The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has published a report that attempts to identify key skills students need to learn now in order to be well prepared when they enter the workforce. The report was sponsored by Google and is based on polling of business leaders and students. It’s no surprise to me that the skills…
Teaching Python with Codecademy’s intro curriculum
I taught a beginning Python programming class this Spring using the Codecademy intro to Python curriculum (http://www.codecademy.com/en/tracks/python). The class went well and the students seemed to enjoy it. Here are a few things I would do differently next time though: 1. The codecademy curriculum is self-guided and each student can work at his/her own pace….
OS X command line tool for batch resizing images: sips
This OS X command line tool is very handy. Every time I need it though I have to google it to remember what it’s called. So, I’m making a blog post to remind myself. Hopefully it will be useful to others who happen across this post.> sips -Z 200 *.jpgThe -Z tells to utility to…
Nice report on determining educational usefulness of Apps
http://qz.com/399360/four-ways-to-tell-if-an-educational-app-will-actually-help-your-child-learn/
The ‘Factory Model’ of Education
This is a great article. It offers some (much needed) historical context to the claims often made by school reform advocates that our education system is structurally analogous to the factory system as it existed over one hundred years ago. These same reform advocates often valorize educational technology as a means of radically changing our…
Student Evaluation Cards
A Sample Card Our teachers have a system of passing on information about students when they move up a grade. They use 5 x 8 cards with four sections (Social, Academic, Parents, Developmental) where they can enter notes and draw a circle with four quadrants filled with red, green, or yellow to indicate how a…
Setting up WordPress Multisite for a Student Project
I was asked by our tech teacher to set up WordPress sites for our 8th Graders to use for a final project. WordPress has a special mode called multisite that makes this fairly simple. With multisite you essentially have a single installation of WordPress but you can create multiple blogs within that single install each…
A bash script for creating student Open Directory accounts
our sad old OD server I recently took over the IT Director job at a school that had been without a full-time IT person for almost a year. One of the awesome gifts from the previous IT person was a ten year old iMac with 1GB of RAM acting as the Open Directory server for…