TechIntersect

Most educators are familiar with Randy Pausch’s famous “Last Lecture.” Far fewer know about his amazing computer learning tool called Alice. Pausch and his team developed Alice as a 3-D virtual world environment that introduces basic computer programming concepts. The best part is you can get Alice from a free download at Alice.org.

Many schools are using Alice as a digital storytelling platform, and the program is within the grasp of even 10-11 yr old middle-school students. Honor Randy Pausch’s memory, and download a free copy of Alice today! Work through the example tutorials, then use Alice to explain to your students how all computers work.

Every computer system, regardless of size or purpose can do these things:

1. Process Input /Output
2. Store information
3. Do repetitive tasks
4. Make decisions
5. Do math computations

Alice can also do all of these things. I have put together an overview of Alice which explains each of these five things a computer system can do. You may download and reproduce the PDF for any non-commercial use as much as you like.

I will walk you through this overview at the free Edublogs Online Professional Development this evening (8pm Central Time – 9am Friday, Western Australia time). Feel free to join us if you would like to learn more.  Use this link to join in the discussion.

***Edit***

A couple of resources for those of you interested in using Alice.

• Dick Baldwin’s tutorials were immensely helpful to me in getting started.
• Alice cannot record it’s video, so I use CamStudio to capture video from my screen to disk. It’s free.

I’m presenting RIGHT NOW with Grant Griffiths at the Twin Valley Social Media Workshop in Clay Center Kansas. Here is a video of Grant kicking things off. We’ve had a great turnout. So happy to see so many interested folks here!

(Frank McCourt photo by David Shankbone)

This week I was saddened to learn of the passing of Frank McCourt. Professionally, Mr. McCourt was a teacher for more than 30 years, but he wasn’t known for his life’s work of teaching. He was better known as the author of the autobiographical “Angela’s Ashes.” I actually read his three books in reverse order, reading his final book “Teacher Man” first. Once I read this man’s approach to teaching, I was hooked.

In Teacher Man, he describes his first day in the classroom, completely unprepared for the world that he had just entered. The students were having an argument, tempers flared, and someone threw a sandwich that landed at McCourt’s feet. So he did the only thing that he could think of, he picked it up and ate it. Throughout his book, Frank McCourt describes in delightful detail the joys & pains of learning the profession of teaching. Without formal teacher training, he simply did what came naturally, usually bringing out the very best in his students. One of my favorite writing activities that he describes is “write an excuse note from Adam & Eve to God”.

McCourt experienced and dealt with the very same things that teachers today are faced with. He writes:

I was uncomfortable with the bureaucrats, the higher-ups, who had escaped classrooms only to turn and bother the occupants of those classrooms, teachers and students. I never wanted to fill out their forms, follow their guidelines, administer their examinations, tolerate their snooping, adjust myself to their programs and courses of study.

Frank McCourt taught using his strengths and he really didn’t care a great deal what others thought about his methods, because everything he did was ultimately for the benefit of his students and their learning. He should be an example to teachers everywhere. Read his book!

***Warning*** this post is pretty geeky. I wrote it so I might refer back to it if needed, and also if someone has a similar problem they are trying to solve. (If my students see my awesomeness in the process, that is another acceptable outcome

I got to blow the dust off of my networking skills a little bit today. I teach an introductory networking course and I used to be a system administrator/networking pro, but honestly my skills get a little rusty if I don’t put them to the test once in a while.

Sometimes my networking students wonder why I make them do labs where they must manually configure all of the TCP/IP settings when DHCP will do it automatically. Without knowledge of how to set things up manually, I would have been unable to solve a real-world problem today.

What I thought would take me an hour wound up taking nearly 3. Terry, down at the hardware store, asked me to hook his laptop up to his store’s network using wireless. Terry’s always so willing to help out Wendy & me with stuff that goes wrong around our home (most recently it was the lawn sprinker system), I was hardly in a position to refuse. I had already taken the day off for jury duty and I didn’t know when I would have time otherwise, so I agreed to look at it this afternoon.

