Wednesday's power outage at school...

was a bit of a disappointment, actually. Power cuts at school typically happen in the late morning or early afternoon in conjunction with wild, windy, stormy weather. Wednesday, the power was off at the beginning of the day.

No worries. I deployed Operation: PowerOn!

I'm lucky enough to have permanent access to a lab set of MacBooks: 10 laptops on a charging cart (a lasting legacy of Digital High School). The school purchased The Mechanical Universe High School Adaptation on VHS circa 1990, and repurchased the set on DVD a few years ago. I was able to rip each episode (via Handbrake and VLC), turn them into QuickTime files, and load them onto each laptop. (This also comes in handy when a student misses the in-class presentation and needs to make it up at lunch or after school.)

We have a class set of headphones and signal splitters for use during computer-based sound wave labs. Three splitters will turn one stereo jack into four, so four students can watch one laptop screen and listen to their presentation without being distracted by the other computers' audio programs.

It worked flawlessly: the class spent the first 20 minutes of class watching "The Wave Nature of Light" and answering questions from the video sheets I give out when we watch this episode in class under normal circumstances.

In truth, the power came on about 10 minutes in and I could have aborted Operation: PowerOn. But sometimes the return of power is fleeting and uncertain: it's up, then it's down, and back up. I didn't see any need to take a chance when the contingency plan was going so well.

Operation: PowerOn successfully negotiates the power cut conditions: No AC means no projecting and no surfing the Interwebs. The room is dark, illuminated by whatever light comes in through the windows. But charged laptops can last for hours.

Had the power remained out, we had a PhET activity lined up, and since I loaded the full PhET installation on each laptop, no Internet connection was needed.

I'd be lying if I didn't admit to some sense of smug satisfaction that comes from being prepared for such an outage. But I hate feeling powerless when the power goes out or surrendering the time to waste. And my students were great about it; no complaints of having to do a physics lesson when the lights were out. They jumped on it and completed the lesson like pros.

Laptop glossy screens hazardous to your posture?

I knew it!!! I've always been a fan of the matte screens. I'm not keen to look at a mirror when trying to see my laptop screen. But I guess that's just me. (Not to mention the fingerprint magnets that glossies are.) I watched with incredulity as Apple followed the bad lead taken by PC laptops, going to glossy screens. Everyone seemed enamored of glossy. And Apple crept further and further into glossy hell. They still do. It's unlikely that this news item will alter the future enough so that I'll even be able to pay extra for a matte screen on my next laptop (c. 2013).

Mac laptop glossy screens hazardous to your posture?

I guess I'm not the only one who has no use for glossy Mac laptop screens.

PTSOS2 Afterlinks: Clickers, IP, and Keynote

Dan Burns gave a demo of the Renaissance clickers he uses at Los Gatos HS.

Paul Robinson has adopted Qwizdom clickers at San Mateo HS.

I have adopted iClickers at Rio Americano HS.

We also had an extensive demo of Interactive Physics by Paul Mitiguy. Because otherwise, we wouldn't have covered mechanics (again)!

Lastly, if you have a Mac and want to make appealing and engaging presentations that won't look like presentations students have to sit through in their other classes, I highly recommend the use of Apple's Keynote, part of the iWork productivity suite.

PTSOS2 Afterlinks: Mac OS and YouTube downloads

Here's a nice way of grabbing video clips from YouTube on your Mac OS X computer.

It's called TubeTV. It's essentially a YouTube browser with a "save" button. Seems pretty slick, but I haven't put it through many paces yet.

You'll need Perian, a QuickTime plugin, to use TubeTV.

Keynote 08 first impressions (with requisite MS dig)

Yes I am late to the Keynote 08 party.

Keynote is Apple's presentation software, and it crushes Microsoft's PowerPoint in many ways. Of course, PowerPoint has infiltrated the lexicon so that all computer-based presentations are referred to as PowerPoints. So throw it in with Kleenex and Jello in that regard. Most people who know about the Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, would be surprised to learn that no PowerPoint presentations were used in the making of that film. The computer-based presentation was all Keynote.

