Taste of Tech

Earlier this week, I distributed a cd of free software to my tech team. These are various applications that may be useful to teachers and students. It’s a little old-school to actually burn the discs and pass them out, but I find that they’re more likely to actually take a look at something if I hand it to them instead of just sending them a link to it.

You’re out of luck, though. I’m not going to give you a CD. Here’s the list of applications I gave them, along with links to the sites. All of these applications are free, at least for education users:
AUDACITY
Audacity is audio recording and editing software. It allows you to use a microphone or other audio device with your computer to record. You can then edit the recordings, add effects, merge multiple sources of audio together, and then export the whole thing as an MP3 file. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

FIREFOX
Firefox is an alternative web browser to Internet Explorer. It provides a number of number of features, including tabbed browsing, live bookmarks, and better implementation of web standards. There is also a signficant number of add-ons available that can enhance and extend the web browsing experience. http://www.mozilla.com

FREEMIND
Freemind is mind-mapping software that allows the user to visually link different ideas to one another. It may be compared to commercial products like Inspiration ™, though with a somewhat different feature set. Some teachers have claimed that this software is better than Inspiration. http://freemind.sourceforge.net

IRFANVIEW
Irfanview is a simple image editing tool. Use it to resize those enormous pictures that modern digital cameras create. You can also crop, enhance, and make minor adjustments to pictures. It’s very easy to use. http://www.irfanview.com/

JAHSHAKA
This is high-end video editing software. It allows you to edit video clips, create various visual effects, add music, and incorporate animation. http://www.jahshaka.org/

JUICE
Juice is a podcast receiver. Just add podcast feeds from your favorite source (you can find lots of them on podcastalley.com or podcastpickle.com). The software checks the feeds for new podcast episodes, and downloads them automatically to your computer when they’re available. From there, you can listen to them on your computer, sync with an mp3 player, or burn them to CDs. http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net

NVU
This is a free web-site development program, comparable to Frontpage or Dreamweaver. If you’ve decided that content managment solutions and blog software are not for you, here is a decent free alternative. http://www.nvu.com

OPEN OFFICE
Open Office is designed to be a replacement for Microsoft Office. It has a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation program. It’s file-compatible with MS Office, so you can easily open and edit files created with Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Because it’s free, students and teachers can install it and use it at home. http://www.openoffice.org/

SCRIBUS
Scribus is an open source desktop publishing application. It provides a powerful, professional page layout system for creating spectacular documents. http://www.scribus.net/

SKYPE
Connect a microphone and a pair of headphones to your computer, and talk to anyone, anywhere in the world, for free. This implementation of voice conferencing is easy to set up and use. http://www.skype.com/

TRUECRYPT
Truecrypt allows you to encrypt data on your computer in a virtual drive. It’s an easy-to-use way of ensuring that confidential information stays confidential, even if the computer on which it is stored is stolen or compromized. This software is highly recommended for people storing sensitive data on laptops. http://www.truecrypt.org

‘Tis the season for lists, and I might as well jump on the bandwagon. Microsoft® is in the midst of convincing everyone that they have to have the new version of Windows® (Vista®). The marketing machine is just starting to gear up, even though Vista isn’t yet shipping to home users, you can’t buy a computer with Vista preinstalled, and corporate customers would have to be out of their minds to do wide-scale deployments of it now.

We’re not going to consider switching to Vista before the summer of 2008 in my school district. Here’s why:

