Dan's Tech Blog

Here’s my Final Project. This presentation explores the future of education, what it will look like, and what that means to teachers.  How do we prepare for the unknown?  What is technology’s role in education?  Hopefully after watching this presentation, these questions are answered for you.

Thanks everyone for a great semester and thanks Dean for the class. Here’s my presentation from the last class.

Well my mentorship is coming to an end, as is my overall work with my classes. In my first class, the students have finished with their entries, and so my commenting and suggestions are also finished. It was a pretty good time; lots of hard work but I can take a lot out of my experience in that class. My second class is slowing down a bit, but I’m still receiving e-mails regularly and I’m continuing to correspond with a core group of students in that class. It was pretty good in the first month, but now I think I’m ready for it to end…it was a great run but even great things get old. The mentoring time-line is a pretty comfortable length…perhaps just a bit too long, but I definitely took what I could from it and learned a lot. Great experience.

My Final Project is also completed. I added a couple more slides to it (total of 20 slides now), and I created my slidecast on slideshare, and everything is ready to go. I’ll probably embed it on my blog on Wednesday just in case I have to deal with any technical difficulties. I’ve probably put in a good 20 hours into making this presentation, so it’s been a busy couple of weeks.  Here’s a couple slides from it.

On my brother’s computer he just configured and bought, he chose to use the ATI HD 5770 video card. When we got it, we upgraded his drivers to the new Catalyst 9.11 drivers…horrible idea.  A couple hours later his mouse cursor would randomly blow up in size, his sticky note function wouldn’t open, and he couldn’t change his wallpaper at all (only to solid colors). I know a ton of people are having these issues and other then doing a custom install (and ignoring 9.11) there hasn’t really been a solution…until now. Here’s what we did (it’s painful stupid…I can’t believe this works):

We just made a new admin account and deleted the old one.

• Go to control panel -> Add or remove user accounts -> Create a new account (you need to be the administrator to do this properly) -> make a new “Administrator account”
• Switch users
• Go to Add or remove user accounts again -> make the other administrator a “standard user” -> then click on that account icon and delete it (unless you wish to keep the old account that doesn’t work properly)
• You’ll notice that all functions now work again (the mouse cursor problem will still happen…this may not be an ATI problem but rather a Gigabyte MB problem).

• Cursor Glitch: AMD released a hotfix for this found here. If this doesn’t work then try any of the following: To make it so you don’t notice it too much, right click -> personalize -> mouse pointers -> mouse properties and enable “Display pointer trails” and then drag the bar to zero (you’ll barely see a trail…you get used to it after five minutes or so). Another interesting thing is that it will instantly go away if you simply open the “magnifier tool” and keep it running in the background. If you want to kill it completely, just delete the “magnifier tool” (should be 2 files in your system32)..just do a search in your system 32 -> delete them -> reboot and you shouldn’t get the glitch ever again.  Apparently if you have a Gigabyte MB, flashing your BIOS to the latest version fixes this problem.

It might be a good idea to uninstall Catalyst Control Center (the moment that flashed up with “Catalyst Control Center has stopped working properly” all the problems progressively occurred). This was a relief (better then a custom install). Should take no more then ten minutes to do (plus all your programs carry over). Hope this helped anyone having these problems. Let me know if any of you have success.

After google searching my name, my top results were mainly my Facebook page, a couple Internet Archive uploads, and my blog. Looking a bit further, I found some records of some academic awards I’ve won  and some of my badminton results from last year (I didn’t expect to find those at all). My digital footprint ranges to some websites as well, such as slideshare and youtube. On both sites I have some uploads as well as a variety of comments.

I guess I’m pretty content with what my digital footprint looks like as of now. There’s nothing that I’m ashamed of or embarrassed over, which is obviously a good thing.  To improve on it, I plan on having my own teaching website and blog, which will house a lot of my teaching resources as well as many of my students’ work. I may even decide on creating a blog before I become a teacher in hopes of it being reviewed when I have job interviews and so forth. Overall, my digital footprint isn’t too big, but I have a lot of time to work on it. Hopefully, it will eventually reflect my talents and goals.

