Taste of Tech

The debate has been going on since IBM introduced the personal computer in 1981. The PC used an Intel processor, an open architecture, and an operating system made by Microsoft. All of this was very different from the popular Apple II. Isaac and Ishmael went their separate ways, and the war began.

The debate has continued for the last 25 years, and has really heated up in the last few months. In January, Apple announced the switch to Intel processors in the Macintosh, sparking all kinds of speculation about Windows running on Macs, and Mac OS X running on computers made by other manufacturers. Dvorak stirred up the hornet’s nest by speculating that Apple was going to abandon the OSX operating system, and just build computers that would run Windows. The Ohio eTech tech coordinators listserv returned to the debate when Boot Camp was announced. So, reluctantly, I’m moving off of the "who cares" position I’ve held for almost a decade to tell you what I think.

First, a little background on me: I’ve used both platforms pretty extensively. I’ve gone back and forth several times. My first exposure to computers was on the Apple II. Later, I learned programming on a PC. In college, I used all kinds of things (Macs, NeXTs, VAXen…) but primarily used PCs running DOS. As a student teacher, I taught computer applications on Apple IIs and Macs. As a starting teacher, I taught in a Windows 3.11 lab. Two years later, I switched jobs and platforms, and taught in a lab with OS 7 (and later 8.x). Four years after that, I changed jobs again, and found myself using Windows. Then, I became a technology coordinator, and had to support both platforms. For the last five years, all new purchases have been Windows, but we still have a lot of Macs around. I do both. I know both. But I don’t like both.

Both is expensive. Every technology problem that we have has to be solved twice if we have two platforms. Everything is more difficult. The software is different, network protocols don’t quite match up, and hardware is different. Staff development is a pain ("if you have Windows, follow these steps. If you’re using a Mac, follow those directions"). In situations (like schools) where we never have enough resources, it doesn’t make sense to support both platforms. That’s why we don’t do it.

I’m not really talking about Macs trying to live in a Windows world here. Just for the record, we use Linux servers, and our network is fairly platform-agnostic. But every little thing (like, say, file service) requires two solutions if we’re using both.

But it’s more than that. Macs are more expensive. An iMac G5 with a 1.9ghz processor  half a gig of Ram is $1278.46 in the eTech equipment and services catalog. The Dell Optiplex GX620 with a 3ghz processor and the same Ram is $798. Sure. The Mac has cooler software, and built in wireless, and firewire, and a huge hard drive. But we don’t need those things.

Macs have always been "user friendly." A complete novice can sit down at a Macintosh and become a productive computer-using individual in a very short period of time. It’s harder to do that in Windows. But the problem comes when they want to move beyond "novice." The learning curve to becoming an intermediate computer user is much steeper for Mac users because they don’t have a decent understanding of how the machine works. I know I’m over-generalizing here. But many Mac users are oblivious to how files should be named, how folders can organize information, or how network volumes work. The problem occurs on both platforms, but I’ve never had a Windows user try to put a file on the web called "Mr. Smith’s web page .html." When I try to explain that this is a bad idea because a browser will see it as "Mr.%20Smith’s%20web%20page%20.html" or that some browsers won’t like the two dots, I might as well be speaking Greek. The bottom line is that there are certain assumptions you can make on a Mac that don’t apply when you move beyond that world, and many Mac users have trouble adjusting.

From a health perspective, I find Windows to be much more tolerable. I don’t have any data to back this up. But when I worked on Macs every day, I had a lot of wrist pain. When I work in Windows, I don’t get it. My theory is that the Mac requires a lot more mouse work — there aren’t keyboard shortcuts for many of the things you have to do. You also have to click and hold the button down much more on the Mac than you do in Windows. Those actions — repeated thousands of times — cause pain, at least for me.

From a productivity perspective, they both get the job done. Neither will adequately prepare our students for the "real world", where they’ll be using stuff that hasn’t been invented yet. Ten years ago, we were teaching Microsoft Works 3.0. Who cares which platform it was on? Nobody’s using it anymore anyway. If both platforms will do the job, it comes down to personal preference. If it comes down to personal preference, there’s no reason to support two platforms. It wastes time and money.

This is the first in a series of items about how existing podcasts can be used to supplement classroom instruction in various subject areas. One of the natural applications that comes to mind is in the area of foreign language. In many cases, we teach foreign language in an immersive environment. The German teachers exclusively use German in their classes. Sometimes, students become very frustrated with this approach, but it does help them learn to use and understand the language.

It is potentially helpful for students to hear native speakers of languages, or at least different, fluent speakers of foreign languages. This is where podcasts can come in.

Consider PIEcast. Created by the Partners in Excellence, a language-learning project in Scotland, this podcast offers language learners opportunities to practice the language they’re learning in interesting ways. There are Spanish, German, and French versions of the podcast.

Larry Keim is a middle school Spanish teacher in Mesa, Arizona. He created the Rolling Rs video podcast to help students learn Spanish.  He has produced 16 episodes since the beginning of the year. InstaSpanish is an interactive weekly podcast which includes listening comprehension exercises and grammar lessons for students of all levels. Recent episodes have covered slang terms, listening comprehension, and differences between verb tenses. Spanish Arriba is a weekly audio podcast to help Spanish language learners.

The French Pod Class is a podcast for French language learners. Students can also dive into French culture and language with a Parisian speaker on the French Poetry podcast.