The first hour was spent just figuring out what he had, and learning circuitously that the wireless router wasn’t configured & working as expected. (Hmm, I might have thought to ask about that part up front!) He could always get the Internet to work through the wireless, but he couldn’t see the store server, where his merchant programs & data reside.

He already had a router connected to the DSL, and this wireless router was really overkill. All he needed was a simple wireless access point. And that was what I struggled with for quite a bit longer than I should have. The router created a separate network, and was preventing access to the store network through it. How could I make the router act like an access point?

My final solution was to configure the wireless router in this simple manner:

1. Set the WAN side to Autoconfigure with DHCP and leave it disconnected.
2. Configure and connect the LAN side to the store network.
3. Configure the laptop with a static IP also on the store network.
4. Enable security settings.

Setting things up this way, we bypassed the routing part, only utilizing it as a wireless access point. I spent a lot of time looking for settings in the D-link router config to try to disable routing, but found no such option. Once I figured out that I could get away with hooking up only the LAN side of the router, and the laptop would still talk to it, I was set. Initially, I tried letting the laptop use the router’s DHCP, but when I did this, the laptop was configured to think that the wireless router (which wasn’t connected on the WAN side) was the gateway to the Internet, so the Internet wouldn’t work. The workaround was to use a manually configured IP with the correct gateway address.

It took a lot longer than it would have back in my glory days of networking, to be sure, but it’s good to know that once the cobwebs are blown out, I can still solve real-world networking problems from time to time. I never wanted to be one of those “theory only” professors anyhow. Hopefully doing little projects like this will ensure that I am always able to function in the real world as well as in classroom or laboratory.

Tags: router, tcp/ip

Anyone who does any kind of research knows how far we have to go towards digitizing printed collections of documents. Last spring I did a research project at the Eisenhower Presidential Library and was surprised to learn that there are no plans to digitize anything from that important collection in the near future due to a lack of funding.

My ears perked up recently when I learned that the Forsyth Library at Fort Hays State University has been working to digitize the Apollo document collection of the Kansas Cosmosphere. This video is from the press conference announcing the online publication of documents from the Apollo 1 accident investigation which once belonged to Jack Swigert and were given to Charlie Duke who donated them to the museum.

Anyone interested in NASA history and the Apollo space missions should check out the online documents here: http://www.fhsu.edu/forsyth_lib/digital/space/

Emily and I had the amazing opportunity last week to meet Charlie Duke, Apollo 16 astronaut at the Kansas Cosmosphere. Charlie describes the experience of viewing the entire Earth at 16,000 miles from space.

Tags: apollo, lunar, moon, science, space

Science Girl Em & I are back from her week at Space Camp at the Kansas Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, KS. Yesterday was parents day, and I followed her and cousin Andrew around with the video camera. While I watched them perform their Lunar Base Mission, all I could think about was

Why isn’t school more like this?

The lunar base mission was performed by the kids in several tents interconnected by a series of tunnels. Cameras were placed inside of each tent so parents could view what was happening inside during the mission. Control panels with working switches and lights were placed in each tent, and each camper was assigned a role; Emily was the base botanist (highly appropriate because she & I often work together in the garden.)

The kids are given a mission checklist to follow, which includes a script to follow for communications with each other and the teacher acting as CAPCOM (Capsule Communicator) using handheld radios.

In my weird brain, I began to envision an entire school year taught inside of little play tents. These kids were learning teamwork as well as working on communication and literacy skills. There’s no reason a teacher couldn’t come up with all sorts of math & science activities to do inside the tents. They could learn all about life sciences; what does it take to survive & thrive independent of any outside assistance? Everything from growing food to recycling could be covered.

I think a really creative teacher could do the entire curriculum in this environment. Social studies, music, literature could all be incorporated into the lunar base experience. After all, if astronauts were actually living an extended stay on a lunar base, they would live complete lives, it’s not only work. They would need entertainment and mental stimulation. The kids could research what the ISS astronauts do for entertainment during down time.

Yep, I think I would have liked school a lot more as a kid if I could have went to a “lunar base” once in a while. Congratulations to the Cosmophere on an outstanding learning experience.

