September 2007

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This little story illustrates the absolutely ridiculous nature of Websense – my district’s internet filter.

While perusing through my feeds on Google Reader this morning, I found a link to a New York Times article about how the state of New York is investigating Facebook’s safety rules.

Needless to say, I was websensed. While trying to link to this article, I was blocked. Thinking this was just a fluke, I typed ‘facebook’ into the NY Times search field:

nytimessearch.jpg

Again, I was blocked by Websense:

websensed1.jpg

To recap, my district’s internet filter is not only blocking Facebook (with which I completely agree), but they are also blocking information about Facebook!

Where am I – the United States or China!

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Websenseless

In anticipating the release of Google Presentation, The Official Google Blog recently released a neat little video describing the power and utility of Google Documents. The video speaks for itself and is worth watching:

My biggest problem is that our district has blocked Google Docs via Websense for fear that students might use it to chat (in a quite convoluted way) and import inappropriate content from outside of their safe little fortress of an intranet. This same mentality has them blocking flickr and slideshare.

And this is also why the district blocks YouTube (I might remind you that Google owns them). But stupefying as it may seem, Google Video is open!

When I question these practices, I usually get this response: “what happens if a student imports porn this way?” To which I mentally reply “yeah, that is a LOT easier that plugging in a USB drive full of porn into any district computer.”

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For those of you following Dale Basler’s blog, you’ll remember that he recently posted about Mark Frauenfelder’s book Rule the Web (how to do anything and everything on the internet, better, faster and easier).

While I realize that some of you still open books and read them cover to cover, Mark has created a blog for his book that caters to some of us who like to get information in short, abridged segments.

Most of these episodes are actually short audio segments, and you can easily listen to them with the embedded Pickle Player. Here are a few of the latest ones:

You’ll note that these episodes are fairly new, so this is your chance to get on board with a new resource from its beginnings!

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I stumbled across NoteSake from a recent LifeHacker post. This little gem seems like a great idea – take notes and tag ’em, send/share them, and organize them. So I tried it out.

The editor takes a little getting used to, but seems like it has quite a few features. For instance, I can do superscripts and formulas, which is definitely important to me as a science teacher. I realized that it isn’t very easy to paste old notes (taken from MS Word) into the editor, but when you are done, you can easily export the notes out as a Word document or a pdf.

notesample

Perhaps the neatest functions of NoteSake lie in the ability to tag your notes and to share them with others. Imagine being in a class where all students took notes with NoteSake, and were able to collaborate their notes together in a group.

However, this is an ideal tool that is not realistic for most public high schools. Most kids do not have laptops or even computers in their classroom, and may have limited internet access. In order for this to be effective, students would have to transfer their notes (which is not that easy) into NoteSake instead of taking them on-the-fly.

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Wired Magazine’s How To Wiki Blog recently posted an article on how to Write a Perfect EMAIL. As educators are flexing their fingers for work after resting this summer, this is a perfect article to kick off the school year.

Here is the annotated list:

  • Be Brief
  • Put your message in context
  • Make your requests clear
  • Include a deadline (if appropriate)

Dale Basler and I recently presented The Basics of Online Communication to NSTA’s National Science Congress. We’d add a few more tips:

  • Use bcc (blind carbon copy) for multiple addressees
  • Trim unnecessary ‘fat’ on forwards
  • Choose function over form (i.e. avoid fancy formatting)
  • Don’t use e-mail for everything (not good for chatting, etc.)

You can see the video and powerpoint of that presentation at Zentation (below):

The Basics of Online Communication
44:27
Maintaining successful and effective communication in the digital world.

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After a few days of unbearable heat in my classroom (no air conditioning in my school), I decided to quantify my misery.

Using a Vernier LabPro and Surface Temperature Sensor, I collected temperature readings in my classroom (in Fahrenheit) over the course of 8 hours of school. Here is the resulting graph:

temp

You’ll notice two things:

  1. My room got hot – up to 85ºF, which was actually cooler than the day before (~89 ºF). Our district touts equity, but seeing as the other high schools in our district both have air conditioning, I can assure you that the district is NOT equitable in providing a classroom environment conducive to learning.
  2. The other interesting thing is that there is a noticeable change in room temperature when the kids are physically present. Notice the two dips in temperature (marked by the arrows). They represent two hours the chemistry room is vacant. Thus, body heat can significantly raise the temperature of any classroom.

Keeping these two things in mind, I have a suggestion to maintain ‘equity’ – keep rooms cooler in non-air conditioned buildings with lower class sizes!

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