• We don’t have to. There’s nothing in Vista that we have to have. Windows XP® is a stable, reliable operating system. We’re good at supporting it. Our users are good at using it. Vista doesn’t have any killer applications to make us want to go out and buy it.
• Our hardware can’t support it. Computers certified as “Vista Capable” have enough horsepower to run Vista. But to get the most out of the new operating system, you have to have a “Vista Premium Ready” computer. The stickler for us is the graphics card. We generally use the graphics adapters that come integrated on the motherboards. They’re cheap and they do everything we need to do. Or, they did.
• Not Ready for 64 Bit. One of the big advantages to Vista is the new approach to security. By protecting the operating system’s kernel from changes made by applications, Microsoft can get a better handle on dealing with malware. Unfortunately, this would break many device drivers, along with most firewall, anti-virus, and system maintenance programs. So these security measures are only implemented on 64-bit versions of Vista, for which new drivers have to be written anyway. That leaves it up to the device manufacturers to release new drivers. I’d be surprised to see a 64-bit driver for this 12-year-old laser printer sitting next to my desk. We have a lot of old (but still serviceable) peripherals in our schools that aren’t going to work with a 64-bit operating system. It would also scare me to run a new system without decent anti-virus software, especially given…
• The new TCP stack. Steve Gibson calls it “Vista’s Virgin Stack.” Rather than just reusing someone else’s stack like they did for Windows 2000, Microsoft decided to write their own from scratch. It’s an admirable goal, but the security problems may not have all been worked out.
• SMB2. Microsoft uses the “Server Message Block (SMB)” standard for allowing Windows computers to access files and directories on servers. The standard is a combination of technologies developed at IBM, 3COM, and Microsoft, but Microsoft has added a number of extensions and enhancements. Other products, such as the open source Samba server, implement the same protocol to allow Windows computers to communicate with non-Microsoft servers. Vista uses a new variant of SMB, which is causing problems with Samba. Since we run Samba on more than 20 servers, this will have to be fixed before we can move to Vista.
• Volume Licensing. Currently, we have an open license for Windows XP. This means that, as an organization, we have a serial number for XP that does not require product activation. It’s up to us to make sure we’re not using more licenses than we have purchased, but it makes it easy for us to use programs like Ghost to deploy Windows. In many schools, it’s much easier to re-Ghost a computer than to troubleshoot software problems, especially when user data is centralized on servers. With Vista, open licenses do not exist. So every time we re-Ghost a computer, we have to re-register the license with Microsoft. After two installations, we have to purchase a new license, even though we’re still using the same computer. Alternatively, we could set up a license server, running Microsoft’s not-yet-released Longhorn server operating system, with the sole purpose of proving to Microsoft that we’re not breaking the law. Since it’s nearly impossible for us to buy a computer without Windows, this whole thing is a waste of time and money. And it’s made more annoying by the fact that we don’t use Microsoft servers, and shouldn’t be forced to.
• No Doc Files in Wordpad. All right. This isn’t as big of a problem as the others. But other than this CNN article, I haven’t seen this mentioned elsewhere. In Windows XP, you can open Microsoft Word® documents using Wordpad. This allows people who don’t have Word to read Word documents. So if I send a Word file to someone, if they have Windows XP, they can open it. If they have Vista, they have to have Microsoft Word to open the file. The implication is clear: Microsoft wants everyone to have Office to read (not just create) Office documents. This reminds me of the cheap, unnecessary incompatibilities between Microsoft Office® documents and Microsoft Works® documents.

The bottom line? We’re going to stick with XP as long as we can. As soon as computers are available with Vista, we’ll buy them, but we’ll downgrade the OS to XP. In a couple years, we’ll have enough of a critical mass of Vista-licensed machines that we can consider upgrading them. Before that happens, we’ll need a compelling reason to switch. Hopefully, by then, most of these initial problems will be worked out.

What’s with all the ®s? Microsoft, Windows and the Windows logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

The current Time magazine cover story (”How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century,” December 2006) highlights the need for students to learn 21st century skills in order to compete in the global economy. Specifically, we should be teaching our children to:

• Know more about the world in which we live
• Become innovative and creative thinkers and problem solvers
• Develop information literacy skills
• Learn to work well with others

How do we do that? Well, we’re actually already doing a lot of it. Math programs like Investigations and Everyday Math grew out of the University of Chicago Project more than a decade ago. In 1989, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued the Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics, calling for an emphasis on problem solving, critical thinking, and making connections between mathematics and other subject areas. This project, in turn, inspired other curricular groups to issue their own subject-area standards.

We’ve been working on information literacy issues since getting Internet access in 1996. I’ve blogged about this before. Our media specialists are at the heart of these skills, just as our media centers are at the heart of our schools. It has certainly been slow going, but the good news is that our kids are more information-savvy than their parents (and teachers) are.

Anyone who has been in a classroom lately knows how much students work in teams on projects. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen an elementary classroom arranged in rows. The desks are almost always in a table formation, with each table of 4-6 kids working together, as a team, on various projects. As the students get older, the classroom arrangements change, but teamwork is still a big part of their school experience. We don’t do a great job of teaming outside the borders. There aren’t group members in different classes, schools, time zones, etc., but our kids learn from an early age that they have to work with others to get the job done.

Where do we drop the ball? Knowing more about the world in which we live. Sure, we do teach some introductory foreign language in the middle school now. But we don’t teach any foreign language in the elementary school, where students are most likely to achieve fluency. We also do a pitiful job of representing world languages. In the Brecksville-Broadview Heights schools, we currently offer German, French, and Spanish as regular classes. While that’s a nice start, it completely ignores the continents of Africa and Asia, where most of the world’s people are.

