Jun

4

A bit of creativity

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You’ve got to love creative uses of technology. As teachers we’re always encouraging creativity in the classroom, and as teachers we should be trying to use technology in creative ways.

That made this article about an English band so interesting. They couldn’t afford a video for their song, so they took to the streets and deliberately played their music by surveillance cameras. Under privacy laws, they were able to obtain much of the video which they pieced together into their music video. You can like or hate surveillance cameras, but you’ve got to admit that’s a brilliant way to use technology.

If you prefer something more auditory, this British Honda commerical gives you just a hint of what you can do with sound. It can be more than speech and than thumps and bangs.

I guess these videos just hint at what you can do with technology if you’re creative. Now, of course, the problem is to communicate that to my students. I wonder if I can find a creative way to do that?

May

5

Is technology making us dumber?

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Gene Weingarten has a great piece on technology and what it does to our intelligence. I’ve often been suprised that so many of my students have trouble doing math in their heads, and I attribute it to reliance on calculators. We don’t need to be good at math because we have those little calculators.

Weingarten humorously suggests that many Americans can’t spell well because they don’t need to. They have spell checkers.

So is technology making us dumber, or are we just learning different things? Have I become the old curmudgeon who thinks everyone was smarter when he was young, or are kids not learning certain basic skills as well? I’m honestly not sure.

May

3

good bye capital letters

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I’ve been doing some blogging with a couple of classes and have struggled to get the kids to add capitals to sentences. Their sentence structure is also often horribly tortured. The kids, of course, can’t quite see why I’m so uptight. This piece from the Boston Globe, “the revenge of e.e. cummings,” does a nice job of humorously getting at what’s going through my head.

Apr

14

When less is more: Smaller laptops

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In the past couple of weeks, both Intel and HP announced not bigger and better but smaller and less powerful laptops that they are going to be producing soon with release dates set as early as the end of the month.

The idea is to produce machines that are reasonably affordable for more people and to get them put to use by more and more schools. Apparently reasoning that most people don’t use the full power of a laptop computer anyway, these two companies are building what appear to be stripped down machines with slower processors, smaller hard drives, and smaller screens for less money.

After all, if all you’re doing with your laptop is word processing, watching YouTube, and sending e-mail, why pay for enough processing power to be able to do fancy graphic editing and powerful video and audio mixing?

I like the approach. I’ve noticed in the past couple of years that my old 3 megapixel camera is out of date, while my newer 6 megapixel SLR is also out of date. Neither has nearly the megapixels that most cameras that are currently available have. Yet, unless you’re blowing up your pictures to poster size, a 3 megapixel camera will do nicely, and a 6 is a luxury. Why pay for something you’ll fully never use like an 8 or 10 megapixel camera?

Making computers accessible to more people by offering them less makes sense. Most of us don’t need all the bells and whistles, and not having to pay for them should be great.

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