue. Laptop insurance/warranties will also be an issue. If 15% of the laptops begin malfunctioning near the end of a 4-year-run, that will be enough to make it difficult for teachers to rely on those machines for classroom exercises. Nothing it more frustrating than having a whole lesson plan come to a stand-still because 4 kids' computers won't work. I've had it happen to me plenty of times. These also tend to be the kids who don't need any additional distractions.
5) If these are school-owned laptops, then you have a great deal of latitude in locking them down. Remote monitoring is another issue, and I would consult your district's attorney. As far as locking them down, the guiding question should be "what level of security supports the curriculum." Most slashdot users will think of these laptops as computers, with all of the implied potential. Thus any lockdowns curb that potential, and in turn the student's freedoms and opportunity. While this is a valid mode of thinking for personal machines intended for personal purposes, it is the wrong mindset to have in an educational environment. For starters, most students will never come close to tapping that potential (they want to surf the web and IM).
These laptops are being purchased to augment your curriculum, and should be configured in a way that makes it a platform for your curriculum. This may involve lots of restrictions, or just enough to keep a kid from accidentally breaking something. While you'll probably learn as you go, you should already have some idea of where that line is. If you don't, I'd recommend more research and consultation/training your teachers before writing that big check.
With totally unlocked computers, it is likely that a significant portion of the machines will begin malfunctioning due to user-abuse: "I'm going to install every piece of crap software I find! Isn't it great?" While it won't be a majority, it will be enough to make it difficult for teachers to rely on the machines to function properly during an activity (see above).
It's a great example of belief creating reality, however. If people believe that the Monday after Thanksgiving is the biggest online shopping day of the year, then retailers are going to start offering "Cyber Monday Specials." This, in turn, will drive more people to shop that day. Rinse and repeat.
From a marketing point of view, it is actually quite clever.
the main plot device for next summer's blockbuster movie (tentatively titled "Star Portal").
-T
PS. Porno directors are already casting for the X-rated adaptation, tentatively titled "Star Hole"
To provide a counter-point, I've been teaching beginning programming to high school students for several years now. My classes are usually mixed between the kids who would get an A if I gave all of my lectures in pig-latin, the "normal" kids, and the kids whose greatest aim in life is to play the same stupid flash game every day. I'm also in a public school environment where I cannot assume that students are able to program at home. All of my labs consume several days of class time. This definitely slows me down, but it also lets me get really picky with their coding styles. I can harp on things like making easy-to-read code, picking good variable names, comments, etc.
I start with a broad overview of the architecture of a computer. We discuss the classical von Neumann machine, and how it applies to a modern computer. I spend some time discussing the significant bits of a modern computer, discussing a modern CPU in the broadest terms, and usually crack open a machine and have the kids huddle around while I point out various parts on the motherboard. That takes 2-3 days.
We then do a very broad overview of the history of computers, and I usually make them watch a video just to change things up. In the past, we worked our way through the better part of a lengthy series on the history of computers, and I made them write papers. This year is much more modest, with a 1-hour Modern Marvels episode and some class discussion. That takes 2-3 days.
I then go through the general hierarchy of programming languages, from machine code on up, and an overview of the compilation process, naming the different files that are produced along the way. My goal is to simply give kids an idea of how things work and enough information that they could learn more on their own if they wanted to. That takes 1 day.
The rest of the year is programming.
When we get into actual programming, I use the Eclipse IDE and C++. I know people on Slashdot have VERY STRONG opinions about these choices, but I find that those tools really meet the needs of my course. In short, teaching unix makefiles and gcc is NOT part of my course's scope, and I have to act both as a feeder for our AP course and a prep for seniors going off to college.
My general curriculum goes something like this
1) Datatypes and variables
2) Arithmetic
3) Input and Output (cin, cout)
**I do those topic twice. I go through once to give the kids enough information to write some basic programs. Then I go through again more in depth, talking about the sizes/limitations of the datatypes, ints vs doubles, iomanip, the cin streametc etc.
4) Conditionals, if, if/else, switch
5) Loops (for and while)
My first semester usually ends somewhere between for and while loops. Second semester goes like this
6) Review of concepts for kids who took the first semester last year
7) Loops, again and with greater complexity
8) Functions (I really agonized over when to teach functions. I finally decided to do it after loops so that students can write meaningful and substantial functions for more substantial and complex programs)
9) File I/O
10) Arrays
11) Searches, sorts and some basic runtime analysis.
I usually spend between 40-60% of my class time in labs. At the beginning of the semester, I usually have to "invent" reasons for labs. Once we get past that initial hump and kids can write basic programs on their own, I assign a lab when I think I've covered enough material that I ought to make them practice something. This usually works out to be about 5-7 days of lecture, followed by 7-10 days of lab.
