http://news.cnet.com/8301-19518_3-10465117-238.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Police get Webcam pictures in school spy case
by Larry Magid March 6, 2010 1:12 PM PST
Two IT employees at Pennsylvania's Lower Merion School District have been put on administrative leave, and pictures taken from Webcams on school-issued computers have been turned over to the local police department, according to the attorney of one of the employees now on leave.
… Marc Neff, the attorney for Perbix, told the TV station, "Every time a tracking device was activated, it was activated at the request of an administrator or another IT person. [Oops. Bob]
[From the first video:
[On the layoffs... Bob] “It sounds fishy.” [(Local?) Fox News spent six and a half minutes on this story. Bob]
Helps me understand what is wrong with e-Textbooks. There is money to be made in “dying” industries. If you doubt that, check the price of a “buggy whip” next time you are strolling through your friendly farm supply store. They never stopped making buggy whips when the carriage went horseless, they just shrank the industry and the “best” firms remained to serve a (very wealthy) niche market.
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/023679.html
March 06, 2010
Essay: Books in the Age of the iPad
Craig Mod: "With the iPad we finally have a platform for consuming rich-content in digital form. What does that mean? To understand just why the iPad is so exciting we need to think about how we got here. I want to look at where printed books stand in respect to digital publishing, why we historically haven't read long-form text on screens and how the iPad is wedging itself in the middle of everything. In doing so I think we can find the line in the sand to define when content should be printed or digitized. This is a conversation for books-makers, web-heads, content-creators, authors and designers. For people who love beautifully made things. And for the storytellers who are willing to take risks and want to consider the most appropriate shape and media for their yarns."
See also:
Baltimore Sun, A closer look at Apple's iPad and iBooks, inclusive of a link to a YouTube video that is instructional on many levels - the emphasis on touching media directly (drawing on paper with pen or markers) moving toward using intermediary devices, mitigating both the sensory and intelligent functions?
WSJ: An E-Reader for Kids
(Related)
Andreessen’s Advice To Old Media: “Burn The Boats”
by Erick Schonfeld on Mar 6, 2010
Applying a business model, one might ask: Who is the customer (parents, students, government) and what are they purchasing? (Good grades, high “standard test” scores, learning ability)
Improving Education Through Better Teachers
Posted by Soulskill on Saturday March 06, @01:33PM
theodp writes
"The teaching profession gets schooled in cover stories from the big pubs this weekend, as Newsweek makes the case for Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers, and the NY Times offers the more hopeful Building a Better Teacher. For the past half-century, professional educators believed that if they could only find the right pedagogy, the right method of instruction, all would be well. They tried New Math, open classrooms, Whole Language — but nothing seemed to achieve significant or lasting improvements. But what they ignored was the elephant in the room — if the teacher sucks, the students suck. Or, as the Times more eloquently puts it: 'William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge.' But what makes a good teacher? When Bill Gates announced his foundation was investing $335 million in a project to improve teaching quality, he added a rueful caveat. 'Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn't have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching,' Gates said. 'I'm personally very curious.'"
WOW! I'll use this in my Website, Excel and Data Analysis classes. Probably many more uses. AT LEAST, YOU SHOULD LOOK AT THE “HOW IT WORKS” VIDEO.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/easily-create-awesome-charts-and-graphs-tableau-public/
Easily Create Awesome Charts & Graphs With Tableau Public
By Varun Kashyap on Mar. 6th, 2010
… Excel has a great charting engine, and perhaps the most commonly used tool to create charts. We have also shown you a number of applications and web apps that you can use for charting. Tableau is another service that takes charting to a whole new level.
Tableau Public is available for Windows and the download is free, although they do ask for your email address.
http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/
Another tool to drive my students (A. Nuts B. To experiment C. To read the textbook D. None of the above.) Pick One.
http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/quizmaker-online-quiz-generator/
QuizMaker: Dead Simple Online Quiz Generator
For those times when you want to create a simple quiz online, check out QuizMaker. It is a simple online quiz generator based on JavaScript that lets you create a quiz online without writing any code. You can begin by entering a question, up to 5 possible answers for it and a feedback for each answer.
www.attotron.com/pub/Quizmake.htm
Similar tool: Quibblo.
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