Rocky's adventure in education

New job in Northborough

2010-03-28T09:44:00.000-07:00

Yea, I have accepted a new position as technology specialist at the Peaslee School (K-5). It should be a lot of fun being back in an intense learning environment. I can't wait to get started. I'll be looking after the IT lab and the schools technical infrastructure while helping teachers and students to leverage technology towards improved learning skills. Long list of secondary activities. Usually this position includes web sites, photography and AV stuff, which are fun also. Looks like they have not used LOGO to introduce math and programming concepts so I'll be trying to develop some reusable curriculum assets for them as well.

love to learn, learn to love.....its a good day.

Braggin on our daughter Allyson

2010-03-28T09:41:00.000-07:00

Hey our daughter Allyson, an educator in New Hampshire, was selected to be one of those representing the state to this summers educational summit in Washington DC. She is a peach and will advocate for the 'right stuff'. Proud daddy.

Mass "Race to the Top" proposal

2010-03-04T12:05:00.000-08:00

The Massachusetts proposal (PDF) for a portion of the 4.35 billion funding
was listed on the US DOE page here

The PDF at the Federal site is unreadable, probably someones secretary scanned it badly...
the original back at the statehouse is much better

Seymour Papert

2010-03-04T09:55:00.000-08:00

Just finished Seymour's book "The Children's Machine" and posted my notes on my Edu 21st page, see link over there --> . Lots of really good stuff that we should have evolved towards a lot faster.He wrote it in 1993, and here we are 17 years later with the fallout of "Leaving More Children Behind than Ever" , having followed on the heals of the earlier "America 2000".

Hopefully the new administration will sponsor more variation and less hot air than the last.
In the course of writing my notes I came across this wonderful talk given by Seymour in 1999 for the Diversity Task Force convened by Vice President Al Gore. Check it out...I love this guy.

Turns out he is working still in Maine with at risk youth ( similar to the institution I was working for earlier RFK Children's Action Corps ) (and whose school unfortunately now is without teachers for technology, music, art, media due to state budget cutbacks)

One Laptop per Child 2012 XO-3 design

2010-01-01T09:21:00.000-08:00

http://blog.laptop.org/2009/12/24/xo-3-concept/

Open Learning Networks

2010-01-01T08:36:00.000-08:00

http://ineducation.ca/

excerpt about: articles and reviews of works that explore ideas in teacher education, as well as broader and more inclusive discussions in education. We envision works that augment the latitude and significance of the idea of education, while acknowledging the ubiquitous growth of the digital arts and sciences in the everyday practice of life and how that might (in)form notions of formal and informal education.

the first article in the first issue, the case for Open Learning Networks, provides the rational and research behind the teaching style that I just blundered into, by intuition. I moved the RFK library pages into the cloud in 2007 and began student assignments in the cloud in the 2008 summer session, continuing that fall. The RFK infrastructure at Google persists to this day (unfortunately I left prior to full transfer to teachers). Some of the newer operating systems coming down the pike for netbooks (Chrome OS, Jolicloud, Moblinux, Android) will really lend themselves to this model. The article goes deeper into functional partitioning which would be needed to implement on any kind of scale.

Happy New Year...rocky

The Intergenerational School

2009-12-09T19:29:00.000-08:00

Saw a great report on the Intergenerational School on PBS.
What a terrific idea, pairing senior mentors with young ones for reading and various kinds of school assistance. Here is one in OHio. Someone should start a similar charter school here....

Tech Tip: Poor man's document camera

2009-12-02T14:29:00.000-08:00

Want a document camera but school does not have the 300-400 $$???

Get a 14$ gooseneck web cam for USB. I like the Hue HD web cam.
duck tape it to a couple dead hard drives for weight, and plug into the USB port of your laptop.
Rotate the image 180 if you want to place it pointed down above a document. Prrrresto! , poor man's doc camera and it works great!

Education in the 21st century

2009-12-02T14:01:00.000-08:00

Well, down the rabbit hole we go again.....
The US is proclaiming that education is a big priority, but the layoffs in the schools continue unabated.

The non-profit sector that services the most unfortunate among us, who for one reason or another can't hack it in the public schools, really took it on the chin with huge cutbacks in the departments of youth services (DYS) and children and families (DCF) that trickled down to layoffs at Robert F. Kennedy Children Action Corps where I was teaching technology. They had already killed the shop courses in 2008 where kids learned how to use tools and build stuff. The media/library person left that year and was never replaced and then Title 1 reading was gone. Now Art and the IT courses are gone. I was teaching Career Exploration and Social Skills/Character Ed as well so presumably they are gone too. Down to just basic ELA, Math, Science, History , I guess, with an emphasis on teaching to the MCAS. Pretty sad when you think that this is the generation upon which we are pinning our hopes of human survival.