Whenever I introduce a new topic, I usually start by posing a problem, and use the new concept/syntax as the solution to the problem. I spend some time talking about what happens inside of the computer when to use that new syntax, and what kind of "real world" situations would require its use. We then discuss the concept in depth, with multiple examples and what-ifs. At this point, we're usually writing a little dem
Because you can do a little at a time, when you have the time (10 free minutes. Let's see what my college buddy did today)
Because its really not that much work (you make it sound like it takes hours and hours)
Because there is an entire social norm set up around calling people that doesn't necessarily fit into a person's schedule. (why do you think people spend 2 minutes sending a text message that would have taken 20 seconds to call and say). This is doubly true for far-flung friends that you haven't talked to in a while.
Because you can't show someone pictures of your trip to Spain over the phone.
Because reconnecting with lost friends is both fun and difficult. "YAY! I found you. Do we have anything to talk about now, or are we just warm memories from days gone by"
Because of any number of other reasons that make perfect sense to the person doing it. If they don't make sense to you, well, that's completely irrelevant. It's not about you.
I resisted Facebook for a long time. As a high school teacher, my profile is completely private and a religiously de-tag myself on people's albums. I joined it this summer at the urging of a friend, and have really enjoyed being able to reconnect with far-flung friends. It's a poor surrogate for that shared experience that underlays many friendships, but it is better than nothing when someone is several time zones away.
There isn't a teacher out there who wouldn't pull the 20% kid aside and say "Look. You bombed. But, over next quarter/semester, if you do all/most of your homework and manage to get a C/B/whatever, I'll pass you."
My school district is looking at a similar policy, and I'm not happy with it. I don't mind putting a "floor" under students in freefall (especially when there are out-of-school forces in play), but its something that you do on a case-by-case basis according to the needs of the student.
If a district's teachers are not looking out for their kids this way, you have a deeper problem than a grading policy.
I own a Mac, so I had to boot into XP to run VMWare Server and finish configuring the FreeBSD "machine" for my class. The disk image will eventually be run on the school's servers, which I believe are running Windows Server 2003.
I'm not sure what the big deal is with FreeBSD and OpenBSD. VirtualBox outright claims that OpenBSD should work no problem, but my attempted install of OpenBSD was nothing but total carnage. FreeBSD worked fine until I tried to track their stable tree. Apparently there are some I/O timing issues that make an I/O intensive operation (like "build makeworld") a risky endeavor. I don't even think I got through make buildkernel, and recommended solutions did nothing.
I'm not ideologically wed to FreeBSD (in fact I quickly grew tired of running it as a desktop environment), but I do understand its layout pretty well. Most importantly, I know how to create a highly restrictive jailed environment for my students, which allows me to make the server accessible from home. I'm sure you could do something similar under Linux, but most of the solutions I found were too generous for my liking, and I couldn't be arsed to repeat the process of figuring stuff out.
I spent a lot of time trying to get VirtualBox to play nice with FreeBSD. I'm much more familiar with BSD-flavored *nix (esp re: creating jailed environments), so I run a FreeBSD box as a cvs server for the programming classes I teach. I planned on migrating this function to a virtual machine this year. Unfortunately, VirtualBox would go down in flames every time I did a build-world. Web searches availed little.
I tried using OpenBSD instead, but that ended up being worse. The install looked something like
I eventually had to migrate my partially-finished FreeBSD disk to VMWare and finish my work there. It's a bit of a bummer, because VirtualBox does appear to have some really neat features, especially for XP guests. Still, I gotta use what meets my needs.
$50/month?
Sucker! I only pay $49.95.
I think the concerns revolve more around how the technology was developed and deployed than the concept of using technology itself. No voting system is tamper-proof, but the current batch of voting systems fail the most basic tests for reliability and security.
If a system was developed/deployed that was as resistant to electronic manipulation as (for instance) my banking information, I'm sure most of the people here would have few objections (except for the handful who always think they know better than everyone else).
Well, optical scan voting systems are a business as well. Diebold even has a line out. Don't indulge too much in the "evil corporation and corrupt government" line of thought. While I'm sure it is accurate in some cases, using it as a sweeping analogy just weakens your overall argument.
Optical scanning seems to be currently in vogue in Ohio. After some controversy, Cuyahoga county (metro Cleveland) is in the process of abandoning its touch-screen voting machine for optical scanning. It won't be ready for the primary, but will hopefully be ready for the general election. Unfortunately, optical scanning also has some semi-legitimate objections. The biggest objection is that optical scanning systems don't warn the voter is s/he made a mistake.
At first glance, it is baffling how an intelligent person can screw up something as idiot-proof as filling in a bubble. It isn't too hard, however, to imagine situations where an otherwise intelligent person could make a mistake. Intelligence isn't a legal requirement for voting anyway. Unfortunately, reasonable and commonsense solutions to this issue will probably play backseat to elaborate and expensive solutions that create twice as many problems as they solve. That's pretty much how we got here in the first place, and wasted millions of dollars of taxpayer money on an unreliable system.
