Daily Archives: 6/7/2005

A report from WWDC

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My colleague Siddhartha Chadda is out at Apple’s WWDC this week and has this “man on the street” report:

The gasp of the audience when Steve Jobs said “it’s true” with the “e” hanging down to mimic Intel’s logo was a seminal event in computing. This is really the third major transition for Apple. And my opinion is that Steve Jobs made a compelling case for this transition. This time it is when Macintosh as a platform is very strong. Most people don’t change much if they are strong and it really is a bold new direction for Apple to do at this particular time and space.

One can make the case for a race between Longhorn and Mac OS X (Leopard) on Intel by late 2006.

Going to some of the labs at WWDC and seeing stock Intel motherboards in a G5 powermac chassis is so freaky not because of the Frankenstein aspect but how matter of fact the developer community has embraced this new path.

There are labs with 75 G5′s with each alternative row of computers with nice shiny brass combination locks in the back. These are the only hints that you are running OS X on a Pentium motherboard.

People want stuff to work. They don’t care about what CPU is in there. This announcement is absent from Apple home page as a major link because they still want to sell Power PCs. And frankly a person looking to surf the web, write an email and store photographs can’t care about endianess and other technological hurdles and developers just care about solving technical problems on a platform that allows them limitless possibilities.

It’s going to be a very interesting two years for Apple.

Geocaching comes to the classroom

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I just finished a session called “Geocaching in Your Classroom” by Monte Gaukler, a Middle School Curriculum Technology Partner from Grand Forks. The group had a great time talking about how geocaching could find uses in a variety of subjects across a K-12 school district. Need to know a bit more about geocaching itself? Try the FAQ.

We used Garmen eTrex GPS units for our little adventure today. It looks like they can be had for about $100 each. The precision was not too bad (within 20 feet or so), but my Magellan does do a bit better. That said, I still think I’d go with the Garmin in a school setting where easy of use and low cost are more important factors.

Here’s a very short list of ideas for using geocaching and GPS in your classroom (these aren’t all mine):

  • To train your students to use their GPS receivers, give half of the class golf balls and have the kids hide them around the school grounds. After they set a “waypoint” at the location of the golf ball, the students return and give the GPS receiver to another student who uses it to go find the ball.
  • A P.E. teacher could create some caches and send students to go track them down. Instant exercise!
  • There are a lot of science applications. Students could do all sorts of water quality and other environmental studies and integrate their results with GIS. (Assuming you’ve got some good GIS software.)
  • The use of GPS for teaching about geography and math related to latitude and longitude are pretty obvious. It makes the whole discussion a lot more concrete when kids can walk outside and see their latitude and longitude in real time. (Make sure you talk about Dava Sobel’s book Longitude.)
  • This one’s a little more involved, but wouldn’t it be cool if some students used travel bugs to track the points on a map and learn about the local geography of the areas where the travel bugs go?

Craig reminded me of the Degree Confluence Project, an effort to “visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location.” Hurry, there are only 12,240 left to be found and photographed! It doesn’t take long to thoroughly boggle your mind when you stop and consider the way that GPS technology has rippled throughout our economy and culture.

Building the perfect curriculum sharing tool

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Here is a list of the features I want/need in whatever curriculum sharing tool with use:

  • Web-based utilizing standards-compliant, semantic markup
  • Searchable
  • Extensive use of RSS to allow teachers to subscribe to various grade levels or subjects
  • Ability to link to state and national standards as well as whatever local standards we’d like to include
  • Comments enabled on lesson so teachers can leave additional information about how the materials worked for them or suggestions for improvements
  • Hooks to plug into whatever intranet portal technology we choose

Is that so much to ask?

This tool has to get used. Creating yet another Web site that goes unvisited is unacceptable. To that end I think it’s crucial that the system support not only browsing and searching for materials, but notifications too. We know our curriculum, we know when it’s taught, and we know who teaches it. Wouldn’t it be cool if the system could send an email like this:

Dear Tim,

You must be thinking about your upcoming unit on the water cycle
right about now. Perhaps you'd be interested in one of the following
lesson plans that have been posted since the last time you taught
this unit.

At the end of the message would be a list of hyperlinks to complete lessons available in the system including rubrics, printable instruction sheets, and whatever else is necessary to teach the lesson. I think a system like this would get used a lot.

New version of Debian released

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Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 was released yesterday. My school district has standardized on Debian for several key applications such as Request Tracker and Moodle over the last year. While it may not have the glitzy, commercial appeal of RedHat or Suse, it’s rock-solid. The new version brings all the major components up to recent versions and features a new installer with support for enterprise-grade features like LVM. If you’re considering Linux for a server in your district, give Debian a look. Once you go apt, you never go back.