Week #2 - OS Madness

This week we learned about computer operating systems and for the first time ever I got my hands on a Linux variant: Ubuntu,  It was fun to see the differences in Ubuntu versus OS X and windows.  It does seem that computers are starting to have a very similar operating system by design.  Each company (and open source community) finds out what works from their own research as well as cribbing information from each other.  Over all learning about Ubuntu was a fun way to delve into OS topics without having to do expensive and time consuming full installs of comercial products.

On a side note I am still trying to get my USB install of Edubuntu to boot up.  I'd love to have it as a backup for those students who do not have their computer working at full potential in my laptop classes. I'll keep you all posted about how it all works out

Also, incase you haven't tried Edubuntu there is an excellent website available to try it out without having to download the iso and burn a boot CD. [link]

Computer History for John Wilkinson

When I was in grade school, probably about 3rd grade, my mom brought home an Apple IIe for the summer as part of her school's "Computers on Loan" Program.  We had a word processor, a blackjack game and as no school computer could ever be without it: Oregon Trail.  I was only allowed to go on the computer after dark and this rule was in place for good reason.  From the moment my tiny fingers hit that keyboard I was hooked.  I played around with the computer for hours at a time.  The old green screen would make my eyes burn after a couple of minutes, but I didn't care.  It was so cool that I could type and it would show up immediately on the screen, I could play blackjack (although I was always fuzzy on the rules) and I could shoot buffalo on the Oregon Trail (although I could only carry back 100lbs of the meat :) ).  

At first my mom had to type in the commands to get the programs to load up from the big noisy 5 1/4" floppy disks in the front of the machine, but soon after I had watched her do it a couple of times I was able to log into it by myself and play the night away.  I distinctly remember helping my father boot up the computer after he had tried several times to get the machine to work.  He looked so proud at me when I helped him.  This experience has been replayed countless times in my classroom where students have been able to make the computers do almost anything they wanted with little outside training.  I have a feeling that in a couple of years this will just be even more of a divide between digital natives and those who have come into the technology later in life.

The last thing that was memorable about my first computer experience was when a neighbor and I were playing the blackjack game and we accidentally hit the "-" button when we were typing in our bet.  Suddenly when we lost (the two of us still had not figured out strategy in the game) our total increased instead of decreased.  We tried it a couple of more times and soon we could get to the 10K total the game declared as the goal.  This ignited our imaginations and we spent the better part of two weeks playing with the betting function of the game to see what would happen when we typed in other things.  As our experimenting was really random we did not figure out why the "-" key made our bets act in the reverse of what they should.  I later asked my dad about it and he tried as hard as he could to explain the concept of subtracting a negative number, but I was a little too young to figure it out.

Over all I really enjoy using computers and I believe that this first experience was crucial to developing this love.

Starting CEDO 510

One class down, quite a few more to go!  The course that I am in now is "Computer Systems: How They Work".  This should be a fun class to get to poke around in the machinery of computing for a little bit.  As a physics teacher I love to find out how things work at a ver low level.  I've built two computers from scratch (but neither was particularly well put together) and I've taken a little programming in college, but as for the true hardware / software interaction I am very much a neophyte.  This will be very useful as it looks like we are taking a nuts & bolts approach that will help me in the classroom to diagnose and "tech triage" the laptops my students are using.  I look forward to the class and hope that we can do some great stuff in digging around in a computer's guts.

Week #2 - Web cams, Social Bookmarking and Online Storage

This week we took a look at web cams, social bookmarking and online storage.  I'll have to admit that using web cams for voice chat in school scares me a little if it is not properly monitored. The technology has quite a few ways that it could be abused.  However, I've used webcams with my students in a couple of other ways:  using it as a camera for taking pictures of lab setups, with white boards to produce quick flip books and as video recorders to produce video lab reports where the students talk about their labs instead of just writing out a conclusion.

Social Bookmarking was a neat thing to dive into.  Digg and delicious are both great sites to wander for a while when you have some time to kill.  I was most impressed about Diigo, though.  The research applications of the web service are awesome.  I have a feeling that I'll probably be using it at some point during the course of this program.

Online storage was the last thing that we looked at this week.  I chose Drop Box as I had some familiarity with it in the past and many people had recommended it to me.  In the classroom it provides me with a way to have students be able to access their files outside of school.  Currently I have my students submit digital lab reports to a school controlled "classrooms" drive that is only accessible through the school's network.  it would be great to implement a service like Drop Box so that students would not have to log into school in order to submit their work.