Bill MacKenty

Technology strengthens, deepens, and broadens our learning...

Teaching Diary

Our art department wants to scan about 1500 35mm slides.  We’ll be scanning at fairly high resolution, so each file will be around 5MB.  We are looking for a digital image library - web-based - which will let us upload and categorize our pictures. We would like something like Flickr or Picassa.

We’d like casual user management (single login for the whole school, and a teacher login to edit / change upload slides). Availability is important, as is optimization. We would like to be able to download original file size (like Xanga) or a derivative thereof.

We’re a school, so inexpensive == good.  As this collection of 35mm slides represents the heart of our art department, we are interested in data integrity, and long-term storage.

Please contact me here with any suggestions.

Thank you! 

From New Scientist Tech (warning: weird redirect thingy) comes this fantastic article (pdf here) about the tethered self.  This op-ed piece talks about some of the social aspects of things like myspace and facebook. A quote:

Our new intimacies with our machines create a world where it makes sense to speak of a new state of the self. When someone says “I am on my cell”, online”, “on instant messaging” or “on the web”, these phrases suggest a new placement of the subject, a subject wired into social existence through technology, a ethered self. I think of tethering as the way we connect to always-on communication devices and to the people and things we reach through them.

Today is a professional development day at hchs.  There are no students, and the faculty is busy in department meetings and taking technology professional development.

I started the day teaching naviance and then moved to blackboard. Later this afternoon, we are tackling smartboards.

It’s hard to describe how cool it is to watch seasoned teachers look at this stuff and say “Man, that is cool...how do you use this stuff?”

For me, part of getting games into the classroom is being part of the team.  Getting professional development done, helping faculty with other technology projects and supoporting facult in their use of technology is a great way to help build an affective relationship with technology.

It’s a good, busy, great day. 

I’m an open source advocate.  I think there is a place for open source in education, and I regularly look for open-source solutions to common server tasks at my school.

I’m an Ubuntu user at home (as a long time OS X guy, I’m loving ubuntu!).

Yesterday, I asked my supervisor about changing our webserver from a windows/IIS environment, to a Linux/apache setup.

She was shaking her head no before I was done with my sentence....the reason? 

Support.

And you know what? I totally understand.

I’m very comfortable using and administrating Linux, but in an organization like a school, there has to be layers of support. After all, if I’m sick, or leave, I don’t want to leave the school in a lurch. Still, though, I admit to being a little dissapointed. 

My long-term career goal is to be a district technology coordinator. I will make sure to hire people who are conversant in multiple operating systems, and multiple network configurations. 

After all, as someone Way Smarter Than Me ©, said, “It’s not what you know now that counts, it’s what you are capable of learning as systems change”.  I think that’s a good philosophy.

Update: Looks like we will be putting Open Office on all the computers in our labs! Yahoo!

As many of my faithful readers know (all four of you), I am very interested in the role of games in education.  And while I don’t consider games to be the panacea for all our ills in education, I do think they can really push us in the right direction.

After reading and digesting The World is Flat, my wife and I started talking about education.  She is European and came from a very different educational background.  As we were talking about what’s wrong with American education, and American competitiveness, we tossed around some ideas, and came up with the following questions:

* Maybe our students just aren’t working hard enough?
* Maybe parents don’t make education a high-enough priority?
* Perhaps we aren’t doing the right kind of work in school (like focusing on basic skills instead of innovative thinking)?
* Maybe we are doing pretty good, and the media is tainting our perceptions with yellow-journalism.

I’m not saying our kids aren’t capable of working hard enough, but as I think about American shrinking dominance in the world (which I think is happening) I look back on our educational system, and wonder how we can do it better.

When I was living in China, I noted the kids weren’t more or less smarter than any other kid - they just worked much much harder than students I was used to working with.

I write this as a question, looking for a response and any comments.

Every Friday, we have some time during lunch recess in the computer lab.  Students are allowed to come up and play games, surf the net, or listen to music.

Today, we had a fifth grade in the lab doing some math problems (here), and as such, had limited seating available.

The result?

During lunch I witnessed an EXQUISITE planning process amongst 9 boys.  Teams were created, different boys planned how they would take multiple routes to the computer lab to get their first, and roles were assigned in the game. They ate their hotdogs & chips at light speed, and, without waiting for lunch to end travelled over the sound barrier to the lab.

They, of course, failed to plan on the following contingencies:

1) Other people on the stairs
2) Our “don’t leave the lunch room until lunch is over” rule. 
3) Each other (as they stumbled up the stairs)
4) The number of available computers (only 11 were being used, we had 18 free)

In the end, I asked them all to come to the office, and we discussed proper behavior .  I’m happy to report we had no injuries, just some excited boys.  There was an animated discussion and debate about what actually constituted “lunch over” and “running on the stairs” ("Mr. MacKenty, I wasn’t running, I was just moving quickly!"). 

And as I was walking up the stairs, laughing out loud at the ludcridity of the situation, I was again reminded why I love working with kids.