I believe she addressed this when she discussed how different families have different values, and no one can dictate what content parents should allow in their homes.
Now clearly, she (like anyone) has some bias. She's nice enough to make it fairly obvious in her writing. It is the reader's job to filter it out.
You're correct when you say "learning and exploration," but you take it in the wrong direction. In a school environment, "learning and exploration" happens within the confines of the pre-existing curriculum. Why teach students about a cell when they can have one-on-one time with a interactive flash animation of a cell? Why just talk about the Civil War when students can play with a 3D Civil War simulation? Why play tapes of French speakers to a French class when they can be connected via VOIP with real French speakers who are learning English? Why teach the unit circle when students can play with it on a screen?
The list goes on and on! That's the kind of learning and exploration that technology allows, but it only works when the computers are in a reliable state. 8 years experience have shown me that this is only possible when the computers are sufficiently locked-down and students use the machines with minimal privileges. Back in the day, I ran a Win 98 lab. My school was on the late edge of the tech curve, and so sufficient security software was lacking. I ended up having to reimage the lab every few weeks as machine after machine went down to student after student loading useless crap on them. If I wanted to fix the machine during class, I'd have to burn 5-10 minutes (up 25% of my teaching period) silently cursing at a monitor instead of teaching or helping students. Over the years, we've gone from Win 98 to XP to Linux w/XP over rdesktop. Students now have a network store where they can keep files, but no install privileges on the machines. Now learning and exploration *is* happening in my lab, because when I try to show my students something cool, the machines remain working. They don't labor under the weight of god-knows-what installed and running in the background.
Here's the heart of this issue: I've taught a lot of cool things over the years. C++, Java, web design, 3d-modeling, image manipulation. We would spend some time talking about TCP and IP and how the Internet works. We would learn about fractal terrain generation and modeling natural phenomena. All of my classes were centered around open-ended projects with lots of opportunities to play, explore and push the limits of your understanding on your own. Given all of this cool stuff and all of the opportunities to challenge oneself and grow, the average kid on the average day would rather spend 1.5 days of a 5 day project doing the bare minimum, just so they could play jewelbox for the remaining 3.5 days. There were plenty of kids who stood out and really pushed the boundaries on their own. A number of kids surprised me, and quite a few kids experienced a lot of success in my class while struggling in other classes.
Still, when the average kid on the average day would rather stare at a monitor and surf the web for screen savers instead of actually learning the material, leaving the computers in an unsecured state is asking for a lab filled with malfunctioning machines. This is true regardless of who is leading the class and how expert s/he is at maintaining discipline in a classroom. The teacher can't be everywhere.
In every (Ohio) public school district that I've worked in, teacher pay was determined by a very simple grid of years experience vs education. The district had a base salary, and every cell on the grid was merely a percentage (over 100%) of the base salary. Stipends for coaching/advising were also percentages (albeit much smaller) of the base salary.
I'm not sure how salaried pay could be MORE simple. Starting this school year, I knew exactly how much I was going to be paid (gross) and was able to calculate by hand (within $20) how much my net would be.
The holy grail for me has been software that deals with speech impediments. I stutter. I'm fluent enough that I function fairly well in real life (I'm a high school teacher), but speech recognition software has universally failed to meet my needs.
All of the words have too many s's.
Uncovered by the research: When the volcano is about to explode, it sounds like Yoko Ono.
1) Bill Gates the individual is doing this, not Microsoft the business. They actually do have separate bank accounts.
2) You are assuming that all of Microsoft's profits are somehow coming from the "public works" budgets of federal, state and local governments. This is a staggeringly incorrect assumption.
3) You forget the AIDS is killing an entire generation of Africans, with 20% of some countries' population being infected with HIV. You can tut-tut all you want about how AIDS is avoidable, but it isn't so simple in regions where education is scarce, protection is more scarce, and free time is plentiful.
If I understand the article correctly, it is thinking solely in terms of revenue generated rather than popularity. For instance, Google Maps/Earth is wildly popular and there really aren't too many applications like it, but can you say that those products have made Google a substantial amount of cash? In comparison to their ad business, I don't think so.
From a Wall Street point-of-view, this is troubling. You have a large business in a fast moving market hanging its entire hat on a single technology.
I'm sorry, but I own the trademark rights to the words "inane" and "lawsuit". Lucky for you I have very generous liscening terms that will keep you out of court.
I found the original trademark:
2 o6.2.511
http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/jumpto?f=doc&state=saf
Interestly enough, this search leads to several other Stealth trademarks. I checked for torrent but couldn't find registered to this individual...though I didn't try looking too hard. However, it is obvious that the faster a knowledgeable judge can issue a smack down to this guy, the better.