Mind the Gap

In the most recent issue of NEA Today, there is an article entitled, Mind the Gap, which is an article about the very discrepancy we've been discussing between our students who have computers and access to the internet, and those who don't. While the things we are learning in this class are applicable in the classroom, I can't help but think of the 50% of our students who are being left further behind each day as technology continues to develop. It makes me want to really focus on how we can get these resources to our students who are on the losing end of this explosion in technology. I have some ideas about how we could help/like donations of computers from businesses who are upgrading-but I have no idea where we could get funding to support 'wiring' our students throughout the city. Does anyone else see this as an increasing difficulty in educationg our students?

Complete Booklist for IB English now avaiable

This post is for my colleagues at Highland and any other school in the district teaching IB English classes. We finally received a complete list of books and authors for IB English. It seems many schools were using books not apprved by the program, and were therefpre not in compliance. Highland has been in compliance, but we have been charged with the task of coming up with new curriculum to update our program and make it more accessible for the students. I will copy, and distribute these book lists so we can begin our discussion of changing books for the upcoming years.

Final Word on Accessing Blogger With Dial up

I finally got an email from Mozilla regarding the issue of difficulty connecting to Blogger using the Firefox browser with a dial up connection. Mozilla DID design Firefox for MacIntosh computers, and it does not support dial up connectivity with many sites well, if used with a PC. They suggested using Explorer as a browser, as I discovered, if having these issues.

IB Training ELA Updates

For anyone interested in IB training, or is thinking about implementing it in their schools, I just came back from level 2 training in New York, and have a great deal of materials that explain the various written and oral exams students need to do in their junior and senior years in high school. I'm not going to put the link for their page on this blog because it is very confusing and hard to navigate-but if you are interested in the information on testing outcomes I would be happy to share some materials with you.

battery problems with your laptop?

Has anyone else noticed that battery life in your laptop goes from full to half after just a half hour? The bottom of my laptop also gets so hot I have to put a magazine under it so it won't burn my leg? Is this normal? Is there a problem with the heat sink? I know that is how the heat is dissipated instead of using a fan. Our ex-building tech sent me a page for uploading a battery check and a 'fix' for the problem, but it turned out to be a blind link to an inoperable page. Does anyone have a link that works?
bc

Are there any free wikis out there where we can uploand folders?

I've been trying to create a wiki at PBwiki, but it appears yu can't upload folders, only create individual pages. Does anyone know of anything available to use where we can uploand entire folders for sharing? The PBwiki folks say that is coming soon-but will we have to pay for a premium service to take advantage of this? So far, this is not conducive to creating a shared cache of lesson plans. It seems we can still only upload one document to a page. Just to upload curriculum for one class, there would be well over 100 pages that would have to be uploaded separately. There has to be a better way. What have others found out?