TEXTBOOKS – K12 Electronic Teacher Guides & Students Text

As technology spreads so does the need for the K12 educational system to keep up.  What a better way to use your dollars better and use a new non-profit organization to get FREE electronic textbooks for you kids and Teachers.  Lets face it – a lot of districts are having problems keeping up in all ares’ due to budget cuts.  You have to take a look at this and see if you can make it work in your district, just think – even if you modify one or two classes – how much will you save on text books – either saving the parents money or being able to use that money for other projects.

If it means changing your lesson plan or presentation of those lesson, it just might be worth a look at this new service.

CK12.org – FlexBooks – Electronic Textbooks – FREE 

Key Benefits

	Access to free textbooks
	High quality educational content created by educators
	Content customized to reflect “today” and the different needs of students
	Quality ensured by CK-12‘s Community of Educational Practitioners
	Increased pedagogic choice for all teachers, aligned to state standards as well as developmentally correct content
	Supported by publishing tools that facilitate quick and easy content creation and distribution
	Collaborative learning via a community where authors, teachers, and students create, access, share, rate, recommend, and publish

Technology used Right! Keep attention – Keep on track – Keep them Alert!

I always like when technology is used and it gives a huge return in kids education.  Yes it means changing the way your lesson plans are presented, yes it means being creative and a little more work in preparation – but doesn’t the end result justify the investment.  It can even make your job of teaching more enjoyable and rewarding when you see more kids staying on track and engaged in the class.  At the end of the day we want the kids to leave school each day with some understanding, some new insight and thinking about and growing in some manner.

I have heard and seen advertising for these clickers for sometime, but never really understood just how valuable these could be.  I thought it was just another technology gimmick!  How could these really be used to keep kids on track and gaining their full attention throughout a lesson.   What a great article that ran today in New York Times, talking about how many Universities are utilizing this technology to do just that!  About half-million students are using them today.

EVANSTON, Ill. — If any of the 70 undergraduates in Prof. Bill White’s “Organizational Behavior” course here at Northwestern University are late for class, or not paying attention, he will know without having to scan the lecture hall.

Many kids don’t really like these clickers, while others believe it helps them keep on track and do what they really should be doing in class. 

Though some Northwestern students say they resent the potential Big Brother aspect of all this, Jasmine Morris, a senior majoring in industrial engineering, is not one of them.

“I actually kind of like it,” Ms. Morris said after a class last week. “It does make you read. It makes you pay attention. It reinforces what you’re supposed to be doing as a student.”

Take a read of the entire article to really get a good understanding – the key is to incorporate the clickers into your lesson plan and get the kids involved throughout the lesson.  This approach I believe can be used for any grade as it puts technology in the hands of the child that is more than a little familiar in using it already.

NEW YORK TIMES – More Professors Give Out Hand-Held Devices to Monitor Students and Engage Them

Technology at it’s best!

Breaking it Down: How to start deploying Microsoft Desktop Virtualization technologies

 Since virtualization is key to most technologies going forward and a number of districts have already started down that road and I believe many more are looking at it.

I thought his article from Microsoft might be of assistance.

Todays post is from Dave Trupkin, Senior Product Manager for App-V and Med-V

I’m coming to you live from Tech·Ed Berlin. Karri Alexion-Tiernan just posted over on the Windows for Your Business a blog outlining Microsoft’s position on Desktop Virtualization describing the “layers” and the importance of management.

I had the opportunity to catch up with some experts on the show floor and get their insights regarding deploying Microsoft’s Desktop Virtualization and as a bonus, Citrix joined us to chat about XenDesktop integration with our virtualization technologies.

Let’s spend some time together to dive in to the different components of the Microsoft Desktop Virtualization stack and talk about deployment tips and resources to help you get started with each. In future posts, we’ll explore the specifics of each technology in greater detail.

 LINK TO ARTICLE

Text Books – Surprise – Surprise – Students want Paper!

Reading the following article from the New York Times I was surprised so many kids are not looking at E-books, but would rather carry 10lbs book around the campus.  It is for sure a change in mind-set and study habits even for kids who use technology all day long.  Some of the comments made did surprise me a little.

Similarly I started listening to audio books a few years ago and I love it today.  I started to do this not because of the technology, but because I just couldn’t find the time to read a paperback.  This allowed me to continue doing something I loved, it was something I had to get used to and it is a different experience.  My daughter who has grown up with technology love’s to read and wants to have the physical book in her hand, she don’t want to listen to or use an E-reader – though she has not tried either and at this point she doesn’t want to even try it.

According to the National Association of College Stores, digital books make up just under 3 percent of textbook sales, although the association expects that share to grow to 10 percent to 15 percent by 2012 as more titles are made available as e-books.

