Technology Blog

Girls and Math

lupok — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 23:31:53 +0000

My daughter said to me today, “I’m not good at math because I’m a girl”. I was shocked. I explained to her that she can be good at math, even great, with hard work. I then explained that her grandma was an accountant and I hoped that she was good at math since she just finished doing my taxes. I’m not sure where she got the idea but I hope I was able to convince her that idea simply wasn’t true. We even found a couple excellent resources for her to use, here’s the links: A Maths dictionary for kids and mathatube. We also use TuxMath at home and at school.

Until next time,
Ken

We Presented at Google today

lupok — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:23:59 +0000

Today in downtown Ann Arbor at Google, Scot Graden, Heather Kellstrom and I presented the Saline Area Schools Google Story to many educators from around the state, here’s a link to the presentation. It went really well. It was good to meet a people from different districts and catch up with acquaintances from local districts.Google even paid for breakfast and lunch.

Until next time,
Ken

Google Apps Case Study: Saline Area Schools

lupok — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 13:22:13 +0000

We’re very excited that Google has taken the time to do a case study on our use of Google Apps, you can read more information here.

Amazon’s EC2

lupok — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:17:17 +0000

There’s some pretty impressive stuff going on with Amazon. They now have this full cloud computing service called EC2. It’s pretty amazing, it’s like leasing a server farm with redundancy and scalability at your fingertips. You can even reboot your server instance from the web interface. The future of computing has arrived and it’s being delivered by Amazon.

Internet Safety and Security

lupok — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:06:14 +0000

I recently attended cyber security event at SHS. It was an excellent discussion on staying safe on the Internet at work and at home. Here’s a link to their website which has a plethora of useful information on how to stay safe and how to teach our children to stay safe online.

Google Wave

lupok — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 08:34:38 +0000

Google will soon be releasing it’s new Wave technology and many of us will be wondering: what is it?

Basically, it’s a realtime collaboration protocol that combines pictures, video and any other type of media in stream that are shared peer to peer and the great thing is it can be used on any device your phone, desktop, netbook, etc.

Right now I cannot send text directly to your instant message account (unless you’re using an XMPP-based client), I have to send the message to your IM server which relays the message to you.
I cannot send audio directly to your phone, the phone company has to route it there.
I cannot share a picture directly with your Facebook account, I have to sent it to Facebook first to be carried on to you.
I can’t send a file directly to you, I have to put it on a share or email it to you

With Google wave I can send all these things to you right away and Wave puts it in a conversation which becomes a real time stream to all the things you’re sharing. Here’s more info on the actual protocol and the pieces to make it all work.

Until next time,
Ken

Best new features of 10.6 Snow Leopard

lupok — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 15:12:32 +0000

Apple released their newest OS for Mac yesterday but it may surprise some people but may the features I was waiting for the most are not in the 64-bit processing or the new Expose features but in the Universal Access Features. Here’s an additional link with more information. This is very exciting for Saline to help assist our special needs students and allow them the best overall experience. I’ve been told by Apple representatives that Apple spends millions on research in Accessibility and so far it looks very promising.

Until next time,

Ken

Powerschool 6.0

lupok — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:57:29 +0000

We have recently upgraded from Powerschool 5.2 to Powerschool 6.0. One of the biggest features that parents will see is the ability to change or set your own password in the Parent Portal, additional features include standards-based gradebook, Google maps for address validation and support for Mac Intel servers.

New iPhone 3Gs

lupok — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:16:02 +0000

Apple release a new iPhone last week. It’s looks really nice but I’m not sure how much better it is than the 3G model. On the plus side the original 3G model is now only $99.

Bing?

lupok — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:43:33 +0000

To add to the list of new search engines Microsoft releases Bing this week. It’s supposed to be more evolved search. I’m still sticking with Google but I have to admit the background to Bing is prettier.