Many parents and teachers are familiar with a letter allegedly written by Abraham Lincoln to his son’s schoolmaster.* Here’s my update with a technology twist.
World, my daughter starts college today.
Give her fast, free Wi-Fi and an Ethernet cable for her dorm room.
Make it easy to share work with others with projectors as bright as her ideas; to print her work on printers with ink and paper.
Make it easy for her to plug in her laptop, at any library table or classroom seat.
Grant her access to the latest, most powerful digital authoring tools, along with the time and support to test their limits. But balance her schedule with a hike in the woods and a swim in the lake.
Show her how an entire future could unravel with a single Facebook photograph or a hastily written email; and help her understand the subtleties between fact/fiction, selling/informing, and truth/lies.
Provide her with teachers who are digital role models, who embrace and use new technology both inside and outside their fields, yet value old-fashioned facts that are correct, good spelling, and well-crafted projects.
Help her to be charitable with her digital abilities; to help an older person or a fellow student in need.
But especially world, don’t let her text in class, even if it is to me.
* According to the “Lincoln Never Said That” page at http://illinoishistory.gov/facsimiles.htm the authenticity of the letter is doubted.
Not shown in the video, besides the selection of tasty food in the cafeteria, was a walking tour through some of the cubicles, where I met some Steve Grove’s news team (with a mascot beagle). At one point I asked that question about “famous people who have visited YouTube” and I was told the story of a not-to-be-named Presidential Candidate who famously asked “where do you guys make all the videos?”
Intel’s Infoscape is a prototype that was being shown at CES 2010. Here’s what I learned. There are two screens, each powered by a single i7 chip, which was the point of the display. This is not a production model. The display was created for Intel by http://foghorncreative.com and was positioned at the corner of Intel’s giant CES 2010 booth. Infoscape is made up of two 7′x7′ touch screen glass walls that are set at a 1920x1920 resolution. The content is controlled by “a man behind the curtain” (in this case Mike Martin) with a laptop. It is fun to think about what you could do with this type of technology in your living room, school lobby, classroom or library.
Any parent knows that children are fingerprint and germ factories. Mix with this the fact that they have a lot more shiny things to touch these days, like phones, screens and remote controls, and you have a constant cleaning problem. What can you do? Make your own screen cleaning kit. Here’s one way to do it, for about the cost of an App:
1. Find a clean spray bottle and rinse with distilled water
2. Fill with a 50% mixture of rubbing alcohol and distilled water.
3. Find a good rag. A 100% cotton T-shirt or diaper works best.
Other Tips:
• Clearly label your bottle of solution, and keep it far from your children. While it isn’t poisonous, it is not the kind of thing you want a child using as a squirt gun. Make sure the alcohol is clear, and not mixed with a color lubricant, like glycerin. I used 70% Ethyl Alcohol labeled “rubbing alcohol.”
• Avoid ammonia-based glass cleaner on plastic screens. For glass screens like older CRT screens, old fashioned TVs, you have no worries. Today however, cleaning a plastic screen is more complicated. They range in size and material, and plastic scratches easier than yesterday’s glass. Plus ammonia-based glass cleaners like Windex supposedly cause plastic screens to yellow over time.
• Don’t use paper towels. You’re supposed to use a 100% cotton cloth, instead. Besides being bad for the environment, paper towels might contain bits of wood that could scratch or dull the screen’s surface.
• Keep permanent markers, crayons and sharp objects away from your kids and screens. Out of site, out of mind.
• Don’t soak it. Liquids and electronics don’t mix. Start by turning off your monitor or computer, and then spray a lightmist of cleaner that you dry off quickly.
• Use dry before wet. A dry feather duster (I purchased 5 for $4) can remove the lint or dust first, minimizing the contact of potentially abrasive particles.
Pour yourself a drink. At http://bit.ly/530bOj, Jackmakrl writes: “Here’s how I clean my laptop screen. The first thing I do is fix myself a drink in a clean glass with lots of ice. Then I get a microfiber cloth and dip the corner in some 91% isopropyl alcohol and rub that around the screen trying to get all the oily bits off. Might have to do it a couple of times, the alcohol evaporates pretty quick. Then I wipe another corner of the cloth on the distilled water that has condensed on the outside of my glass and use that to rinse off any residue. Semi-vigorous rubbing with a dry part of the cloth eliminates any streaks.”
I used rubbing alcohol/distilled water in my experiments and not isopropyl alcohol, which has a different carbon structure. I also did not personally try vodka, as it was above my price formula. However, a few sips would make me care much less about a slightly dusty screen.
In Extreme Cases:
Crayons: Live with a toddler? Besides being sleep-deprived, you may wake up one morning to find crayon marks all over your 52 inch screen. To remove wax (or glue), you need to melt or dissolve it. You can use warm baby oil (or cooking oil) to melt the wax and rub it off with a cotton cloth. Clean the remaining oil streaks with your alcohol/distilled water solution.
