Dr. Jess - Raw Data

The periodic table has always seemed to me to be some large poster in the corner of the Science class. But now comes the Dynamic Periodic Table. This is very cool!

There are a few sites on the web that I always seem to find my way back to. One of them is the Daily Overlook. One of the sites of the day is…. Terry Sebastian’s Africa in 30 days. This site has a slide show on Africa. The photos are compelling and the music with it, is dramatic. The perfect accompaniment to the pictures. I have found myself going back to this web site because of the outstanding pictures. They just demand to be seen and seen again.

Take a tour now

Wednesday, July 23, 2008, I had the wonderful pleasure of meeting so many new teachers at Ridgeway Middle School.  I presented a brief overview of Learning Village, our systems repository of curriculum and lesson plans. During my 1/2 hour I had many insightful questions and quite a few very happy teachers who loved the program. They responded to me personally after the meeting and I was quite pleased. Others in our division, received equal praise for their presentations. This was a great way to introduce new teachers to our technology products. I wish those teachers a wonderful school year!

The tech specialists in my division recently received new laptops to replace the aging ones we have been using for the past 4 years. So in migrating to the new laptops, I had to figure out what to do with my old data. There are a lot of very important documents, at least to me, on that machine. Eventually they will be wiped clean. So I had to copy everything off of the old machine and …… do I really want to put all the junk on the new machine as well as the important stuff. Then I have to figure out what to save and what to delete. So the best thing was to back all the data up to a portable usb hard drive. Then when I need specific files, I can retrieve them. I purchased a 500 gb portable usb hard drive which was pretty cheap as far a storage was concerned. I paid $85 and received a $10 rebate. Not to bad. Initially it took about 30 minutes to back up the computer, but now my latest backup took about 14 minutes.

Teachers should be saving their important files to portable hard drives because you never know which classroom you will be moved to, never know if the computer in you room is the same one that was there last year, and you need to safe guard important documents that keep you as a viable effective teacher. SO BACK IT UP!

I experienced the most wonderful vacation this past month.  My wife and I flew to San Francisco stayed a few days, rented a car and drove up highway 101 all the way to Vancouver Canada.  We made stops along the way in the most incredible places.  We experienced two redwood forests.  Probably one of the most inspiring experiences was hiking the Lady Bird Johnson trail.  The incredible size of the redwood trees compared to the  human scale is to bring on reverence.  Both my wife and I came away from this experience with a real respect for these trees.  They could have all been cut down and logged into history.  We are quite fortunate that many are alive and cared for.

Every now and then you come accross a web site that is just pure fun! No real heavy stuff, just something to have fun with. The NURU,LLC guys have something that is creatively fun. What does your phone number spell? So here is the link.

When I visit schools I often bring my TLA projector. It’s easier for me to project my laptop screen than to have several teachers look over my shoulder. There are two types of projectors which utilize either LCD or DLP technology. “The DLP chip is a reflective surface made up of thousands of tiny, hinged mirrors. Each mirror represents a single pixel. LCD projectors typically contain three distinct glass panels: one each for the red, green, and blue components of the image signal being fed into the projector. As light passes through these LCD panels, individual pixels can be opened to allow light to pass or closed to block the light.” One of the problems concerned the trade offs “No longer do you have to trade readability … for color.” The difference now is about cost. On the low end projectors, the ones that most schools would be purchasing, the difference between the two is negligible. Most LCD manufactures ask that the filters on their projectors be cleaned every 100 hours of use. That’s pretty easy except if the projector is hanging from the ceiling. The real cost of long term projectors is the replacement of lamps. LCD lamps tend to last longer and be slightly cheaper.

Source: http://www.eschoolnews.com    Wed, Apr 16, 2008

I happen to be a fan of John C. Dvorak. He is a “CrankyGeek” and runs a blog. I was watching the current vidcast and one of his guests, David Sparks, replied to John’s question about the necessity of belonging to a social network. His reply was…. “you should be in social networks that are important to your industry because…. What is a network? “… either you are looking for the solution to your problem or be the solution to someone else’s problem.” How do you find out? The answer is BE IN A SOCIAL NETWORK!

Our ed tech group has, over the past few months, had several discussions on the misuse of PowerPoint as means to get one’s message across. Think about it, how many times have you sat through a pd (professional development) session with an endless PowerPoint presentation filled with text that is way to small to read. Then have the presenter read it to you, even after they provided handouts of the complete presentation. What is PowerPoint really all about? Paying attention to the audience’s point of view. What is the audience remembering about what you are presenting? Cliff Atkinson, author of beyond bullet points states the first rule ” ….is to know your audience well”. This is so true! I have sat in presentations where the speaker had no clue about who the audience was and what kind of experience was common to all. They wound up speaking down to us because of false assumptions. As more ideas come to the forefront I will report on them.

This past weekend I was reading my wife’s copy of the Wall Street Journal and in the Weekend Journal section, back page, there was a review written by David Littlejohn of Cezanne’s “Bather”. This is a painting of a young man in trunks walking on what looks like rocks covered in a thin film of water. Now, I have seen this painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York many years ago. The problem I had then was that I did not know what to look for in this painting and what it is that makes it so outstanding. Mr. Littlejohn takes this painting apart and reconstructs it in a very meaningful way, so that I now fully understand the “why” of this painting. “…a creature of the artist’s mind.”  As a young man many years ago I just looked at it and probably thought, “nice painting!” It is with this thought in mind that I remind teachers that sometimes asking an older more experienced teacher about “why” we do the things we do, brings deeper insight into methodology of instruction. Translate that to the students. Many times we begin instruction without setting the stage for that instruction. It is important to explain to students why we are studying-learning something and how it fits into the overall scheme of things.