Job RENEWED!

So after several months of waiting whether I would get my job back (except this time as a full time position) I was called in to a budget meeting and told that enough funds had been set aside for me to have my job back! Sweet! Apparently I'll be funded at 85% by the elementary school and 15% by the middle school. I guess if everything goes according to plan I will be teaching every grade from K-8 next year. What an opportunity! I'm so excited (and relieved) to know that I'll be coming back next year. I have so many plans for the school it is really going to be a fun summer and school year trying to implement all of them. First off of course is the switch to edubuntu mini-labs in all the classrooms and then the switch to Google Apps for Education. But I also got an pleasant surprise when I was told there were sufficient funds for me to purchase an LTSP server for the lab as well! Great news all around! Hope everyone had as great a Memorial Day weekend as I did. Cheers -joe

The Google Teacher Academy

So I'm here in Santa Monica at the Google Teacher Academy and having a great time. Learned all about their apps for educators as well as Google Earth and Sketch Up among other things. I'd write more about it right now, but my laptop's space bar is kind of messed up. More info to come, (and pictures from the Coachella Bjork concert as well as the Shoreline concert too!). -joe

Google Academy!

So I promise to post some pictures and even video of the Bjork concert (amazing of course) here soon. In the meantime though I thought I'd take the time to announce my acceptance into the Google Teacher Academy for Southern California. SWEET! I've been really excited about Google for Educators and the services they provide, even going so far as to sign up my school for 500 email addresses earlier this year when we thought our original e-mail provider was on the fritz. I still have plans to move our site over to Google this summer, but since our provider seemed to fix itself over winter break we decided that switching horses midstream was an unnecessarily risky proposition.

Needless to say I'm ecstatic about the opportunity to participate in a Google-centered community of educators and can't wait to spend my entire Saturday driving up to LA and learning cool stuff (ok, maybe I could do without the LA part). I'll be sure to post what I learn here as soon as possible, which should be about a month from now. Cheers -joe

Coachella!

Bjork is headlining the first day this year. B and I drove up this morning and while there is only basic cellular connection here, they do have an AT&T Blue Room. So I'm coming at you from the Coachella Music and Arts Festival 2007. We just came from the Amy Winehouse performance and am basically just waiting around for Bjork to go on at 11. We're planning on getting to the stage about 2 hours early in the hopes of staking out a decent place near the front of the stage. Shouldn't be too hard, but it's hard to know how many people here are really interested in Bjork. It could be thousands. We'll see. Hopefully I'll find a pocket with at least EDGE connection and pix will follow. Rock ON! -joe

Printing to Canon in Edubuntu

Well, it appears I was a bit mistaken to bellyache yesterday about the difficulty of installing the driver for the Canon 5000 print station we have. The BrightQ program I installed worked just fine, and in fact was quite easy to use if lacking a bit as far as UI appeal. In fact, it turns out I had everything right yesterday except for one thing, the user ID for the printer. Obviously our school tracks all the printing jobs that each teacher does by assigning each teacher a specific user id. On Windows machines a prompt pops up after each print job is sent asking the user to input their ID. I guess BrightQ just requires that this ID number be input when setting up the printer. I actually suspected as much yesterday but decided to chance it, failing of course. So today I just uninstalled the printer and then reinstalled it with my User ID as the only change. Fired right up! I was even able to set up the printer in the teacher work room too. I was riding high all afternoon following this victory. If I hadn't been able to work this out it would have been a definite deal breaker as far as setting up Linux at the school. Now I feel like I'm back on track. -joe

FOSS Education

In my never ending search for some sort of common thread for this blog my latest idea is to make it about my job and specifically about what I'd like to do with my job. This I suppose means I would write about what I'm doing at my school and my struggles, successes and ideas. Recently of course I've been spending inordinate amounts of time trying to roll out Edubuntu on some sort of level. It's been really great for me to have both the power and the time to do such a project, and I suppose I realized today that this has come at the expense of some of my other duties, but nevertheless it has been an enlightening and rewarding experience.

One of the main problems in FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) education I've recently discovered is the lack of drivers for things like Linux. For example at work we have several different Canon ImageRunner print stations. These things do it all from scanning to copying to printing and stapling and 3-hole punching etc. Pretty sweet machines when they aren't broken. So naturally they will HAVE to work with whatever software OS we are using at the school. If I can't find a way for Linux to operate these things, it is a complete deal breaker. I might be able to skate by with still moving the student computers over to Edubuntu since there does seem to be better drivers available for small printers and laserjets and things. There's no way I'm going to realize my dream of being a totally FOSS school without this though.

I did find one site here that apparently makes drivers. I haven't had a lot of time to look it over yet so I'm not even sure if they are free to use or not. I'm guessing they are though. The good news is that I was able to decompress and install them. The bad news is that it didn't immediately work. Some RTFM work may be in order here, but really this shouldn't be that difficult to do. So I guess that is the worse news: that to even get to the point of having the program NOT work I had to use the terminal plenty, restart the computer a couple of times just to be sure that wasn't the solution to any of my problems, change the boot password (which ended up being my problem) and then finally trying to figure out this unnecessarily confusing UI on the program. Ugh. Unless these issues can be solved, Linux will NEVER be a viable alternative to Windows, much less OS X in the field of education.

So let's not go out on a sour note. The Really Good news is that within Edubuntu, setting up a networked printer was an absolute piece of cake! I've installed networked printers galore on Macs and PCs all over SDSU and I can say that the Ubuntu UI for this procedure is incredibly easy. It combines the best of both the PC and Mac worlds with a simple procedural wizard ala Windows with the brilliant functionality of OS X. Basically I just searched for a networked printer and it found several, even successfully guessing which one I wanted to install. Then the driver screen popped up and it knew the printer was Canon, except on the long list of available drivers only one ImageRunner was to be found. Unfortunately it was not the model I needed for any of my three print stations.

