The $5 TI-83plus

Alright, Cait is taking Advanced Algebra this coming year and needs a graphing calculator. The prescribed calculator, you may have guessed, is of the Texas variety. I do need to note that Cait hasn’t had her class yet and hasn’t been told which equipment to get. This information comes from a friend that checked the class site of their scheduled teacher. This is important information as you will see, read on…

There are a few issues I have with this situation. First, what the heck? A new TI-83plus is $95 bucks on Amazon. Really? This technology is like 20 years old! The TI-83 is based on the 82 and it should be no surprise that this technology is decades old. I remember friends having these calculators when I was a junior in high school. They look pretty much the same. I mean tech has evolved since then, the TI graphing calculators should be the iPhone of the education world by now with e-texts and learning management. Are you listening Texas Instruments shareholders? Haven’t they missed out on a great opportunity to change education? Why is this calculator stuck in the past and why is it still in the $100 price range new? (please scroll down and click through to the XKCD comic about this)

I imagine that the demand for the product is somewhat artificial (due to class requirements) and that is part of why the prices are so high. We got lucky, all the garage sales we went to this summer paid off and we found a TI-83plus for $5, which is what it is worth in my estimation. Anyway, I do hope the rest of you have similar luck in buying these calculators for your kids this coming school year.

That leads me to the other point I wanted to make in this post that I alluded to earlier. We as a staff have been told that we offer a free education to our community. That means that we can’t require students to purchase material for our classes. I am in full support of this policy even though it does create some problems for me and what I do in my class. We have been given the line and we will have to walk it very carefully.

I wonder if my daughter’s teachers will still require these graphing calculators this coming year? Does the district have the funds to provide each student a $100, two decade old design, calculator? I am curious to see what you all have to say and what my daughter says when she comes home on the first day of school.

MS Word to edit your digital pictures? Are kidding me?

I’ve been on a wonderful journey the last few months learning about photography and taking a lot of pictures to hone my skills. I think I’ve reached an intermediate skill level as an amateur, but don’t take my word for it, please judge for yourself and let me know what you think.

The other day my wife showed me a catalog of classes being offered through a local community education organization which will remain nameless in this post. I got excited, “Oh! check to see if there are classes on photography”, I say. Sure enough, there are a couple of classes on digital photography. I feel pretty confident that I don’t need an intro level class so I look toward the second, more advanced class, see description pictured.

My head almost exploded…

Since getting my Nikon D5000 last spring, I have been shooting up a storm and learning as much as I can about digital photography. The main source of this learning has been a couple of podcasts, This Week in Photography and later Photofocus. I got to tell you, listening to these shows, and I did go back and listen to all the back episodes of TWiP, I feel like I came as close as I’m ever going to get to opening up my cranium and pouring in knowledge. The education I got from these shows is awesome. I know about the basics and how to control my camera to get a good image, even if, as a newbie, I forget to look at the settings before I pull the trigger. I know which direction I want to go in stylistically and I know about what equipment I would like to get next. (I have spent about $2000 in my head already, shhh don’t tell my wife)

Anyway, I was thinking that it might be nice to get into a room of people like me that have an intermedia skill level and are interested in learning more. I would take a class and an experienced photographer would give the class assignments, then critique our work and give us suggestions for improvement. All things that clearly I won’t get by taking the class noted above.

Using Word to edit your pictures, that’s what they are teaching in this class? NO, not just this class; the intro class also noted how you will learn to use Word for your digital pictures, this class was for advanced use of WORD FOR PICTURES… (ouch, my head hurts again)

So clearly I won’t be taking this class and I’d suggest that you not bother with it either. Being that this is a educational technology blog, I suppose that I should relate this to education. Putting pictures in Word for editing makes my head hurt because I’m always catching kids at school pasting pictures into Word when what they should be doing is saving the picture to their computer as a jpg or gif for best results and easy management. If you are one of the elementary tech teachers that is teaching kids to do this, I’m sorry but you simply must stop. The pictures are easy to put into other documents or upload to a website when they are saved in original format. Pictures are also easier to edit using the right tool, and no, just because Word can crop and adjust brightness and contrast doesn’t mean you should use it for every picture.

I suppose that another lesson here is know what you are teaching. Being somewhat knowledgable about such things, I would have expected a second level class to talk about advanced photographic technique like using flash or editing your pictures with Photoshop Elements or Picasa Desktop. Heck, how about using something online to edit pictures like Photoshop Express, Picasa (which just got Picnik integration), or Pixlr, or Google it kids, there a bunch of online image editors out there now any one of which is preferable to using MS Word.

Boring Sea Urchin at the Field Museum in Chicago

Curation is an important skill in our information rich society. The skill is useful for organizing and digesting information that ultimately makes your Personal Learning Network or PLN. More on that later. Curation in the digital age is about what tools you use to get information and who you choose to listen to. Just like a museum curator chooses what to exhibit and the best way to display the artifacts of that exhibit. For example, one of the tools I use in my PLN is Twitter. Choosing who to follow is the way to curate the stream of information in Twitter.

For my professional life, I follow people like Howard Rheingold, an author and professor of social media. There are also other people I follow that speak directly to education in general and educational technology specifically. Twitter is great because of the near constant stream of information. Sometimes there is a link that I can choose to click to read more, or not. My Twitter feed also gets focused through curation when I follow new people that are mentioned or re-tweeted. This steers my focus along specific subjects, ed tech, iPhone/Apple news, and photography.

How do you get started? Most everyone does curation when surfing the web. You come across a blog or site you like, you add it to your favorites. You might also choose the organize your favorites into folders or at least prioritize them so the ones you visit more often are at the top of the list. You know that list of favorites? Thats your PLN, but a very inefficient one where you have to go to sites to get new information. A good PLN uses a tool that allows you to tune your sources, curation, and funnels that info to you, instead of you going to it. I tune Twitter for specific topics. Many people tweet information during the day, but all those tweets show up in just one place for me, my Twitter stream.

In the video below Howard Rheingold interviews Robert Scoble, a technology evangelist and social media guru. Robert talks a lot about the different tools he uses for gathering news and how those tools help him validate sources and see patterns in the stream, another aspect of curation.

In looking at Howard’s Blip.tv page, he has a number of interesting videos about new literacies. Among the concepts I’m looking forward to learning about is something that Howard calls “Infotention”, short for information attention I think. Howard also talks a lot about crap detection, which if you ask me, might be one of the most important things we can teach students today. Students will need to be able to curate information on the Internet in order to function in future jobs. Does technology education teach students about curation and crap detection?

Steve Vai search results on Image-Swirl

Check this out! I know some of you have seen the wonder wheel in Google Image Search. Well, it looks like this project from Google Labs is going to take the wheel to a new level, Google Image Swirl. This is kinda of neat because it groups the results and it uses pleasing animations.

Me when I graduated from Central Michigan University

Well, it’s not official just yet, but my professor tells me that I have completed the work for the capstone class and that finishes the requirements for the degree. The grade update and graduation thing should be happening by the end of the month.

For those of you that don’t know, this last class was a bear for me because I had messed up the first project. Last summer I worked my butt off coding data for a research project and I did a few things wrong. The research project didn’t fulfill the requirements of the class. It was about thus time last year when I found out that all my work was for naught. It was a little upsetting and definantly a blow to my self esteem. In discussions with my professor, we settled on a different project that isn’t research. I kinda wish I had known that I didn’t have to do a research project, since I know that research writing isn’t my strong suite. I guess that I assumed that I needed to do research because the class before was a graduate level research class.

Now that I’m done, I’ll be able to post to the blog again. I gave it up about a year and a half ago. (did you notice?) I told myself that I have too many irons I the fire. I wanted to reduce the things I do in order to get the grad school done. I don’t practice guitar like I want, I would love to start recording again and I’m sure the band would love me to practice more too.

Since I’m not worried about school work as much i feel like i can devote more time to other adventures again. Playing guitar every day is a goal. I’ve been learning the art of photography and i plan to step up my work there. I also plan to post to the blog at least once a week now.

I have also been wanting to do a educational technology podcast for a long time now. I help out at school with a news show. The show was live in the morning for a long time. However, homeroom time was reduced so much that it became difficult producing a live show. The solution last year was to do a podcast one day after school. Once I got into the rhythm of producing a podcast, I feel confident that I can make a good show. Will anyone listen to a podcast of mine is still in doubt. Stay tuned…

Alright! Thanks to everyone to who came to the session, I hope it was valuable and gets you started do the road to increased productivity. (You know, so you have more time to integrate technology into your classrooms.)

Here is a link to the prezi that I used for the session: http://prezi.com/no6gedbi7twy/

More Evernote Resources:
EvernotePhil on YouTube. Phil’s YouTube channel would be a good place to start if you are just getting started with Evernote. Evernote Blog (w/podcast) & Ron’s Evernote Tips, are good places to keep up on news and tips.

Then there is always @evernote on Twitter.

For advancing users, here is a link to a blog post from Lynda. She taught me a few tricks that I didn’t know about Evernote!

Feel free to keep the conversation going here with tips and questions!

When I had PCs, it seemed that they would brake, our tech would come fix a day later… Then when it came time for the same activity next quarter, they wouldn’t be working right again. With the Macs I have control, I build the master image and copy it out to the rest of the lab. I can tweak things as needed, I can fix issues right away.

This new lab I have done something new, I am joining the Macs to the districts Active Directory (AD) Domain. For those of you that don’t know AD is a major component of Microsoft Windows networking. The advantage here is that my students can now use their AD user names and passwords in my lab, they couldn’t do that before. We are still limited to just authentication, I have hacked the Mac OS X “User Template” to control certain aspects of the environment. However, the next big challenge is to get the student’s network drive to mount automatically. The difficulty is the fact that Im not using a Mac OS X Server to act as a intermediary between the Mac OS X clients and AD.

Here are a few pictures of the new lab, and stay tuned for details of setting up a Mac lab the way I have.