Ryan Collins

🕹ī¸ Do Something Great! 😄

Author: ryan

  • Portable blogging

    I’m testing out a mobile blogging client for my Windows Mobile 5.0
    Smartphone, MoBlog. It appears to work ok, including allowing me to
    insert an image from my phone. I’ll post a longer review once I’ve had
    more time to play with it.

  • Next fall, every school district in Florida is required to set up an online school for K-8

    [In Florida, virtual school could make classrooms history —
    OrlandoSentinel.com][]

    > A new law that takes effect next fall requires every district in the
    > state to set up an online school for kindergarten through eighth-grade
    > students.
    >

    This is fascinating to me, and I’m surprised that this didn’t get more
    news coverage when the legislation was being passed in Florida. Each
    district still gets the \$6,000 per student, and most are going to buy
    the services of a couple of companies that provide online education
    instead of create their own online curriculum. Even the computer and
    Internet connection are provided to the students.

    I could see this being a watershed moment in the aspect of educational
    technology. Can education be provided digitally and will students learn
    just as well as they do in a classroom of 20 students? The pitfalls are
    enormous, mostly centering around socialization skills, although this
    should be a solved problem with the years of home schooling that have
    taken place. [In the spring of 2003, 1,096,000 students were being home
    schooled in the United States][].

    (* Thanks to Kevin Jarrett and his tweet! *)

    [In Florida, virtual school could make classrooms history —
    OrlandoSentinel.com]: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/state/orl-virtual1008nov10,0,978666.story
    [In the spring of 2003, 1,096,000 students were being home schooled in
    the United States]: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2006/homeschool/estimated.asp

  • Codeweavers Crossover Pro and Games for Mac and Linux Free today only!

    Codeweavers is offering two of their products for Mac and Linux free
    today only    . I’ve only played around with Crossover when it was still
    in Beta, but this is some exciting news. I’m hoping it can run VMWare’s
    console application so I don’t have to start up VMware Fusion on my
    MacBook.

  • Posting from my ipod

    Showing off the WordPress app for the iPod.

  • Firefox 3.0 to be released at 10 PDT (1:00pm for those on the east coast)

    Go and download it! (At the proper time, of course. 🙂 )

  • Test post from TypePad’s Blogit

    This is a test, posting from my iPod Touch.

  • Would a rose by any other name smell just as sweet?

    According to a recent study, [names really do make a difference][]:

    > Parents are being warned to think long and hard when choosing names
    > for their babies as research has discovered that girls who are given
    > very feminine names, such as Anna, Emma or Elizabeth, are less likely
    > to study maths or physics after the age of 16, a remarkable study has
    > found.
    >

    Fascinating research. They even examined twin girls and found that what
    they were named could put them on two entirely different career paths.
    Also, naming a child with a ‘lower-status’ name, spelled in an unusual
    way or including punctuation, lowered exam scores by 3-5%.

    One more thing for new parents to worry about. 🙂

  • Happy 35th Birthday Ethernet

    [May 22, 1973: Enter Ethernet][]

    > 1973: Bob Metcalfe of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center writes a
    > memo outlining how to connect the think tank’s new personal computers
    > to a shared printer. The memo puts forth the basic properties of —
    > and names — ethernet.

    Looking at his diagram, he had the foresight to see networking not only
    over a local area network, but also telephone lines and radio waves.

  • Wiimote interactive whiteboard success

    Since I am home this week, I decided to get caught up on some projects.
    The big one was working on getting an [interactive whiteboard setup
    going with a Nintendo Wiimote and an infrared pen][]. This morning, I
    finally got my infrared pen working. What I did was bought a cheap LED
    flashlight from Walmart and replaced one of the LEDs with an infrared
    LED, the Radio Shack 276-143 to be exact.

    After checking that the pen worked, I downloaded the Wiimote
    interactive whiteboard software     and it worked! I’ll try to get some
    pictures and a video up, but I don’t know if I’ll have time today.

    Next goal is to find some whiteboard software to use with it. For right
    now I’m just using Inkscape.

    [interactive whiteboard setup going with a Nintendo Wiimote and an
    infrared pen]: http://ryancollins.org/wp/2007/12/10/the-50-interactive-whiteboard/

  • Why do students need email?

    [![][]][]On the Ohio Technology Coordinator’s listserv this question was
    posted:

    > We already had one case of student to teacher generated e-mail that
    > originated on a student computer inside the school. The FIRST question
    > I got as the Tech Director was ‘Why are you allowing students to send
    > and receive email in school?’
    >

    And my question would be, “Why are you letting them use pencil and
    paper? They could be sending notes to other students or staff!”. For
    discipline we do not distinguish between computer generated or person
    generated correspondence. The punishment may change if it’s on the
    computer because they’d lose computer privileges due to the AUP.

    You’re not going to be able to stop it. A student could simply fire up
    telnet and use your existing mail server to send email to whoever
    they want, saying anything they want.

    No access to telnet on the machine? Then throw up a Java telnet client
    on any old web host and access it from there. Actually, if I wanted to
    get around a school’s filters, this is the route I’d probably go. Once I
    get SSH somewhere, I can get full access to the Internet, and it only
    requires port 80, a web browser, and Java. (This is what I use at places
    that have network access locked down. I open a SSH tunnel over port 443
    to my home computer, and then have full access to anything on the
    Internet.)

    Not only is email use part of the State of Ohio Technology Standards, it
    is our job as teachers to educate the students on the proper use of
    email. How to use it, what’s appropriate, etc. Part of the problem with
    the garbage that students send through email is that they’ve never seen
    anything else. It’s pretty foreign for them to see an email message with
    proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation. (I hope I have everything
    correct in this post! 🙂

    I bet you have students right now using a free email services, ssh
    tunnels, etc.

    We like to think we have things locked down, but unless you’re working
    for the NSA, you do not have it locked down. Education of the students,
    punishment for inappropriate behavior is a good way to go. We as
    Technology Coordinators we have a habit of putting up technological road
    blocks instead of solving the real problems.

    Thunderbird Email

    []: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30735542@N00/215738569