Permanent makers. You wake up from your nap to find that your young artist has drawn a smiley face on your monitor, with a permanent marker! What to do? As quickly as possible, get your rubbing alcohol and start rubbing. The alcohol will (hopefully) dissolve the ink. If that doesn’t work, you might want to squint whenever you use your monitor, and pretend you don’t see it.
Scratches (or worse). There’s obviously nothing you can do after the fact. But you can prevent scratches or dents from happening in the first place. Consider a screen protector. TV-Armor is one such brand, that ranges in price from $70 to $290, depending on your screen size. You can also make your own, by simply velcroing a slab of plexiglass over the screen, to form a clear, crayon-proof barrier between your child on the screen. If a child gets loose with a pair of scissors, a marker or a blow torch, simply replace the plexiglas and call it a day.
Just make sure you measure carefully, and remember that you’ll pay a price in image quality. The extra surface adds an extra layer of glare.
- Reading: “SMART Table in my Classroom – My Conclusions | ICT in my Classroom” ( http://bit.ly/8sFzey ) #
- Watching: By way of Dave Maki, the video I just showed Ned Davis for NJECC (Sweet Georgia Brown & traktor http://bit.ly/6PmO7s ) #
- Editorial: 1 SMART board or 16 iPods Touches? Let your theory decide. Why it’s time to revisit the DynaBook Dream ( http://bit.ly/nQYIG ) #
Each year, as NECC (the National Educational Computing Conference) comes and goes, it is fun to wander the show floor and dream. For example, imagine the implications for classrooms of a legal-pad sized iPod Touch. Lets call it the iPod Jumbo.
Children could swipe, stretch and pinch their way down to street level on Google Earth, or tilt the screen back to change the horizon, as they can on the small version. The worksheet sized screen could offer up an endless supply of soft correcting worksheets, synced in real time with the school’s server. No more #2 pencils.
The concept of such a device was rumored last year but that was before Apple’s 35,000th app.
Steve, we know the Apple board of directors may need to be convinced about the iPod Jumbo project. First of all, consider the competitors. Jeff Bezos has his larger sized-Kindle, plus there are now dozens of Atom-powered netbook choices for tech coordinators on the show floor. Sure, they run Windows, but they’re cheap, and some have touch screens. But here’s the biggest reason. You could make a fortune. This year 50 million computer-free backpacks will make their way to 97,000 public elementary and secondary schools in the US, and before the school year is out, an estimated $489 billion will be spent on their largely non-digital, non-connected education (see http://nces.ed.gov).
You might be wondering, who would program such a device? That one’s easy. The army of iPhone/iPod Touch app programmers could fill up the jumbo-app store, guided by a community of picky raters.
Forty years ago, on July 20, 1969, I was a 10-year-old attending a summer camp in Michigan. I can clearly recall the day we were herded into the camp’s mess hall to watch the moon landing by way of a small black and white TV.
We sat on our hands as Walter Cronkite described the events in his familiar, newsy voice. From where I was, it was difficult to see the TV screen, but it didn’t really matter because everything was so blurry anyway. The signal, after all, was coming all the way from the moon. I walked out of the mess hall filled with wonder and frustration. The idea that people were walking on the moon was amazing, but why did everything have to be in slow motion? And why do grownups have to talk so much? I had experienced a state-of-the-art 1969 multimedia experience; akin to drinking the information through a straw.
Contrast that 2009’s view of the moon landing. Check out the sites listed on page 4 and at LittleClickers. One of these, We Choose the Moon (on page 18 and shown on this month’s cover) is the exact opposite of my camp experience. The Apollo 11 event is layed-out, buffet style, complete with a timeline with each key moment. You can control your exploration, or let the events unfold naturally in real time. If you want to stand on the launchpad, you can, and browse real photos or videos taken by the astronauts themselves. You can listen in on the actual radio transmissions, or you can read them as a Twitter stream. Choice and active learning has replaced the didactic lecture, a sure-fire recipe for better learning.
There’s a lot of other products to get excited about in this issue. At the top of our tester’s list is Wii Sports Resort. Discovery Kids: Smart Animals Scanopedia embeds hundreds of animal facts on a poster sized page. In case you’re stuck in a home with a pack of bored kids, two wonderful movie-based games can help save the day: G-Force Video Game, and Ice Age 3 Dawn of the Dinosaurs. Both run on multiple platforms.
Enjoy the issue!
Warren Buckleitner
PS. Our town’s Mediatech Foundation is turning five! And our experimental community technology center, located in our town library, has never been busier. Last month set new attendance and circulation records, with 605 people signing in and 444 video games circulated. To celebrate, we’re having a party the weekend of August 7 that will include a real time attempt at Charles Lindbergh’s famous flight using Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight. Two 15 year old game testers will try to stay awake for the entire flight— 33.5 hours, in real-time weather. If you’re in the Flemington, NJ area, stop in and watch “history” being remade.