Like many Microsoft products, PowerPoint was originally developed by another software company (Forethought). And like the similarly now-ubiquitous Excel, PowerPoint was originally a Macintosh-only product. (Why are spreadsheets still spreadsheets while presentations are now PowerPoints?)

Keynote was originally the in-house presentation software designed for and used by Steve Jobs for his Apple-related presentations. Microsoft's PowerPoint wasn't good enough for him, either.

Keynote 1.0 was a fairly bare-bones program. Subsequent upgrades have added power and utility. Keynote 08 is really Keynote 4. It's the most mature member of Apple's iWork productivity suite, which also includes Pages for word-processing and Numbers for spreadsheets.

iWork 08 was introduced in August. Bad timing for my interests. I didn't want to try learning the new features during the ramp-up and launch of the new academic year. But with Winter Break looming, it was time to dive in.

The new build styles and transitions are always fun. Mostly eye-candy, but that's not always a bad thing. If you've already got substance, why not enjoy a little style?

I'm already putting the new object animations to use. Especially rotation. I dabbled with Flash a few years ago because I hoped to incorporate animation in my presentations. But Flash is, erm, "robust," and sports a non-trivial learning curve. I was ready to climb that curve, but lost much of my enthusiasm as I learned that all Flash animations had to have opaque backgrounds. No transparent backgrounds allowed! That cramped my style and I eventually lost touch with my interest in Flash.

Keynote's animation features will not put Flash out of business, but they will allow me to do most of what I need to do. And as ever, Apple figured out how to make powerful features easy for the end-user.

Microsoft is due to launch Office 2008 for Mac soon. I hope PowerPoint 2008 is catching up to where Keynote was a few years ago. More likely it will be an awkward clunker bending under the weight of still more features most people will never use.

Which color laser multifunction printer?

Consumer color laser printing was a mature technology when I bought an HP 2500 in 2003. The printer itself was (as I recall) about $500. I paid extra to get an actual paper tray. And when the toner cartridges ran out, replacing them nearly matched the original cost of the printer.

The $175 imaging drum recently expired, and the $400 worth of toner was down to half capacity. To keep the HP going was going to take about $600 to keep going another couple of years. So I started looking for a replacement. I do like color laser printing. And now there are multifunction machines that will print, fax, copy and scan--built around color laser printers. My interest was piqued!

Since I had let four years pass since the 2500 came out, I was ready to be wowwed by the newer, better, and less expensive models that would surely be out there. For a nice multifunction, I'd be willing to part with up to $800.

Strolling through the local big-box office supply stores, I came upon fewer choices than I anticipated. No shortage of multifunctions, but most are built around inkjet printers. A few are built around monochrome laser printers. Just a handful are built around color lasers.

Canon? I own a top-shelf Canon photo inkjet, a Canon digicam, and a Canon digital SLR. I like Canon. They have an ImageClass color laser multifunction. But they decided not to make it Mac-compatible. I might understand that in 1987, but not in 2007.

Hewlett Packard? As mentioned, I have an HP color laser and do like the print quality. When "testing" the copying quality of the multifunctions at Office Depot, the HP 2840 outperformed the competition. Further research at C-net and Amazon revealed some downsides. Most reviewers seemed to hate the machine. The accompanying software was singled out for particular dislike. And the 2840 was born in 2005. HP has let this model wither in a continuing barrage of negative user reviews for two years.

Brother? The MFC-9440CN gets a lot of love in the online pro and user reviews. It came out just this past summer. The prints seem a bit waxy compared to the HP, but the quality is good. It's Mac-compatible. I was close to a purchase when I looked for the straight-through printing option.

Heavy card stock doesn't bend, so printers that guide paper through a circuitous printing path usually have a straight-through option. You feed the card stock in through a front flip-out tray and it emerges to a flip-out tray in the back.

The Brother has no such option. It can print paper no heavier than 43#. For a $700 printer, that was a deal-killer.