There are several podcasts to help with learning German. Speaken Sie Deutsch is one. Let’s Speak German is another. My German Class is a video podcast.  German Poems is a podcast that focuses on classical German poetry from the likes of Goethe, Schiller and Heine.

JapanesePod101 is a daily podcast to help Japanese language learners. The goal of the project is to make learning and speaking Japanese easy and fun. The program emphasizes situational Japanese, so listeners learn which forms to use in different situations. Learn Japanese is another place to learn about Japanese culture and language.

Chinese linguistics expert Serge Melnyk offers free and easy Mandarin lessons on his podcast.

What if the foreign language is English? There are also a lot of resources available for English language learners, too.

Disclaimer: Not being fluent in these languages, I haven’t actually listened to these podcasts. It really wouldn’t do me a lot of good if I did. But teachers of these languages may find some valuable resources in these links.

This past winter, our school district was bit by the podcasting bug. A lot of people were very interested in the technology, and immediately saw all kinds of applications for it. We could podcast our morning announcements. We could podcast board meetings. The principal could podcast messages to the students and parents. We could podcast staff development sessions. We could podcast physics lectures. We could podcast just about everything.

But it’s more complicated than we want it to be. It’s not impossible — and we did manage to get some podcasts online. The process was fairly painless, but required some prerequisite skills. So we tried to go right from the big wheel to the two-wheeler and ended up with a scraped knee.

Let’s look at this a different way. In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee created the first web site. He intended the web to be a collaborative space, where everyone can create and share content, and everyone can make links between different ideas. Five years later, we wired the schools to use this technology. Five years after that, we started encouraging teachers to put information online, to be content providers as well as content consumers. We’re another five years down the road now, and we’re just getting into blogging and online learning, and using tools that make it really easy to put things online.

Podcasting won’t take that long, but maybe we need to work on being podcast consumers before we’re podcast providers. To that end, I’ll be exploring some ways we can use existing podcasts as resources with our students.

In order to take advantage of these resources, it’ll be really helpful for you to know what podcasting is. If you haven’t been reading all of my posts, go back and take a look at What is Podcasting? to get a quick overview. Then put your helmet and knee pads on, and we’ll hop back on the bike.

Bartleby is a suprisingly useful collection of resources. Named after the scrivener (or copyist) in Melville’s story, the site publishes classic books online as well as preeminent contemporary reference works.

The collection includes several encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, and fact books. It also has collections of quotations (including Bartlett’s). The 1914 Oxford Shakespeare and the King James Bible round out the reference works.

The verse section includes several classic anthologies of English and American poetry as well as some modern verse. The fiction section rivals the collection of Project Gutenberg, and the nonfiction section includes a wealth of resources.

The section on English Usage includes the American Heritage and Columbia guides to English usage, as well as classics like Strunk & White’s Elements of Style and Fowler’s The King’s English.

There are many sites online that provide some of these resources. The key with Bartleby is that you can search individual resources (such as the Word Fact Book) or all of them at once. This allows researchers to tailor their searches to their specific needs. For example, if I search the entire collection for "Michelangelo", I get 147 results. If I search the "verse" section, I just get Prufrock.

Best of all, the resource is free.

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”   
Let us go and make our visit.

One definition of "Web 2.0" is the concept of an online computing platform. Instead of installing programs and running them on your computer, you simply go to a web site and use an online version of the program there.

The idea of using a program on the web instead of installing it on your computer has several advantages. It’s much easier, because you don’t have to install the software, worry about updates and security patches, and deal with conflicts between different programs. It’s less expensive, because most of the online tools are free. It makes it easier to collaborate, because a group of people could be set up to have access to the same files online. You wouldn’t have to worry about saving them in a place accessible to all, or moving them around on jump drives, or emailing the files back and forth. You simply edit the one copy that’s online.

The disadvantages are significant too. If you lose your Internet connection, you also lose your ability to use these online programs. There are also some privacy concerns. If you have a file stored on some organization’s server, it can be subpoenaed. If it’s on your home computer, a search warrant is required (which is more difficult to obtain). Still, in some applications, these tools make sense.

Writely is a web word processor. I’ve written about this before. Basically, you go to the site, and have a word processor in your browser. You can do most of the things you can in a normal word processor. Copy and paste works. You can change fonts and styles and sizes of text. It’ll handle tables and images. When you’re done, you can save it as a web page, a rich text file, or a Word document. You can also leave it where it is, and set up an RSS feed to it, so others can access it online.

Need a spreadsheet? Check out Numsum. It’s true that it won’t do everything that Excel does, but 95% of us don’t use all of the functions that are in Excel. It has the basic functions, and allows you to graph data. You can save it as a web page or a CSV file. Like Writely, it allows you to set up RSS feeds to the files, so you can share them easily with others.

In the trinity of Office applications, the presentation package is the third piece. The online version is Thumbstacks. It doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles of Powerpoint. There aren’t any slide transitions or animations, for example. But you can use their collaborative software to show your presentation to a group of people over the web in real time. Combined with Skype (which I’ll be writing about soon), you can do presentations and conferences entirely online.

We’re at the point where it’s very possible to be productive with just a web browser. When combined with online email and calendar tools, there aren’t a lot of things left that we can’t do on the web. These tools will make it easier to put inexpensive technology into the hands of the have-nots (Microsoft Office is more than $350.00, and we don’t need it anymore). Because we’re just using a web browser, it’s also going to be possible to use older computers longer. As long as they can get to the web, we can be productive with them.