Thing 17 One New Thing

I recently learned about iTunesU at the iTunes store. Personally I don't use iTunes much but I saw a news article about Podcasts of lectures from colleges being available in the iTunes store at iTunesU. To get there simply click on the iTunes logo on your laptop. In the iTunes store there is a menu at the left and at the bottom it says iTunesU (new), click there. Apparently sometime in the last year apple approached a number of universities and asked them if they would give them the podcasts they were doing of classes on campus for free, and apple offered to store and catalog them and make them available to the public for free. There is an amazing array of subjects from universities across the country available for free. A few months after apple started offering the podcasts online one of the lectures had 50,000 downloads. As high school teachers we can certainly make use of some of these lectures as resources for our students. Anyway, have fun exploring "The Mind of Einstein" or an environmental series from Yale or philosophy lectures from UC Berkeley.

Technology Troubles - Weird Fixes

I wanted to pass along an interesting problem I encountered yesterday that may have started over the weekend. While I was using my laptop over the weekend I noticed that a couple of times it would make a whirring sound like it was trying to start up a disk, but no disk was in it. Then on Monday I was on the Campus system entering some grades in Campus gradebook and I got these weird error reports when I tried to save what I had entered and when I would go back and check, what I had entered had not been saved. I solved that problem by saving after every few entries. At the end of the day I turned the computer off, closed it up, and put it in my bag. A couple of hours later at home I went to take my laptop out of the bag and the laptop was hot, in fact, it was so hot it made my whole bag hot. I went to turn it on and it wouldn't turn on. It was off, but it was hot (like it was in use) and making humming sounds, but it was off and wouldn't turn on. I tried plugging it in to the charger and leaving it plugged in for 15, then 30, then 60 minutes and still nothing. So I did what I always do when I have a technology problem, I asked my son what he thought was wrong.

He looked at it, tried to turn it on, again nothing. Then he removed the battery pack by turning the little lock on the back and taking it out. With the battery pack out he plugged the laptop into the charger and tried to turn it on. It came on immediately just like it always had. We checked to make sure it seemed to be working properly. Turned it off. Put the battery pack back in, and it has been working just like before off the battery or with the charger in and the battery charges up fine.

So I said to my son, "So what was wrong with it?" and he replied "Oh, sometimes they get this magnetic thing." Now, I have no idea what he meant by that, and I'm not sure he really knows exactly either, but he sure knew how to fix the problem. So I wanted to share this problem and the solution with everyone so if it happens to you, you will know how to fix the problem.

Thank heavens for a 17 year old techy in the house.

Thang 13

Wow, what a class. I learned so much, but feel like I need about two 8 hour days to sit down and go through different databases the way I did for my one in class tonight. There is so much to learn and so little time to do it in. I am starting to work on a research project for my classes that will take place in late winter/early spring. I want to construct the project to do with my students all that I am learning. Hopefully one of the things I will have learned is how to construct better projects.

Thang 6 and Thang 7

I've just finished my first good look at the research calculator and the teacher guide. Wow!! As a science teacher I have always complained that we were expected to teach students how to inquire, but that I had never had a course on that myself. Well, here it is. What I would love to do is take the RPC and tweek it to make it more applicable to doing scientific research, where you are actually doing a laboratory experiment as part of your research. That would be awesome. I downloaded some pdf files to look at to see how to begin to use this in my class. I thought the teacher's guide about how to develop good research topics was really helpful. I know I have had some bad topics in the past and the results from the students have been equally bad. The RPC could be a whole class in itself called Research 101. Now I've got to figure out how to jump in.

United Streaming Thang

I got onto United Streaming and tried one of the video clips in my 9th grade science class. Yes, you definitely need a pair of speakers to go with the lap top, but the low volume did make the students be EXTRA quiet. The video had good information, but it wasn't organized in the way I usually organize things. I liked the quiz at the end of the clip. It was a 20 minute clip and we paused it so students could write down important points and it eventually ended up taking up at least 50 minutes. I didn't think the picture quality was the best. I would like to see about improving that as well.