It’s been a busy week with the video crew at Twin Valley. Tuesday we filmed the Concordia KS milkman. He’s 88, still drives a milk truck route, making home & retail dairy deliveries. The best part is he’s a pilot, and now that he’s had a pacemaker put in, the FAA has cleared him to fly again! He invited me to go up with him sometime in the near future- and I hope to take him up on it.

Wednesday, we toured and filmed the Ohlde Dairy at Linn, KS. I always enjoy telling these kinds of stories because people these days have little idea of where the food comes from, even people living right here amongst the food being produced. It seems to me that milk cows have it pretty good as far as livestock lives go. They live in hotel-like conditions, with sprinklers & fans to keep cool, soft bedding, plenty of food to eat, and three times a day going for a walk to the milking parlor to be milked. My favorite part was watching the cows walk in and line up into position. They all automatically turn their backsides toward the machine so they can be milked. It was almost like watching a circus act of trained animals, seeing them do that trick.

When I was a kid, I once milked my uncle’s Jersey cow, but that was many moons ago so it was a real treat to get to do a little milking myself yesterday. A lot different than when I was a kid. Gloves were required, not so much for my benefit but for the cows. Have to keep those udders clean and germ-free.

Today I interviewed Bruce Graham, the lead instructor at the Cloud County Community College Wind Energy Technology program. We have a brand new wind farm here in Cloud County, and plenty of people, myself included, have been wondering about those gigantic wind turbines. He shared a lot of good information.

Tomorrow, I will be heading to Hutchinson to the Kansas Cosmosphere to film the Space Camp that my daughter Emily is attending there. She’s been gone all week and I’m looking forward to seeing her.

Give me some time to get all of this stuff compiled and edited & I will be sure to share some video clips with you. It has really been a video-riffic week!

I’m surprised at how many people still have never heard of Geocaching. I first heard of it several years ago, but just began doing it myself last summer. My kids love it! It is a great way for a computer nerd like myself to step away from the keyboard for a while without eschewing technology completely. I got a Garmin Venture HC GPS for my birthday last year, and have been enjoying geocaching ever since.

Geocaching is a game played the world over, using hand-held GPS units to locate “hidden treasure” with known latitude & longitude coordinates that are posted on the Geocaching.com website. While you would think that knowing a “treasure” lat & long would lead you right to it but it isn’t quite so simple. The GPS will guide you to the general vicinity, but it is up to the geocacher to physically locate the hidden cache. These caches are often camouflaged or hidden quite stealthily. On some of the more challenging caches, I have actually been to the location multiple times before I was able to locate the treasure.

A geocache typically contains a log book for the finder to sign their name in & date the entry so people who come later can know who came before. Some caches contain goodies for the kids, such as little toys & nick knacks.  You are supposed to trade items, if you take an item, leave an item as well. My kids enjoy the toys as much as the hunt for the cache.

You can log your “finds” in the Geocaching website, so you know where you have been and when you were there. Once you find a few caches, you might even want to think about placing your own cache and enjoying the visitors who visit your “treasure”. For more information about geocaching, check out the FAQ’s on the Geocaching.com website.

I think you will find that the game is educational and lots of fun. Many caches are placed near sites of historic or cultural interest. This video was filmed last year when we first got my GPS. I had it saved on my computer but am only now getting around to sharing it. It shows the 6th principal meridian reference point marker from which all of Kansas and Nebraska were surveyed in the 1800’s. It also shows a nearly forgotten Pioneer Graveyard, where some of the earliest settlers were buried. Enjoy.

The Kansas Sampler Festival is a chance for various businesses and attractions around the state to come together in a single venue for people to explore and see what Kansas has to offer. There is food, music, theatrics and fun for the whole family.

I’ve been doing a little housekeeping on my Flip camera this week. On it, I found some videos from the 2009 Kansas Sampler Festival that was held in Concordia, Kansas. I recorded some music as well as an old-fashioned Kansas Cowtown shootout. Enjoy!

Down Home Music

wild thing

Shootout