So for now, I'm ponying up for the imaging drum on the HP 2500. I'll be good for 1500 more pages on the toner set. By the time they run out, there may be a product out there I can get excited about. If not, I suppose I'll look for a deal on toner for the HP. That will buy me even more time.

Attention Keynote-using physics teachers!

I've made my Keynote presentations available via my iDisk's Public folder. Here's how to access them:

1. From the Finder's Go menu, select iDisk > Other User's Public iDisk.

2. When prompted, type in my Member Name: phyzman.

If all goes well, my folder will show up on your desktop. Within, you'll find folders corresponding to the various units I teach. The Keynote files are in those folders.

These are essentially the same presentations that are available via my website, but in Keynote format. you'll need iWork 06 or better to run and/or edit them.

A number of teachers asked for access to these files, and it seemed the iDisk Public folder was the best way to make them available. Note that these files can only (as far as I know) be accessed from a Mac. Which is OK, because Keynote is a Mac-only application.

Let me know if you encounter any technical glitches and I will endeavor to rectify.

Bringing new computers to life

It may be that the implementation and maintenance of classroom computers is a major production for every teacher fortunate enough to have them. If so, it's a thin gossamer thread by which educational technology hangs. Students in my classes have access to classroom computers only because

1. I see significant value in what computers can do for students in my classroom.
2. I was able to prepare a successful proposal for a portion of my school's Digital High School grant, and there was DHS grant money to spend toward the purchase of computers, software, and sensors.
3. I was willing to donate the time, talent, and energy required to transform the computers and software from boxes and discs to computers that students could use to sample and analyze data from sensors, prepare and print spreadsheets, etc. as well as to assemble the charging cart for the computers. All of these activities happened "off the clock."
4. There was support from my district for a wireless computing pilot program back when Apple introduced Airport.
5. My students handle and use computers appropriately in my classroom.

Take away any one of those factors and we're back to a 1970s-style classroom. Or in my case, a 1990s-style classroom. Though I used classroom computers in my high school physics class at Grand Rapids Creston High School in 1981, it wasn't until 2001 that students were able to use computers in my classroom, less than 100 miles from Silicon Valley. And it wasn't me keeping computers out of my classroom!

As the years since 2001 came and went, the classroom computers settled into their role in instruction. We used them where they added value. We didn't use them everywhere simply to use them. But neither did they gather dust. A few years ago, the batteries began failing to hold a significant charge, and the replacements were a nontrivial expense (10 x $100). But the school came through and we thus extended the useful life of the machines.

By 2006, the usefulness of computers built in 2000 had diminished critically. These computers were built to run Apple's OS 9, an operating system Steve Jobs conducted a funeral for in 2002. Though they might have been able to boot in OS X, their CPUs, busses, and memories were not built for it, and they would have struggled in performance and battery life.

So I prepared a proposal for their replacement with their contemporary equivalents, and the school was able to fund the proposal. But the process of preparing these machines for student use--simply to maintain the functionality we had in 2001--was again nontrivial.

The Airport pilot has been abandoned in favor of a new wireless protocol. But the corresponding hardware has yet to be installed at the school. Though it was originally slated for installation over the summer, it is now planned but not scheduled. Fortunately, a network-savvy parent was able to get a new Airport Extreme to pipe the internets to my new laptops. The fiddling and fussing he went through to make it happen was nontrivial, but he succeeded where I had failed in my own laborious attempts.

But other matters had to be attended to. The sensor software had to be loaded and registered to each computer. Each installation required a seven-digit serial number and two 25-digit alpha-numeric security keys. Configuration files I developed for specific labs had to be transferred from the old computers, titles modified for use by OS X, and correctly placed in the correct subfolder of the application support section of each computer's root directory library. Student accounts had to be configured so that commonly-used applications would be easy to find (on the dock) and storage folders for student work were in place before students needed to use them. On each computer. And each computer needed to be configured to print to our networked printer.

I also installed a set of physics simulations on the new computers that simply would not have run on the old ones. On each computer.

Sadly, there are simulations on the old computers that simply won't run on the new ones. They're going to be hard to give up.

