December 2011
26 posts
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Unlike New York, Some Districts Embrace Social... →
positivelypersistentteach:
According to the New York Department of Education’s Web site, students may access the Internet for limited educational purposes. The Department of Education grants access to the Internet for relevant learning activities both in school and at home, for career development, and communication between teachers and students.
Students may use social media networks only for...
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Servers for Educators Looking into Open Source...
Information Infrastructure for Open Source School
Ampache: Streaming audio and video. Accessible anywhere there’s access to the web, presuming you’re not using iOS (wifi only). Great for recorded books, guided notes, lectures, etc.
Calibre: Etext repository as a headless server. Use the free Calibre client (multiplatform) to convert from epub to pdf etc. Great for refactoring text for...
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Use the Kindle Fire as a Creative Device
From Wired.com:
1 Plan A: The Easy Route
1.1 Writers
1.2 Photographers/Artists
1.3 Musicians
2 Plan B: Sideloading Unavailable Apps
2.1 What is sideloading?
2.2 Instructions
3 Plan C: Rooting Your Kindle Fire
3.1 Why would you want to?
3.2 Why wouldn’t you want to?
The Kindle Fire ships with Quickoffice, allowing you to access documents, spreadsheets, and PowerPoint slides you save...
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Teaching Narrative?
Some success can be claimed when we used character generation sheets from elaborate role playing games (I used a GURPS sheet this week, others in past years).
They are polymorphously helpful: this time, I deployed them selectively during a revision workshop to encourage more indirect characterization through dialog (nonfiction narrative), in particular.
Also great for teaching the part of...
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Move over, Nonfiction
Up until today, students have been reading nonfiction in ISM (info systems management) (Minsky, Stallman, Catherdral and the Bazaar, etc.).
Today students chose from the following fiction for independent reading (reading responses due daily, regardless of amount of content-related HW).
“True Names,” Vinge
Neuromancer, Gibson
Snow Crash, Stephenson
Little Brother, Doctorow
Using...
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vimtutor / vim
Advanced Information Systems class took a break from Axzo’s Linux+ Powered by LPI. We’re working through the third unit, a much needed review on manipulating files and directories; however, the unit ends with a skimpy sequence of exercises introducing vim.
We’ve chosen, rather, to rely on the fantastic vimtutor resource.
On Ubuntu,
apt-get install vim-gnome
seems the least...
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Teaching Narrative with Ushahidi
Students are building location-based narratives using a Ushahidi instance on TurnKey Linux’s LAMP stack 11.2. So far, lessons have emphasized
dialog,
setting,
indirect and direct characterization,
and moving from first to third-person voice.
Above all, we are concerned with producing compelling prose that will not leave the reader asking “So, what?”
Each student will...
