Category: Blog

Link to Fire official: Man’s cell phone apparently sets him ablaze – CNN.com

My students have been intrigued, excited, etc over the exploding laptops, it will be interesting to see their reaction to this.

Actually, it’s mostly my 7th period class.  My AB kid has always been into technology news, and he has gotten the rest of the class into it.  So we always start out a few minutes with the issues in the news. 

The Cisco/iPhone, especially has one kid in a lather.  He actually asked if he could make a phone call last week — and when I asked, he said his stock broker.  I told him to wait until after school, which as soon as the bell rang, he whipped the phone out and made the class — I really wanted him to at least leave the room, but since I didn’t say that…

And I really hope he didn’t base the transactions on my opinion — he said he’d researched it during class …. I don’t mind TOO much as he did get his assignment done.

But it’s one of the weirdest things that have happened to me as a teacher.

if you are looking for the Diabetes site, I’m “moved” it — haven’t really, but in the past, if you typed in www.kweaver.org you got the diabetes blog and to get to this blog you had to type in www.kweaver.org/cs  I’ve swapped things to make Websense a bit happier.

I hope.

To get to the diabetes blog, click here. www.kweaver.org/blog

I finally got an email telling me that they had changed the categorization of my site.  However, it could as many as 72 hours for it to actually change.  Fun.

Some things to know — they do not do 24/7 support on categories, they will only change them on Business days.

Several months ago, shortly after I started this blog, I had an HP Pavalion 521n die.  I really liked the machine, but I started seeing an potential hard drive failure.

I tried replacing the hard drive, even ordered the orginal disks from HP and EVEN asked their tech support, but no one could give me a reason as to why the computer wouldn’t boot.

Well I had an even older motherboard/computer finally fail, something I’ve been expecting for a long time, pulled the components out of it I wanted to keep, mainly the hard drive, CD-Writer, and the DVD-Writer. 

I decided to throw the working, bootable hard drive in the HP.  It booted!  So I finally pulled the original hard drive and I figured out why it wouldn’t work.  It’s set up cable select for the slave/master drive.  I haven’t seen that in years! 

So it’s up and working.

I am thinking about trading the DVD-drive for the DVD writer. 

I no longer feel quite the failure!  And hopefully this information will help the next guy.

And why didn’t HP Tech Support tell me that!

I was reminded again how much the mispronouncing of char bothers me.  I was at an AP Workshop this weekend and one of the presenters consistently makes this mistake.

I maintain that if you pronounce it as it is spelled — ‘char’ as in burned — you don’t get the concept and neither will your students. 

char is short for character.  It should be pronounced as an abbreviation for character, thus pronounced ‘care’, not ‘char’. 

It’s like int for integer.

It automatically turns me off the speaker, because they just don’t get the concept.

Dan Fernandez’s Blog

Visual Studio Express – Happy One Year Anniversary!

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I just like the fact that Libya’s government has completely changed their attitude.

Report: Libya buys laptops for schoolchildren – CNN.com

NEW YORK (AP) — The government of Libya reached an agreement with an American nonprofit group to provide inexpensive laptop computers to all of its 1.2 million schoolchildren, The New York Times reported in Wednesday’s editions.

Okay, I am hooked and I am in love.

Went to CS4HS this summer.  First, I will say, I am not a good traveler, and I don’t like sitting still.  Thus I don’t do workshops well.

But I am in love with Raptor.  See http://raptor.martincarlisle.com/

I put it on my computers, took a few seconds.  I printed out the first handout and gave it to the kids yesterday. 

Today I had them write “Hello World”.  Boring… but necessary in my opinion.

Then I had them write a program that got two numbers from the user and out put the sum.  I’ll come back after 4th and let you know how it went, but …

I have six kids in 1st period PreAP.  2 “got it”.  2 still think the rest of us have another head.  2 understand why the first two got it, but think that they are weird. 

Frankly, I’ve never had kids engaged in programming this fast.

IT’S COOL!

I made it through the entire six weeks without writing a referral.  Without sending a kid to the office.

I have not been cussed at.

Students have not torn up equipment.

They don’t hit each other.

They haven’t written on the hall with black marker — and the kid that did that is even in my class.

They actually do the assignments I give them.

What a difference a year makes.

Oh, and I got to tell my principal “I told you so”.  He and I were working on a project during summer school and I told him that I knew we were going to be a “Recognized” school again while he was principal.  We got some news today that indicates that I might have been right.

PRETTY COOL STUFF!

P.S. for those of you who haven’t been paying attention … last year I was teaching remedial math instead of CS.