We have all these grand ideas about the direction that education SHOULD go in ( emphasis on critical thinking, creativity , collaboration, technology, etc) but the governance is driving something (standardized testing) with its funding and its messaging , that is about 180 degrees out.

Now the NFL is pushing their Play60 exercise program for kids while we are building schools with no playgrounds and no recess.

We are shipping money out of Washington to keep teachers working but at the local level they get laid off.

We send IT jobs overseas because there are insufficient skilled workers (they say) but we have not the will to skill up our own kids?

Confused? Just ask Alice....its a bummer.

ubuntu server notes

2007-06-14T05:56:00.000-07:00

installing web admin

Perl tips

2007-05-24T09:28:00.000-07:00

located a GD module that would install just do at command line
```
ppm install http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/ppms/GD.ppd
```
Good examples at http://linuxgazette.net/issue83/padala.html
also need to load GD:graph and GD::text ppm install http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/ppms/GDTextUtil.ppdppm install http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/ppms/GDGraph.ppd

Ghosting dual boot

2007-05-21T07:04:00.000-07:00

trying to ghost dual boot Tecra M2

Ghost10 needs to be installed on windows before it can image a drive..there does not seem to be a way to boot it except for recovery
Ghost2003 with external usb dvd seems to boot OK but hangs trying to get the MFT table

Master Plan Notes

2007-04-17T16:34:00.000-07:00

This is a reminder to put together a long term IM development plan.

include using Basecamp as the project management platform
establish development platform , and goal to move finished, tested apps to production server
start developing some sharepoint expertise with long term goal of RFK wide intranet
Pilot use of chat technology for non-emergency school-residence communications as well as replacement for several classes of residence logging, are transcripts good enough?
Develop prioritized list of development projects
Infrastructure for generic form based data collection to email to implementation agent, essentially single step nworkflow except that email can be combined with processing
Infrastructure for multi-step work flow, essentially web based checklist augmented with links to forms based steps, whose steps yield results that tie back into the flow
Prime candidates for collaborative data collection and reporting are

face sheets
incident reporting
BDM and Grades
take a look at external data requirements

Edubuntu dapper release is out....

2006-06-03T18:15:00.000-07:00

This note will capture learnings from The new Edubuntu release

We are back -Fun with Dapper and X11

2006-05-02T12:00:00.000-07:00

I have not been back here in a while....at present I am messing with
bringing up the lastest Edubuntu release at school....the flight 6 dapper drake release
http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/flight6

It looks really great, super integration with our windows network.
So far though I cannot get AVI's to play.

Had a really great vacation visiting Dianne's Uncle Dick and Aunt Suzie in Fort Worth Texas.....

IE, FireFTP and managing web based content

2005-12-17T08:06:00.000-08:00

was musing lately about the aggravation of maintaining web content in todays ISPscape.

One of mine (1&1) has these really long FTP usernames constructed by concatening the already obscure base username with the ftp site name...so you wind up with impossible to remember access info like username: u12787652333teamsys password:yourpassword.

Now if you maintain things from multiple computers, its gets tough to sync all your access info for the various client tools you use...e.g. ftp, ws-ftp, etc. etc. ......

Lots of my web content is in nature of tech tips, link lists, cheat sheets etc. I would really like something like a index list of files at the site, inside my browser window, and a [ right-mouse, open-with-program] type of functionality that would bring up the file, and write it back on exit.

The ISP had this FAQ note about FTP'ing with Internet Explorer that stated that you could upload this way with ftp://nodename.com/ types of URLS. I have seen this before as a way of reading web files , but writing??? no way , I assumed the author was confused, but decided to try it. They never actually stated HOW to do it, so I thought , well just put in the access info and see if some new IE wizzy pops up. None did, as expected so I was about to leave when I thought to give the old cut,copy, paste paradigm a try.....it worked!!

Well thats nifty, I thought , but I detest IE on general principle, so I bet Firefox would support this as well but it didn't. Then came across FireFTP extention.

Could not get it to work from the address line as advertized but did get it to work from the tools menu. I was impressed with its speed and usability, integration with Firefox, ability to manage accounts etc. Operated very similar to my old favorite WS_FTP.

None of this solved my problem with access information portability, or gave me exactly what I was looking for , but got me closer.....

bye for now.

Here we go!

2005-10-20T19:27:00.000-07:00

Well , nephew Tyler inspired me and I now join the blogosphere with my travels thru education. I am a new teacher , teaching computer and technology to special needs boys ages 7-18. After being in the computer industry for 30 years, the change has been something of a culture shock and I am struggling with how to bring the fruits of the last 20 years of technology growth to a cash strapped and struggling institution.

I have a number of on-going projects and hope to document good results here for technology teachers who might be in a similar situation. I am taking a good look at Edubuntu, a Linux distribution with a focus on third world eductational institutions. Though I am working right here in Massachusetts, the place where I work is 3rd world in all important respects, believe me.

Well by for now, and thanks Tyler...good luck in Australia.......