In two recent studies — one by the association and another by the Student Public Interest Research Groups, a national advocacy network — three-quarters of the students surveyed said they still preferred a bound book to a digital version.

Many students are reluctant to give up the ability to flip quickly between chapters, write in the margins and highlight passages, although new software applications are beginning to allow students to use e-textbooks that way.

FULL ARTICLE

Microsoft Rolls Up Cloud Services Into Office 365, Takes Aim At Google Apps (via TechCrunch)

Might be interesting – we will have to wait and see!  More and more applications are moving to the cloud with 24×7 access – anywhere – anytime.

Today at an event in San Francisco, Microsoft’s Office division is unveiling a new product: a suite of the company’s productivity services called Office 365. Before now, Microsoft’s business-facing cloud services have been broken up in a few places: SharePoint, Lync Online, Exchange, and Office web apps. Office 365 looks to unify these. Microsoft SVP Chris Capossela says “This is everything we know about productivity brought to the cloud”. The me … Read More

via TechCrunch

Dead Sea Scrolls – Soon to be available on the WEB – thx to Google, Nasa & Israeli Antiquities Authority!

The Dead See Scrolls which contains original biblical text is coming to the internet.  This is great news for anyone interested in history and wants to see some first hand.  I can see this being used in many history classes, it being  better than viewing them in a text.  It will be sometime before you see them as this was just announced and the details of the project will be fully disclosed and online within months.

At a press briefing in Israel, the IAA’s Pnina Shor talked about how the Google deal will help preserve the scrolls. “From the minute all of this will go online there will be no need to expose the scrolls anymore, and anyone in his office or (on) his couch will be able to see it,” she said—though we do have to wonder how many couch potatoes are really itching to read The War Scroll off its actual parchment.

The 900 biblical and other manuscripts, comprising some 30,000 fragments, were discovered between 1947 and 1956 in the Qumran caves above the Dead Sea and photographed in their entirety with infra-red technology in the 1950s.

READ ENTIRE Press Release

I for one can’t wait to see this online.

“OH NO”! – Another Image Format

I know, I know advancing technology is what everyone wants, but it always confuses the masses and makes sharing that much harder as a new format gets adopted.

I have to say if the information coming out from Google is true about an average reduction in file size of 39%,  you could see this taking off quickly especially because it’s Google putting it out there. 

To achieve this reduction, the WebP format relies on the advanced, still-mage compression methods that the VP8 video codec uses to compress individual frames. Google has coupled these advanced compression techniques with a very slim container format. Due to its efficacy for compressing lossy images, WebP might someday replace JPEG as the standard format for photos and similar content on the Web.  READ FULL ARTICLE from ars Technica

I guess we have to wait and see what happens.

 

Remote Access Options

Your Superintendent is home working on a report due the next day and something goes wrong with the system, he calls you – What are you going to do. 

Well I came across an article that gave a bunch of options for remote access that are Free but simple to use.

5 Ways To Remotely Connect a Computer Over The Internet

If you try any of these, let me know what you think?

Convert FILES on the WEB

Everyone has had that document that they can’t load up or the version is wrong and you still need to view.  Or you need to send a file to someone, but they don’t have the necessary program to be able to open the file.

Found a FREE service on PC MECH that is WEB based – so you don’t have to install anything and you get your new document emailed to you.  Being that it is WEB based, I wouldn’t want to send any private information, but for general type documents etc – this service works really well. 

With the popularity of eBooks, wouldn’t it be nice to take those large PDF files and convert them to your Kindle format?   Convert PDF files to eBook formats (epub, fb2, lit, lrf, mobi, oeb, pdb, pml, rb, tcr)

ZAMZAR – Free online file Conversion

To have only ONE CABLE for Everything…. INTEL LIGHT PEAK

Everyone has a nightmare of cables, tangled and hanging down.  My wife hates seeing all the cables – so you try to organize and tie them up, but have fun if you have to change or remove or add a cable.  It’s just a MESS!  Well this might all come to an END next year when PC manufacture start to use Light Peak.   Certainly USB has help in cutting down the number of different types and connectors, but you still need one cable per product.  The main issue with USB is the capacity and speed – so it will never be the single connection, but Light Peak looks like it might be able to handle everything in a daisy chain method – this is great.

Light Peak Wiki definition

This was first shown back in 2009 and INTEL was saying this year, but at a show this past week they indicated it wouldn’t be till next year when we will see this great solution.

Related Articles

• Intel’s Light Peak optical interconnect shrinks slightly, LaCie, WD, Compal and Avid begin prototyping (engadget.com)