What about teaching students to look at things from multiple points of view? We Yankees have anecdotally heard of the civil war referred to as the “war of northern aggression” or “that recent unpleasantness”, but do we teach our students about the American Revolution from the British perspective? Maybe if we spent more time taking a global view of American society and its influence in the world, we’d have a better understanding of why there are terrorists attacking America.

We work really hard to be an excellent school district. Our community expects us to be among the best schools in the state. In order to maintain this status, we have to focus on the criteria that are measured on the report card. Unfortunately, these things don’t always correlate well with 21st century skills. That’s a common argument. If we focus on doing what’s best for our children and our society, we risk being labeled as a bad school. Hopefully, articles like this one in Time will help turn the tide a bit, so schools aren’t so discouraged from teaching students relevant skills in a meaningful way.

We’re working on some new site designs for our district web site. It’s part of a bigger project intended to make the site easier to use, provide more useful and up-to-date information, and improve the visual design of the site. With a school web site, color decisions are generally pretty easy to make. Our school’s colors are crimson and gold. Two years ago, we spent quite a bit of time coming up with the “right” codes to approximate these colors on the web site.

To coordinate with these colors on the current site, we used various grays, beiges, and black and white. As someone who generally views colors in terms of the Crayola 8-pack, I’m not the one who should be designing color palettes. Still, we managed to come up with something that works fairly well.

My network consultant, who is helping to design the new site, suggested using Behr’s ColorSmart system. It’s an online tool to help people come up with combinations of paint colors that go well together. You specify a main color, and then up to two accent colors, and it generates eight color palettes that coordinate. You can then select a type of project (though “web site” isn’t one of them), and assign colors to the various parts of the project. It’ll let you print out a picture of, say, a kitchen with your color choices painted in the locations you specify. On the site, you can also order paint samples of the colors you’ve selected, but using the paint on an LCD monitor is not recommended.

To make this more useful, I grabbed a neat little program called Color Cop. This free utility gives you an eyedropper tool in Windows that you can use to grab the color codes from any color on the screen. It also converts between decimal and hex color values. So I can just use Color Cop to figure out which color codes to use to match Behr’s recommendations for the web site.

As someone who can never see the numbers on those crazy tests, this is a huge help.

You can’t divide by zero. Everyone knows that. Well, almost everyone. University of Reading professor Dr. James Anderson doesn’t know that. Neither do the year 10 kids he’s been teaching. It seems he’s “solved” the problem of dividing by zero.

It’s simple, really. Just say that anything divided by zero is nulity. Pick a Greek letter to represent the concept. Then, get a film crew to document you teaching it to high school students. That’s all there is to it.

It’s really funny if you don’t take it too seriously. The comments on the page are the best part. In addition to totally debunking the “theory,” they provide some great real-world examples. Dr. Anderson uses this example of the problem:

“Imagine you’re landing on an aeroplane and the automatic pilot’s working,” he suggests. “If it divides by zero and the computer stops working - you’re in big trouble.”

Commenter Bob reacts to Dr. Anderson’s solution:

The problem with this “new number” that “[stretches] from negative infinity, through zero, to positive infinity,” that will supposedly allow computers to grasp x/0, is that ANY equation can equal nullity…. So unless you hard-code every programing language to only use this number in the event of dividing by zero, it will cause errors in any math problem. And then, say you have a flight computer, as the above article suggests, that needs to divide by zero, and then add 100, and that’s how many yards it has left till it hits the ground. x/0+100=nullity, so it has anywhere between infinity and negative infinity until it crashes. That really narrows it down, huh? Now instead of the program getting [a] syntax error, which will quit out of the program with an error message, the program gets a logical error, as it will attempt to manipulate a totally worthless number. What will the program assume? It’s infinite miles away from the earth? It’s infinite miles under the surface? Somewhere in between? The program wont crash, but the plane sure as hell will.

The scary part is that this appears to be a real story that aired on a real newscast. So now we have people believing that they can start dividing by zero, and they’re teaching kids about it. This reminds me of Indiana’s legislative debate over the value of pi, which fortunately died in the house of representatives in 1897. I sure hope Kansas doesn’t hear about this.

Lest we think Britain’s children have been horribly, irrecoverably corrupted with this stuff, we should take student Hannah’s comment to heart. “Ha im in the front row. it was fun and we got to miss a lesson. yum.”