Daily Archives: 6/22/2004

The Food Report, Part II

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My colleague Sid Chadda told me before the conference that I had to make it to Cafe du Monde for coffee and beignets. Of course, I had no idea what a beignet was. Now I know.

That’s a mountain of powdered sugar you see there on top of that fried “doughnut.” Very delicious.

I had the best steak of my life tonight at Dickie Brennan’s Steak House. It was an “8-oz filet served with creamed spinach and Pontalba potatoes, topped with masa flash fried Louisiana oysters and finished with béarnaise sauce.” Now I’m not a big oyster guy so they put some big Gulf shrimp on there instead. It was a melt in your mouth experience to say the least.

The Garden District

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Carlyn and I took our second and final tour today. We spent three hours this afternoon on a driving and walking tour of the New Orleans Garden District. The Garden District was established by the Americans who came to live in New Orleans following the Louisiana Purchase. They didn’t receive a particularly warm welcome from the Creoles that lived in the old city (today’s French Quarter) so they decided to build their own city with its own grand street (today’s St. Charles Ave). At one time, the two cities were completely separate, but combined to form New Orleans in the middle of the 19th century.

Land is scarce in New Orleans and so there isn’t a lot of room for gardens even in the Garden District. The ground is very fertile since the land here was built from all the topsoil that has washed down from upstream. Everything is very green. Here are a few shots from the first house we visited.

Most of the architecture in the Garden District is Greek revival. Many homes have columns with beautiful wrought or cast iron fences. Here are a couple photos from one of the home we walked by.

The last home we visited was simply amazing. I can’t remember the name of the family that built it, but let’s just say that they spared no expense. This home actually had a large yard and this bit of statuary.

Vendor recap, Part I

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I took the morning today to hit the vendor hall and see what was new in ed tech products and services. It’s difficult to describe just how large the vendor hall is at this convention center. I spent several hours in there, stopping at displays and chatting with vendors, and I didn’t quite make it halfway through. I will post a photo tomorrow of as much of the hall as my viewfinder will allow.

Here’s a short list of some of the interesting things I saw:

  • The folks from LeapFrog SchoolHouse were showing some new products. Carlyn and I sat through a demo of how their products can be used to promote early literacy. I’m always sceptical of purely drill-and-practice programs, but I don’t think these tools fall into that category. The books and equipment seem to work together to create a reasonable interactive experience that I think most students would find motivating.
  • The Library of Congress has created a Web site called American Memory. According to the site, the American Memory project “is a gateway to rich primary source materials relating to the history and culture of the United States. The site offers more than 7 million digital items from more than 100 historical collections.” I didn some poking around and searching and was really impressed by some of the photographs that can be found. Anything we can do to get students working with primary sources is good!
  • Pasco, the company that makes cool probeware for science teachers, was giving out 45-day demos of their My World GIS software. I installed it, but haven’t had a chance to play yet. I think GIS is so cool. I always wished I was a social studies teacher because the GIS applications were so obvious. Of course, there’s an open source GIS package called GRASS, but it’s not terribly user-friendly. Or perhaps, as they say about Unix, it’s not that it’s not user-friendly, its just picky about its friends.
  • In the cool science tool department I found a booth that was displaying the HOBO Data Logger. These little devices are battery operated and can sense light, temperature, etc. They were handing out reprints of a great little article that described a science project that a girl did where she tried to figure out whether UPS air or ground service was better for shipping temperature-sensitive materials by shipping two HOBOs to the same location by both methods can comparing the temperature logs. Fun.

That’s all for now. Student information systems, video streaming, electronic whiteboards, and all manner of NCLB-related remediation products seem to be the most common vendors so far. I’m going to try to finish the last half tomorrow and I’ll report back with any more interesting products.