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A school in London is using videogames as an reward for their students:

A Birmingham school has found a novel way to motivate pupils to stay disciplined - by giving well-behaved pupils a range of executive perks, including access to a computer-games room and the right to wear a special uniform.

Selly Oak School has benefited 180 students with a platinum award card, which gives them access to a games lounge, where they can play Nintendo Wii, Xbox and other console games.

The rest of the 410 students can see from outside what they are missing.

They also give the top 20 students the choice to wear a different school uniform.

While most schools give house points (shades of Harry Potter), this is more ambitious. Teachers have halved their time spent on discipline problems.

Are there districts in the US doing this?

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Games that can educate: SimCity donated to OLPC project:

Electronic Arts announced yesterday plans to donate the original version of the SimCity computer game to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project so that it can be distributed to schoolchildren in developing countries on OLPC’s XO laptop.

Although they haven’t hit their $100 goal, the OLPC XO laptop is a very interesting laptop. With it finally shipping, we can wait and see how successful it will be. Unfortunately, for individual school districts, they will have to look at different offerings, such as the Eee PC from Asus. The addition of SimCity does make the project more enticing.

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Asus Eee PC in pink, green, blue, and black:

Anyone waiting until next year to purchase the entry-level Asus Eee PC 2G Surf ($299) will soon have a new decision to make: Pure White, Lush Green, Sky Blue, Blush Pink, or Galaxy Black.

Combined with a 1-to-1 initiative, what an interesting way for students to gain ownership of their laptops than by offering them a laptop in their favorite color.

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Today marks the start of the eTech|Ohio Educational Technology Conference at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. I look forward to the conference every year. Not only is it a great resource of ideas and practices, it is also a great motivator!

Tomorrow I am running a booth at the Technology Support Display from 10:30-2:30 on Virtual Machine technology. At 3:30 I will be presenting a concurrent session on the same topic.

If you are at the conference, leave me a comment!

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Analyzing Census data shows that being a college graduate is worth $23,000 a year:

“How much is a bachelor’s degree worth? About $23,000 a year, the government said in a report released Thursday.”

An extra ~$1,000 a month isn’t too shabby.

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Fire up your browser and head on over to Mozilla’s ftp mirrors to download the latest version of Firefox. Although this version isn’t as monumental as those in the past, it does add a couple of nice features, including spell check in form fields and a built in session manager to restore your browser windows and tabs after you quit or if it crashes.

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Machine virtualization seems to be the hot topic right now in the computing world, especially with the release of VMware Server from EMC and Virtual PC 2004 from Microsoft for free. That means you can now host multiple virtual machines on your current Windows or Linux PC.

For the uninitiated, virtual machines is a process of running one or more different operating systems on one physical machine. Each virtual machine is a guest of the one physical machine, which is normally called the host. Each guest is totally independent, and do not know about the other guests.

This allows the user to do things such as:

• Testing different applications under multiple operating systems. You could have a WinXP virtual machine running on your WinXP machine. Installing software into the virtual machine has no effect on the host machine, so you can try out software without affecting your main machine. You can also roll back the changes made by the software in the virtual machine if it doesn’t work for you.
• Demoing software for multple sessions. Most virtual machines can roll back all the changes, so once you are set up to perform the demo, you can save a snapshot. At the end of the demo you can revert back to the snapshot, which switches everything back to the way they were originally.
• Ever wanted to try out Linux, but didn’t have a spare machine or didn’t want to bother with dual boot? You can now run it in a window on your current WIndows XP/2000 desktop.
• For the server end, it allows the network administrator to deliver servers through hosted virtual machines. These virtual machines can more easily be backed up or moved to different hardware. EMC has actual software that allows you to move a virtual machine to new hardware without any downtime!

For most users, it’s a very nice way of checking out different applications and operating systems.  If you want a little less hassle and just want to check out Linux, check out the VMware Player and preconfigured virtual appliances.

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Circle time for America’s education crisis | Perspectives | CNET News.com

Recently, I toured educational facilities where the following questions were asked:

Do you offer classes in both Cantonese and Mandarin? How are computers integrated into the curriculum? What emphasis do you place on biological sciences?

Have I been trying to find a college? No, these were hurled by concerned parents at elementary school officials.

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The Seattle Times: Education: Teachers see iPods as educational tool

At Jamestown Elementary School in Arlington, Va., Camilla Gagliolo took another approach. Rather than fighting the fad, she is capitalizing on it by giving students iPods and re-imagining them as a learning tool.

“It just makes so much sense. They are so drawn to this technology. They are so excited by it. They’re comfortable with it,” said Gagliolo, the school’s technology coordinator.

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Study Reveals How to Become a Highly Creative Person » Quantum Biocommunication

Do you desire to be a more creative person but don’t think you have the “creative” gene? You may have some hard work ahead, but it’s possible to become the next Walt Disney or Martha Stewart, says an expert on creativity at Washington University in St. Louis.

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