This week on IT Babble the Podcast Edition, you will hear Patrick and I discuss this topic that was posted on Slashdot.org: Revisiting Why Johnny Can’t Code: Have We “Made the Print Too Small”? Any one claiming that programming is related to text size has a serious problem. Why? Because tools …
Some people have 10 years of experience. Other people have 1 year of experience 10 times, I wish this were my quote. However, it came from a source on Slashdot – which I always recommend everyone read a few times a week. There was an article titled, Lessons From a Decade …
Without directly managing software on student laptops, sometimes it is frustrating to implement simple standards, such as, which browser should students use. I decided to take the simplest approach possible and consider users on Apple laptops, Windows, and iOS devices. A very common technique when designing a website is to …
We have all been there. Normal day at work. Focusing on something we feel is important. Then, the call comes in. Something has been, or is in the process of being, hacked. What? You haven’t been there? Well there is no better way to waste an afternoon and fully test …
Despite the title, I am not in favor of sending angry emails. I use to be known for my emails, sent out of frustration, and also justified in content. However, in hindsight, I regret all of them that could have been communicated face-to-face, or after the frustration had faded. I …
If you are not aware, “A Dude Named Ben” refers to the generic and often ignored systems administrators who work at/in organizations. When the IRS lost all their emails, they claimed total ignorance, and had no idea who their tech people were. This video is entertaining and can explain the origin …
I have traveled to many places on the planet Earth. I have been in deserts, jungles, various oceans, in the frigid cold of Eastern Europe, and the unbearable summers of the Arabian Gulf. I have found that sometimes I encounter a new place that seems like a place I would …
Not long ago I wrote a post concerning a new plan for managing when and how students access technology. This plan is based-on a boarding school model, where year 6-10 go home on the weekends, while the older students stay for the duration, or until a school holiday. The original …
I often find myself in meetings about curriculum projects. I am usually invited to either share my thoughts on the technology components or explain the technology options for tracking the curriculum. Sometimes the topic is sharing resources and making sure core documents can be managed and properly versioned. In all …
I was having a conversation with a tech director from another school , and we were discussing budgets and resources. The amounts were fairly staggering for bandwidth, subscriptions, and network support for content management and VPN. Shortly after the conversation, I started to question my priorities. What was driving my …
I was reading an article on Slashdot, by far my favorite website. The Slashdot posting linked to this original article, The programming talent myth. The article discusses this perception that programmers are either rock-star-ninjas or barely able to string to strings together (that was a programming joke by the way). However, the …
I have been using various versions of Microsoft education solutions since 2007. I am also quiet adept at developing online Sharepoint solutions for business processes, writing custom scripts to make accessing Microsoft resources easier, and by-passing much of the fake resources and security Microsoft has to offer. In addition, …
Consider this question: If you want to run an event, start a new curriculum, communicate better with organisational stakeholders, audit for efficiency, train a group of people economically, or simply show a movie to a large group of people, would you do those things with technology? Would you require support …
This is one of those posts that I may regret writing in a few months. It is more of a plan than a post, and a plan I intend to sell with significant confidence. Starting in the fall, when students roll out of the bus and into the boarding school …
This week I read a post called, “9 truths that computer programmers know that most people don’t.“, by Macleod Sawyer . Below is a summary of Mr. Sawyer’s nine points about programmers and programming, and by the way, he is 17 years old. 1. …the funny thing about code, the website …
A whitelist is a a list of users, IP address, etc. that have permission to do something, and a blacklist is just the opposite. For example, organizations routinely blacklist websites that employees should not use. In a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) model, schools are often faced with the issue …
I was listening to an older episode of This Week in Tech (TWIT), and one of the hosts said, and I am paraphrasing, “we are all walking around with supercomputers in our pockets.” Then I started hearing people imply this frequently. I have not blogged for over a month, but …
Please note: These “Devil’s Advocate” posts are not my views or daily practice. However, as an exercise I think we all need to slow down and ask ourselves if we are doing the correct things in the correct ways. In order to do this, we need to take another position …
I find it to be part of the human condition that we are always guilty of accepting things as truth that are often unproven theories that appear to work well. I also find it common that process that work are often assumed to always work with little or …
This is a graph that means something very odd. This is a graph many research get when they study homework. What this graph means is this: Doing some homework is better than doing none at all, but doing larger amounts of homework is actually less beneficial than doing smaller amounts of homework. …
It’s about getting things down to one number. Using the stats the way we read them, we’ll find value in players that no one else can see.~ Moneyball I often take ideas and assign a numerical scale to them, in order to compare them to other things. I always tell …
I was in a meeting. I dislike most meetings. Not because I dislike people or discourse, but because most meetings seem unfocused and more for ritual than utility. In this particular meeting, we were presented with some self-guided learning options for students who need to be challenged more. That means …
Warning: This is about Educational Technology, Teachers, and Students. This is not a cloud for business article, although some points are valid for all groups of cloud users. Let us get this out of the way: Harddrives go bad, and they fail more often that anyone wants to admit. That …
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