Thus, I'm trying to take away two positive ideas from the experience. First: Ubuntu has the right idea down pat for adding printers. If I had been trying to install a printer that a driver existed for, I have no doubt it would have installed brilliantly and I'd have taken a much different tone for this post. Second: Ubuntu and the FOSS community in general are assuredly adding to that list of drivers continuously, so some day soon (hopefully) installing these printers will not be anything to blog about (except for the ease with which it is done). Alas, for the time being, this is quite a stumbling block for me. Cheers -joe

Mobile Classroom on a Bus

Here's an interesting article about a rural school using the commuting hours on a bus to educate students. I guess it's going to use laptops and iPods, but I'm skeptical that such a think could succeed without supervision. -joe

My Star Wars Personality

Sweet!

Multimedia message

Today i took a class on learning space design and visited this five hundred seat classroom at sdsu.

Edubuntu LTSP

Well, I took the time to haul two computers from Einstein over to SDSU with the hopes of figuring out exactly why I can't boot up a thin client from the server, but I still haven't figured it out. I'm hoping by Wednesday I'll have it all solved since Gregg will be in the lab. The only question is whether he'll help me or not. Maybe more accurately the question is whether I can get the problem under his skin to the point that he won't rest until it is solved.

In the meantime I finished up my Saturday course with Dr. Dodge on Drupal. Pretty sweet I guess, but it is a completely different way of thinking about how webpages work. I'm not really sure that I'm ready to implement something like that across Einstein, but I'll just have to see how much time I have this summer to look at it. So far it is pretty complicated getting some of the modules installed, and I'm not at all confident in the teachers being able to do something like that for themselves. I have more hope for getting some sort of drupal site up for the school and then just linking to teacher pages that they can make themselves, perhaps with Google Page Creator or something. Overall it is a pretty daunting undertaking, but one that seems worthwhile, I'm just not sure I'm ready to tackle it yet, especially seeing as how I'm only just starting to feel proficient at CSS and somewhat capable with Javascript.

I'm still debating about what this blog will be, or become, but I think I'm just going to use it for my own personal stuff. I like the idea of lots of people reading it, but I think in the end the greatest use will be done by my future self, looking back at what I used to do and laughing at how foolish I was (or am). I have so many other goals for blogs and stuff, but I think this idea is still worthwhile. Other ideas include: a podcast blog for Jon about economist articles with commentary by me afterwards, a blog on K-12 educational technology stuff for tech teachers (I think I'll do this in Drupal and link it off of hartmanbot), and of course the einsteintech blog. I guess it isn't as much as I thought actually. Hope all is well with everyone. -joe

Screwtape proposes a toast

So last night in my church growth group we read CS Lewis' short work, "Screwtape Proposes a Toast". For the uninitiated, Screwtape is a demon in the pits of hell, so the wise will be sure to avoid following any advice he has. You can read the whole thing here if you're inclined. What really struck me in the story is the part where Screwtape talks about how Democracy can be twisted into a thinly veiled excuse for envy, and moreso, how this attitude quickly spreads into education. These two paragraphs were especially profound for me:

"The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be “undemocratic.” These differences between pupils – for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences – must be disguised. This can be done at various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing things that children used to do in their spare time. Let, them, for example, make mud pies and call it modelling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have – I believe the English already use the phrase – “parity of esteem.” An even more drastic scheme is not possible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma -- Beelzebub, what a useful word! – by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval’s attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT.

In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I’m as good as you has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway the teachers – or should I say, nurses? – will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men. The little vermin themselves will do it for us."

A sobering assessment in any respect, but especially when you consider that this was written forty years ago. Here are my own thoughts on the subject, borrowed from a blackboard discussion from a couple of weeks ago for my Ed 795B class at SDSU:

"The problem with education in America is that there's no scarcity. Scarcity is why Chinese schools work, and why American Universities work. This is why if I could do just one thing for education, and only one thing, I would get rid of truancy laws. I figure if parents can't even get their kid to ATTEND school it isn't our job to do so. Attending school should be a privilege not a right, like driving a car. I know there is a societal cost to having uneducated citizens, but there is also a societal cost in trying to educate them. I totally understand being an advocate for low achieving kids who've got it rough, but we've got a responsibility to be advocates for those kids who don't. These are the kids who try hard every single day and get essentially ignored for it because they aren't dyslexic or ADD or emotionally disturbed. Imagine if we could take all the resources we spend on raising up the lowest kids who don't give a lick anyways and instead applied them to the highest of the high, making sure they were consistently challenged throughout their school day. Maybe we leave a few children behind, but at least we aren't holding anyone back either."

Until last night I thought my view was too harsh, and while I guess I still feel that way a little, it is much less so now that I read Mr. Lewis' thoughts. Even so, I've come to think that it might not be necessary to do away with truancy laws altogether, so long as that feeling of scarcity is created somehow. It could be artificially created within the schools along the lines of what Germany does now, effectively creating tiers of schooling for all pupils. Those without the grades are not permitted access to all the offerings of the school, akin to our own AP course offerings in high school. This would create a level of scarcity that I think would benefit education overall, though it would not alleviate the suffering of teachers still asked to educate the unmotivated and unsupported (and then berated for failing to do so). That may require another set of solutions I haven't yet thought of. -joe