I do most of my image processing on a Mac. Once in a great while, I feel the need to work with images on my Windows machine. A recent Call For Help Download of the Day described a free product from Adobe that seemed worth a try. PhotoShop Album 2.0 Lite offers an impressive range of features for a free (introductory) program. The program appears primarily to be a photo storage and indexing system with some automatic editing capabilities. It did take me a while to figure out how to save a file I had edited – the email option allows for the file to be saved as an alternative to attaching it to an email message. This one is worth a look for you Windows fans.
“No Child Left Behind” was one of the topics considered by Governors in their annual conference. The opportunity to discuss key issues with Secretary Paige was somewhat lost in the furor over the now infamous “NEA as Terrorist Organization” comment. The administration claims it is spending more on K-12 education than the past administration and governors claim their is not enough funding or flexibility to meet expections of the law.
There will be no EdTech posts this week. I am out of town and enjoying myself. We took the kids to London for Spring break and are having a great time. Our technology is with us, but we are using it mostly for pleasure rather than work.
As I have grown older, I have developed an appreciation for the value of spending time in other places and Cindy and I are pleased we can take our family. I would encourage you to do the same if you have the opportunity. The best way I can explain the benefits would be to refer to the daily experience of watching the sports on TV. Here, not only are the games different than you are used to playing or watching, but the coverage involves teams from countries from multiple continents. The big thing was the India/Pakistan cricket match. I saw a score from the Lakers game, but nothing on the Timberwolves.
One of the lists I follow has somehow become focused on the cost of books. Some are making statements contending without doubt that book companies are evil and responsible for the terrible cost of books and the bad backs of students who must carrying them. I have taken a position on such claims in earlier comments contending that those who take this position are naive regarding all the costs and issues that are invovled (in fact, the quest to save money by reusing books ends up raising costs and may benefit only the stores buying and selling used books). It is true I write a book and may be biased in not complaining about the evil publishing companies. By the way, that used Ford pickup in the parking lot is mine.
Anyway, a subtheme within the general discussion of book costs has involved ebooks. I like this alternative approach to the cost issue and enjoy reading what some imagine may eventually happen given this use of technology. For example, consider the musings of Doug Johnson.
I have a colleague in my department who developed some software for the Apple IIe back in the day when it was the hot machine. He does not want to or does not have the time to rewrite his software for newer machines. He still uses the IIes in his research and is constantly scrounging to find disk drives and 5.25 floppies. When I was department chair, I told him to keep those machine hidden because we did not want the general public to think we were 15 years behind the times. 😉
I just came across something that may solve his problem – a Apple II Emulator‘, ‘
Cindy had an experience while teaching one of her classes that gave me an idea for a demonstration. She was working with pre-service teachers creating simple web pages and experienced some “issues” while trying to work back and forth creating web pages with multiple programs.
Her students were generating web pages by converting a Word document into HTML. At some point, they wanted to tweak the page that was generated and they opened this document in Netscape Composer. After saving the changes, they loaded their pages to the server and then attempted to view the pages in Internet Explorer on Windows machines.
Here is a screen image of what they encountered (this my approximation of the process). If you view this same material on a Mac, my experience has been you do not necessarily see these same abnormalities. Version “Web page created by opening Word HTML document and saving using Composer” that appears below is the corrupted version.
I started experimenting with this same process and generated the following options. I would encourage students to create a similar set of “experiments” to evaluate some of these same issues.
My Point? I do not like the approach taken by Microsoft products. The code appears to create some compatibility problems (easy to see if you view these examples from a Windows machine and IE) and the code is overly complex (view the source code). Why would this be a desirable approach? Beats me. If you feel my analysis is unfair, please feel to respond.
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