TeacherTabletPC

Since I’m buried under a heap of grading (well, actually, I crawled out for a quick break and decided to use the break to post here), I’ll follow the lead of GottaBeMobile.com and post a quick reminder about the changes in Daylight Saving Time in the US. As all the running around by our IT staff at school indicates, this is kind of a big deal, even though it really shouldn’t be (they were very insistent that I reboot my desktop right then and there). Chances are that if you’ve been keeping up with your software updates, you’ll be fine. Just in case, here’s a link to Microsoft’s DST Support Center. (And if like me, you’re multi-platform, here’s Apple’s Support Article and the OpenBSD4.0 Errata Page with a patch and a page from Rutgers University with lots of different platform-specific info.)

I can’t believe I almost missed posting today. I’m actually more surprised that I’ve been able to stick to my goal of posting every day for this long.

Also along the lines of things I can’t believe and/or things that surprise me, the number of blocked access attempts reported by Bad Behavior has just about doubled this week. I don’t think a single spam comment has made it through to the blog, though, and I’ve only had to delete a handful of spam that Akismet has caught. (Oh, and if I’m remembering correctly, Bad Behavior doesn’t default to showing its block count in the dashboard with Akismet’s spam count and I hacked that in there—comment if you want details.)

As long as I’m off on one of these mechanics-of-a-blog-site posts, I might as well publicize that if you upgraded to WP2.1.1, you really must upgrade to WP2.1.2 right now.

From the Greenwich Time article “School making use of tablet PCs in classroom”:

Pen and paper were scarce in Jen Donnalley’s classroom Friday at Greenwich Country Day School. The Upper School math teacher saw little need for the materials, even as she wrote down an algebraic equation and asked her eighth graders to solve for “X.”

(I can’t really let it go unmentioned that they probably should have said “solve for x” instead of “X”, though.) It seems that Greenwich Country Day School has been doing the one-to-one computing thing for maybe two years now and this article was looking in particular at their use of DyKnow in the math classroom.

Warner Crocker at GottaBeMobile.com already noted the article and said:

I’ve been impressed with DyKnow’s software since I first heard about it. It sounds like the collaborative capabilities for the classroom are almost too good to be true. Used in combination with a Tablet PC it sounds like a real winner.

Of course, being the curmudgeon that I am, I couldn’t pass up this quote at the end of the original Greenwich Time article:

Headmaster Adam Rohdie said he has been impressed with how the technology has helped, although he qualifies his enthusiasm by saying it is the teacher, not the tool, that really counts.

“There’s no substitute for great teaching. This is another tool to put in the hands of great teachers,” he said. “It’s not technology for technology’s sake.”

Steve Myers discusses the use of technology and its potential to radically change teaching with many links and references to more formal publications (both his own and of others).  I particlarly liked his statement early on:

The fundamental conclusion is that technology should only be used if it meets two conditions: (1) “professor time should be reduced of the repetitive and mundane chores that a computer can do so well or professor time should be used more efficiently” and (2) “student learning should not be harmed and if possible significantly advanced.["]