With budgets getting tighter and tighter some schools are looking at 4-day weeks instead of 5. The fear, of course, is that students will miss out on the education they’re supposed to be getting if their week is shortened.
Personally I like the idea of a 4-day work week. It would be great to have Fridays off even if it did mean longer days Monday through Thursday. But professionally I have a few issues with it.
Came across a new search engine called TinEye last week. It lets you either upload or paste a link to an image and it searches its index looking for the same image. For those that make money off of their images, or just don’t want copies on other sites, this is a good way to find where your stuff is shown.
Tried it with a few of my shots. Didn’t find anything though. Their stats list about 1.3 billion images indexed. Of course there are tons of images on the internet so that may not even scratch the surface. Or maybe the pictures I tested on weren’t good enough to copy.
One of the biggest limits we came across teaching with Scratch this year is the inability to write methods and use parameters. Methods, returns, and parameters are probably the only major concept in our intro CompSci class that we can’t teach in Scratch; so we introduced them in Alice this past year. It worked ok, but we haven’t been able to come up with any really good labs that explain the purpose of parameters well to the students.
This past week I came across an extended version of Scratch called Scratch BYOB, or Build Your Own Block. And it does exactly what I was looking for. It gives you the ability to create methods and optionally include parameters.
For whatever reason, Twitter just never really appealed to me. The idea of limiting myself to 140 characters seemed, well, too limiting. And my first few skims of Twitter had too high of a junk to good stuff ratio.
But after finally dragging myself to give it a shot, finding a few people to follow, and installing Canary so I can read what’s being said without having to actually go to Twitter I’m starting to convert. The ability to have a constant stream of new stuff to read is addictive. Canary pretty much stays on as long as I’m online.
And I’ve even started tweeting a little myself, although I still feel a little stupid using the word “tweeting.”
Found another offline Wordpress editor to try on my MacBook. This time it’s myWeblog 2.1. I like the looks of it. Seems very Mac-like, which I suppose is a good thing.
One of the things I’m most looking for, and so far only found in myWeblog, is the ability to edit pages. WYSIWYG would be nice, but for now I guess I’ll just wing it.
And yes, I know this is a short little post. But I’m kind of getting tired of trying out different offline editors and writing about them. So I’ll give this one a shot with this post and move on with it if it works like I hope it does.
More after the jump Read the rest of this entry »
Came across this post from a technology teacher in Cedar Park, Texas.
Much of what she talks about is the result of a conference she returned from in Austin a couple weeks ago. A conference that I, along with a few thousand other technology teachers, was also at. I even got talked into presenting a couple of sessions. One on Python and one on Alice.
Her point, and one I definitely agree with, is that as teachers we don’t embrace technology when it can be used to enhance the education of our students. I teach computer science so we’re on the computers most every day. But there are subjects that are not forced to use technology, and many times they don’t. And that’s unfortunate. Students are online pretty much 24/7. Even when they’re sitting in class and supposed to be paying attention to us they have their cell phones in their pockets receiving text message from friends. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags and categories seem to provide pretty much the same functionality on blogs. The only difference I can see is that a blog typically has a handful of categories, but may have hundreds of tags.
With that, does it make sense to even use categories anymore?
I’m thinking not, so I’m going to go with a bit of an experiment. Posts are still going to be put in categories, but I’ve taken off the links to the categories and no longer show what category a post is saved in to. In their place I’m going to try and be more liberal with tagging.
Any thoughts? I know that I typically look for a tag cloud on blogs to try and find what I’m looking for.
If you read the post up from this you’ll see that I just tried out Qumana and wasn’t all that happy with it. It was nice to be able to blog without logging into WordPress, but it had a couple of deal breakers for me.
Unfortunately none of the free solutions I’ve come across have looked to do what I wanted. So it’s off to try a few of the free demos. The first one I’m looking at is MarsEdit. Read the rest of this entry »
Trying something new again. The WordPress iPhone app that I posted about a few days ago was nice, but it doens’t work well for longer posts. Nothing against the app. But I can type pretty quickly and it’s frustrating to have to slow down for the little keyboard. Fortunately I have my MacBook with me pretty much 24/7 so I’m giving an offline editor a try.
The one I’m trying right now is a free one called Qumana. It looks like it’s a way to get bloggers to use their ad network, but it doesn’t seem that you have to. Read the rest of this entry »