Lightning in a Bottle

One of my favorite events here at the ESD is the annual High School Art competition. Dozens of exciting and interesting artworks line our halls, including drawings, paintings, photographs, and sculptures. There are so many that every time I walk around the building, I see something that I hadn’t noticed before.

Now, thanks to digital photography and the web, the art can be viewed online. Point your browser at www.psesd.org/artshow/, and you can see what some of our region’s most creative students have done.

It’s actually fairly easy to create these kinds of web galleries. Adobe’s Photoshop Elements is probably the best software you can get for working with digital images, and has a very reasonable $42 education price. Creating web galleries is just one of the many things you can do with it. There are three steps to creating a gallery:

• Place all the images for your gallery into one directory or folder;

• Start Photoshop Elements and select “Create Web Photo Gallery” from under the file menu;
• Choose your options in the Web Gallery window (style, location of original images, location for completed gallery, etc.) and click OK.

The program does the rest for you, generating a set of html files that your web administrator can upload onto your school or district web page.

For the more ambitious of you, take a look at www.artsitenet.com/. This company sells two products, one of which is a custom server-based system for creating school art sites, with student galleries and portfolios. If you have an active arts program, it looks like it would be a great way to connect your student work with the outside community.

One interesting area that has developed over the last couple of years is the use of Linux in some school systems. Beyond the fact that Linux itself is free (or low-cost, if you buy a commercialized version of it), it also runs on older, slower computers without trouble. There are sites dedicated just to supporting Linux and other open source software packages in schools, such as schoolforge.net, that can give you an overview of other reasons to consider choosing this option and steps to take to implement this approach.

A good example of one of these projects is at http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7418 (part one), and http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7419 (part two). The author describes how he created an all-Linux and open source software lab, which has proven to be very easy to maintain and operate. (Warning: Some aspects of this article are a bit geeky.)

A word of clarification before you go perusing these sites ? you will see two terms, which are sometimes confused. One is open source and the other is free software. Open source software means that anyone can look at the programming code, and make changes and modifications to it. Free software is software that can be freely and legally downloaded and used by anyone without paying. Open source software is often free, and free software is often open source, but this isn’t always the case.

You’ll see the difference in the communities and groups that are involved in this. Some promote open source software because they believe it’s cheaper, technically better, and doesn’t lead to dependence on any one vendor. Others are intense idealists that see free software as a valiant effort against evil, money-grubbing megacorporations bent on world domination. The web pages and comments you come across will be flavored accordingly.

There is still a fairly high technical level to implementing Linux and other open source programs, but that is changing. The Sun computer company is developing a professional, graphically pleasing version of Linux called “Looking Glass.” They have posted a video demonstration of how it works and what it looks like at wwws.sun.com/software/looking_glass/demo.html. They have turned the windows on the screen into three-dimensional objects that can be rotated. (You’ll need to watch the video to really imagine how it works!)

Forbes Magazine online has a fun little article on Five Robots That Will Change Your Life at www.forbes.com/sciencesandmedicine/2004/02/18/cx_ah_0218robots.html. It runs as a slide show and will take you about a minute to view, but it’s pretty intriguing. The first robot does surgery - are you ready to let a computer mess around with your insides? (I had trouble viewing robots 4 and 5 with one computer, but could see them fine on another. Your mileage may vary!)

I’ve referred to this site before, but it bears repeating. When you receive an email with some heart-warming story, or amazing photograph, or outrageous story of corporate/government/celebrity behavior, don’t hit that forward button. Take a minute and surf on over to www.snopes.com and see if your recently received email is in their vast databases of Internet urban legends.

The Snopes site is an effort to catalog and verify thousands of various tales of the Internet. The folks that run the site do an amazing job of tracking down the details behind these emails, and can usually document whether they are true, false, or somewhere inbetween. Even if you don’t have a specific story to check out, it’s incredibly interesting just to cruise through and see what kinds of rumors, stretched truths, and outright fairy tales are circulating out there.

And consider it part of your email civic duty to not pass on emails that are fraudulent, especially when it’s so easy to take a minute and check them out!

The superintendent of the Henrico County school district has written an article for eSchool News giving an overview of the success of their one-to-one student laptop program. They are now in their third year of implementation, and are able to demonstrate significant student achievement gains in that time. The change has affected the whole school environment, including increasing parental involvement and participation in the secondary grades. Most importantly, it has helped teachers move into more constructivist instruction, which probably is the driver for increased test scores.

The article has some very interesting observations about their experience, and suggestions for others looking at the model. It’s at www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStory.cfm?ArticleID=4848. (Free registration required to read the article.)

Microsoft has posted a 64-page guide on the use of tablet PCs in education at www.microsoft.com/education/?id=edguidetabletpc. Sales of tablets have so far been very low, in part because they are priced higher than comparable laptops. (This is due both to the extra cost of things like touch screens and Microsoft charging more for the Tablet PC operating system than for standard Windows XP.) However, once you use one, the appeal of the tablet form factor becomes very obvious. Forget handwriting recognition, though - the nice thing about taking notes on the tablet is that it is in your own handwriting, complete with your diagrams and doodles. Plain text can’t compete!

Another article about the Wisconsin virtual charter schools looks at the aggressive marketing campaigns that are being set up to recruit new students during the three-week window for registration. Wisconsin Connections (Sylvan is the private partner) will spend about $90,000 on marketing, or about 6% of their budget for the school. A new school just starting up will be spending $300,000 on marketing. Since their target is 500 students, that would be 12% of their budget if they reach their goal. There’s an overhead cost that public schools don’t have to worry about - yet.

The story is at www.jsonline.com/news/state/feb04/204381.asp.

Wisconsin has six virtual charter schools in operation, all set up in the last two years. Around 1,000 students are registered through these schools, and the roughly $5,000 in state funding follows them. The charter schools are partnerships between public districts and private education companies, and five more are being considered for next year.

While the students study at home, certified teachers provide support. However, there must be a parent available at home to participate in the program, in order to do tasks such as administering tests. This aspect of the program is a roadblock for some students, such as children from single-parent homes. Another issue (one that the state teacher union is arguing in court) is that parents are providing the face-to-face teaching support, and state law hypothetically requires a certified teacher.

Those participating in the program seem to find it positive. There is an article profiling the program on the Yahoo news service here. (It’s one of those long, ugly addresses.)