I am participating with the Apple Academy this week held in Cupertino. While I have learned much in just the first day, I will share two things that I look forward to for classroom implementation: potential iOS 5 features and the current iOS 4 accessibility features. Let’s start with the future: while I have been…
I must apologize for not keeping up on my blog recently, but I did have a distraction–I broke my femur right at the hip joint in a bicycle accident that required emergency surgery. Four pins later I awoke in a hospital bed with very limited mobility (I needed nurses to even turn me partially on…
Over the years I have been an on-again, off-again user of Linux. I find Linux so interesting, but in my mind it has been hard to embrace it as an operating systems for mainstream users. Of particular problem has been installing or making any changes to software configurations and making Linux work with available hardware….
In a previous blog Who is to Blame for Cavalier Attitudes About Privacy?, I questioned whether privacy invasion is much a problem of lax attitudes from us users as the companies who abuse our privacy. In the companies’ defense, we as users do not have a very good process to express our expectations to privacy,…
Sorry for the long dry spell–I am living proof of the joke: “What are your hobbies?” “I have none, I am a homeowner.” While watching the gradual deterioration of privacy over the years, we have been citing this same old joke in a different context: “What about privacy?” “There is none, this is the Internet.”…
I was excited about the Olympics, I really was. I am in the middle of some house remodeling (hence the long sabbatical from the blog), so I had the screen on in the background while working hour after hour. I probably heard more Winter Olympics the first few days than I had in the in…
I hope we are ready for performance pay, or incentive pay, for educators. It is very clear this administration supports and promotes providing incentives to teachers outside the typical salary schedule. Back in the days when a variation of performance pay was called merit pay, I was adamantly opposed primarily for two reasons: too much…
In order to discuss this issue, I am going to have to channel a Dvorak-like curmudgeon role. Watching Apple and the press/blogosphere fall all over themselves with the rumor mill/speculation market, it gets easier and easier to say “Really, don’t you see what is truly going on?” with the arrogance of an I-told-you-so statement (of…
[This is an entry from my Web Literacy online class that reads more like a blog than a tutorial. It’s not a new topic but I hope it is a good read.] Wikipedia is a controversial tool for many educators. It is representative of a broad set of Web 2.0 tools, the open content model,…
Don’t get me wrong, I really did enjoy Alfie Kohn’s When 21st-Century Schooling Just Isn’t Good Enough. His whimsical treatment of the Friedman “The World is Flat” mentality is dead on: First, it signifies an emphasis on competitiveness. Even those who talk about 21st-century schools invariably follow that phrase with a reference to “the need…