Category: Blog

Another teacher on the same wavelength when it comes to censoring webpages. 

Link to Sicheii Yazhi » Blog Archive » Freedom and Safety for All

This site is no longer blocked by Websense.  Lessons learned — they don’t do much over the weekend and they seem to have even been off on MLK day.

I’ve learned a lot from the experience, and I am going to share some of it with my students.

I am not a big believer of censorship.  I would like that our network be set up so that students cannot get to pornographic materials, but that is as far as I would like it to go.  I think it is up to the individual to determine what they should have access to.

If my students get their assignments done early, I don’t have a problem with them checking email or doing research for another class.  I would just as soon they didn’t play games, but I’m not going to get onto the kid that has a chapter for playing a computer game.

In other words, I think Websense goes too far.

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.