This thing is unbelievable. Construction began in 2004 by Samsung Engineering and Construction, and it’s set to be completed on January 4th, 2010. In only six years they put this thing up. Here’s some facts about it:

• It’s currently 818 m high (2,684 ft)

• Has 160 floors

• World’s highest and fastest elevators (64 km/h)

• The first “world’s tallest structure” to include residential space

• Looking out from the top, you could see up to 60 miles (97 km) all the way around

• Surrounding the skyscraper is something called the Dubai Fountain. This is a record-setting fountain system. It has 6,600 lights and 50 colored projectors, it is 275 m (900 ft) long and shoots water 150 m (490 ft) into the air, accompanied by a range of classical to contemporary Arabic and world music (which is a nice touch).

• Inside Burj, there are 30,000 homes, 19 residential towers (yes that’s inside it), 7.4 acres of parkland, a 30 acre man-made lake (yes..that’s also inside this), and nine hotels including one 7-star hotel

Check out some other insane photos: “Burj next to two other towers”, “Burj overhead shot 2008″, “Burj and Dubai”. I think this tower is incredible. Let me know what you guys think of is.

Well it’s nearing the end and my mentoring classes are doing pretty good. I’m now pretty much just working in two classes. In my one class I’m doing a lot of commenting and giving the students a lot of suggestions on some of their posts and projects. It takes a really long time to go through all of their blogs, but most of the students’ topics are really interesting. Since I started helping them, I feel pretty informed on what’s going on in the world (they deal with current events a lot).

My second class is a lot of fun sometimes. I’ve went into g-mail during one of the students’ computer classes, and chatted with the entire class for around thirty minutes (I haven’t typed that fast before in my life!). I’m still getting a lot of e-mails from that class as well…maybe around three a day. Their e-mail topics are sometimes about school, but sometimes about what they like to do and what their hobbies are. It’s fun to help them out or just chat about what they’re interested in. So far the experience has been great.

I’m experiencing some technical difficulties with my final project audio.

I think this pretty much sums it up.

Well I’ve been working hard on this for the past couple of weeks and I’ve finished two major parts of it. Firstly, my powerpoint slides are all pretty much done; there’ll be 18 in total, and I’ve put in a lot of effort into each one…hopefully the slides will fit into my presentation nicely.

It was a bit awkward to actually write the presentation, because I had to make each slide and then add to my “Final Project Script” after each was completed.  It was a long process, but I’m glad I did it for organization sake. Since my slides are done as well as my script, what I need to do now is make my audio (I’ll probably be making a lot of them and then just compressing all the files into one. Doing it this way will most likely allow me to make a higher quality presentation). So that’s it so far. I hope to finish it up in this upcoming week.

In our last ECMP class we had the pleasure of hearing from three guest speakers: Darren Kuropotwa, Kathy Cassidy, and Clarence Fisher.  Here’s what they had to say:

Darren Kuropotwa: Talked a lot about the “power of information”.  His students provided an example of this; he posted their work online and demonstrated how the quality of their work drastically improved. What Darren also mentioned was the use of scribe posting.  Being reflective of one’s work is vitally important for academic growth and success, and scribe posting is a great way of getting students to become reflective and comfortable with voicing their thoughts.

Kathy Cassidy: She spoke about blogs and “Online Learning Portfolios”. What she does is upload an audio onto her blog of her students’ reading, pictures of them, and some of their works. This is a great way of not only allowing the parents of becoming more aware of what their child is doing in school, but helps the parents have a closer role in the education of their child. Kathy also has a Wiki called “Alphabetantics”, which she uses as an area to post videos of her students learning the alphabet. She also presented some very important statements, one being: “Students need to learn in balance”. An example of this is how students need to learn how to use a pencil and paper, but also need online skills.  As she said, “It’s not safe for kids not to be online”.  I agree with Kathy in how we need to teach students when they’re young how to safely find information online.  Besides this, Kathy also is very great at adapting and introducing new things.  One thing that caught my eye is how she introduced Skype to her grade ones by inviting a geologist to “skype in” and answer her students’ questions. That’s pretty neat and I can imagine how the class must have loved that.

Clarence Fisher: Raised a great point – a very insightful point: What does it mean to be “literate” in today’s society?” I think this is a very important question to ask.  Things are changing so rapidly, and this in turn results in the need to view literacy in a different light.  As Clarence said, networking and the sharing of information leads to success, or, an increased rate of success.  It’s important to recognize this change in literacy, but I liked his second question: “How do we educate kids to see literacy in a different way?” It’s very difficult to adapt ourselves to this new form, let alone teach it. But clearly we have to find a way that efficiently educates students into becoming literate in today’s technological world.

Overall great presentations.  I really enjoyed them.