Lightning in a Bottle

CNN online has a profile of a manufacturing company that lets you design and order your own custom parts online. While computerized manufacture has been around for awhile, what sets this company apart is the special design software they have created. As you create your plan on the computer, it catches and prevents you from making a design that is impossible to manufacture. It takes about a month to receive your finished part.

Just think - sometime soon, when you need to repair that 1969 3M ThermoFax machine and the replacement parts are no longer in stock, you’ll be able to have the necessary replacement part custom made for you, instead of finally being able to toss that old piece of junk into the dumpster. (Rats.)

There are a number of interesting articles posted in eSchool News in the last month at their headlines website. I’d recommend reading:

• ED gives preview of new ed-tech plan, which looks at how the federal Department of Education is moving the national ed-tech plan away from infrastructure towards achievement, focusing on student data, online testing and online learning.
• Test scores fuel laptop debate, about the Maine project giving laptops to all middle school students. The first round of standardized testing shows no difference in achievement, but these tests were administered less than two years after the project began, so there’s lots of room for argument.
• Tablet PCs make mark in schools, which looks at several small colleges that have made these computers the standard student computing device, and
• House bill would slash ed-tech funding, which looks at the current proposal for Title IID funding in the House of representatives, which would cut Enhancing Education Through Technology funds by $91,000,000, or 13% (ouch).

If you haven’t visited this site before, you will need to complete a free registrate to view the articles.

We experienced an unpleasant phenomenon over our summer hiatus. About a week ago, a reader sent an email pointing out that there were some links to innappropriate websites in the comments to one of our spring weblog postings. Upon closer examination, we found that virtually all of our weblogs the past 18 months were clogged with “spam comments” - not real comments from a reader, but computer-generated ones that do nothing but link to external websites. And not just a few, either. There were 3,172 of them. And each individual comment contained twenty to forty separate links to websites, all of them of a nature far beyond the boundaries of good taste.

Several hours of work later, our weblog is again rated “G” (thank you, Kevin!), and will be available for adding comments again sometime soon. Needless to say, there will be a filtering system to prevent such attacks in the future.

Not that it matters much, anyway. There have only been a half-dozen non-spam comments in the last year!

As school starts this year in Arizona, over 3,400 students will be participating in virtual schooling. A total of 14 cyberschools will be in operation, with half run by school districts and half through charter schools. An article in the online Arizona Republic describes some of the different programs and tracks the impressive growth in participation.

The Christian Science Monitor today has an article about online lesson plans. It gives an overview of several sites and the kinds of resources you can find on the thousands of web pages that have these materials available for use. (Where was this stuff when I was a student teacher?!)