So far I've spent many weekend and evening hours to get the new computers student-ready. Their maiden voyages happened this week and so far, so good.

But I imagine places where all the ducks don't line up in a row. Do they simply go without? Are there schools with better support for classroom computers, or is it all a patchwork of individual teacher projects?

Seems awfully late (2007) for things to be this fragile.

Clickers: First impressions

Attending a national meeting of physics teachers is a great way to get a "big-picture" view of the profession. I've been lucky enough to attend several American Association of Physics Teachers national meetings during the course of my career. One thing that's been a perennial topic of sessions since the late-90s is clickers: personal response systems.

Anyone who's seen "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" knows the gist of what the technology allows one to do. On the show, clickers are used whenever a contestant "asks the audience." And who could forget this instant classic of polling-gone-wrong?

Clickers have been used in introductory physics courses at colleges and universities for over a decade. Their use in large lecture sections allows a level of interactivity not previously possible. The instructor poses a multiple choice, "clicker question," and the 200+ students click their response. A receiver tallies the votes and sends the information to the instructors computer. After a given interval of time, the polling is closed and the result is displayed.

Students get a chance to test-drive the new material presented by the instructor. The instructor get instant feedback on how well the new material is being absorbed. This kind of interactivity is gold in the lecture hall. Book publishers are bundling clickers with textbooks. Universities are looking to standardize clickers campus-wide. And so on.

An important benefit of clickers is that they allow students to vote anonymously. "Low-tech" polling can be done by calling for a show of hands for each possible answer. Not only are students reluctant to reveal their preference for a potentially wrong answer, many simply focus in on the "smart kid" and raise their hands when he or she does.

It seemed to me that this technology could be put to use in the high school classroom, too. So I attended AAPT meeting sessions over the years to become conversant in clicker pedagogy. And this year I researched the several vendors and varieties of clickers on the market, and wrote a funding proposal. The school decided the proposal merited funding. In late January, the clickers arrived. I put them to use within hours of unpacking them.

Of the many vendors and varieties of clickers on the market, I went with i·clicker. The i·clicker solution in not tied to a particular piece of software: some clickers are tied to Microsoft PowerPoint or thier own proprietary software. With i·clicker, the voting software "floats" above whatever program you present with. I'm a huge fan of Apple's Keynote, so it was important that voting software not cramp my style or require a major rework of my existing instructional presentations. I think there are some clicker systems still out there that are not Macintosh-compatible. Unacceptable.

As you might imagine, students love the clickers. They like voting for their answer when a question comes up. And they're always eager to see the results of the poll. I've been able to modify instruction on-the-spot in response to clicker questions asked in class.

The cost to turn my classroom into a polling place was roughly $1400. For that we got 40 clickers, a base station, two instructors' clickers, and the software. If I use them only this year, the cost is about $10 per student. If I use them for 10 years, it's $1 per student. College students pay at least $25 for an i·clicker (other clickers are generally more expensive).

This technology does not shatter the earth, nor is it The Savior of Education. I'm still learning how to maximize its efficacy in the classroom. But it is appealing and engaging. (If I didn't think students and administrators were reading this, I'd say the clickers were "sexy.")

And so far, so good.

Skepticism in the Classroom 1.0

I posted a collection of curriculum materials to a new website. It includes quick lessons on skepticism and critical thinking. Many of these short classroom exercises were based on "news items" this past semester. Here's a list of the lessons.

Three-color Mind Control
Dead Psychic's Sketch of John Mark Karr
Football Clairvoyant
Chicago's Most Haunted
Columbia Explosion Photos
Angel at the State Fair

The curriculum links go to Word documents and PDFs, interactive QuickTime and Keyonte files, and links to offsite articles or video clips. At this point, I do not have any of the presentations available as PowerPoint files, because I really don't use PowerPoint. The interactive QuickTime files run as standard presentations, and QuickTime is a free download for Mac OS and Windows.

UPDATE: I posted PowerPoint versions of the presentations--I think! A Windows user will have to verify and let me know.