Taste of Tech

As part of our web site redesign, we’re trying to focus more on the people and the school community rather than the institution. In the past, we’ve included a lot of pictures of our school facilities on our web site. While the buildings are certainly attractive, they don’t do much to convey the message that we are all about people.

As we’re prototyping the new site, I asked a coworker for some new pictures that we could use. She responded by putting some pictures onto a network drive for me. These pictures came from various people throughout the district, and were primarily collected for use on the web.

The pictures all ranged in size from 640 x 480 to 3000 x 2000. Even the smallest of these is WAY too big for use on a web page. The image to the right is part of an unresized image of the high school jazz band.

Most monitors display between 52 and 96 pixels per inch. For years, the standard rule of thumb has been 72 pixels per inch. At this rate, a 640 x 480 image would be more than 6″ by 8″. The 3000 x 2000 image would be almost 42″ x 28″. If you’re using this on a web page along with text or other information, even the small pictures have to be resized.

My first digital camera produced pictures that were 640 x 480. That’s 0.3 megapixels, and the camera cost $600. Last month, I bought some digital cameras for teachers to use in their classrooms. The cheapest ones I could find were 6 megapixel cameras, which produce images that would take eight monitors to display at full resolution. We paid less than $125 for them.

This is all really good news if you want to put digital pictures in high-quality publications. Even printing full-page pictures to color laser printers will take advantage of all of those pixels, and many more. But for web use, we need to resize.

I was going to create a handout and post it here detailing how to resize pictures for the web using the free Irfanview software. But why reinvent the wheel? There’s a perfectly good one here. There’s another one here. And another. Assuming you can use Google, you can probably find another dozen tutorials for this. And if you can’t use Google, I’ll help you.

Anyone who is going to post pictures online has to understand this. It’s easy to post content online now. Most blogs and content management systems are trivially easy to use. But pictures are a problem. Most packages will let you change how they’re displayed, but they won’t resample the picture. This results in a web page that takes forever to load, because it’s downloading all of those pixels that it’s not even displaying. The publisher has to resize the pictures before uploading them. If they don’t know to do this, the problem is only going to get worse.

Soldiers in Iraq and Afganistan are using robots to do some of the military’s most dangerous work. The best way to remove a land mine is to step on it, but it’s hard to get people to volunteer for that duty.  That’s where robots come in. Specially designed machines go out into minefields and trigger the explosives. They lose a leg every time one goes off, but those legs can be replaced.

During a recent test of these devices in Arizona, the Army colonel in charge of the test stopped it before they were finished. The robot had only one leg left, and was still tring to trudge through the mine field and complete its mission. The colonel claimed that the test was inhumane.

The troops are increasingly befriending and bonding with their robots. Many of them have names. In some cases, soldiers bring boxes of robot pieces back to the repair facility, asking that they be fixed. They don’t want new robots. They want the old ones repaired.

In some cases, the robots have received promotions and medals for exemplary performance. Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) units, who use robots to find and remove roadside bombs in Iraq, even take their robots fishing with them. They just put a fishing rod in the claw and put the robot in the sun next to the water.

According to a recent Washington Post story, the military isn’t the only place where robots are becoming commonplace. There were two million personal bots in use in 2004. That number is expected to climb to 7 million next year. If we continue to personify them, we may be facing some pretty interesting questions about their role in society.

Fairbanks Technology Coordinator BJ Thaman posted this message to the Tech Coordinators’ listserv this week:

We are in the beginning stages of creating a Moodle site for our district.  We hope to use this site for both classroom enrichment and professional development.  I noticed that the official Moodle homepage has a Moodle Xxchange where people contribute lessons for all to use and modify.  It sounds like a great idea but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of content / activity.  Does anyone know if there is a similar Moodle exchange for Ohio Schools?  If not, would anyone like to start one?   I hope to have a few courses finished by the end of the summer for digital photography (student) and OSX (staff) that I would be willing to share.

Moodle is a free online courseware package. It includes discussion forums, wikis, chats, assignments, assessments, and other tools for teaching online. We’ve had it installed for several years, but it hasn’t received the kind of attention it really deserves.

Within two days, dozens of people responded t0 BJ’s message indicating their interest. I contacted him privately, and suggested that we create a Moodle course somewhere that would allow us to all share ideas and resources for using this tool in the K-12 environment. He asked me if I’d be willing to host it, which shouldn’t be a problem.

The more I thought about it, the more this begged for a separate installation. We’re going to have a lot of adults, a lot of tech people, who will be using this. They’re not on my network, so they don’t have user accounts already. They do all have email accounts, though. This makes it a different type of audience from our students, all of whom authenticate with their network accounts. I also would like to give some people greater access to the system, and I wouldn’t want to do that on an installation with real students in it.

So, I created the Moodle Sandbox today.  It’s a place for teachers and system administrators to collaborate on strategies and resources for using Moodle in the schools. While I set it up for the schools in Ohio to use, there’s no reason why others couldn’t join us as well. We’re just getting started with it, but hopefully we’ll be able to pool our resources to keep from having to reinvent the wheel.

I’m putting my text in first. Then, I’ll switch to code view and paste:

This week a short history of Pertinax, perhaps one of the shortest reigns in imperial history. Also a virtual tour of the Naples Museum.

Now, I’m back to visual mode.

Here’s code for the general ibed:

and this one is a link using the image tool:

I’m not sure it can handle it as an image, though.

This is the embed from a YouTube video. It’s going to get blocked by the Internet filter, but I can check from home to see if it works:

Let’s try a hybrid approach. This is the YouTube object code with the teachertube FLV inserted: