Unsolicited Advice - Install these applications on your Mac! [Advice]

I got a new hard drive installed in my Macbook the other day, which began one of my favorite processes in computing: figuring out which applications I actually use.

So, here's your Unsolicited Advice: Install these applications!

Apps

• Firefox - I've gone over a few reasons why I love Firefox, and it all boils down to one thing: Firefox is whatever you want it to be.
• Tweetie - I'm not sure how big of a productivity hit my Twitter use would take if I didn't use Tweete, but I'd put it somewhere between 80 and 99%. I appreciate Tweetie because it breaks replies into easy-to-read conversations, auto-refreshes my feed, and makes my link-shortening/image-sharing life much easier.
  
• Skitch - You know those super cool screenshots I usually have in my posts with the arrows? Creating and sharing those takes just a couple clicks with Skitch. If you ever find yourself needing to show someone where to click on their computer, but you're miles away, Skitch is your best friend.
  
• Evernote - I still haven't figured out how exactly Evernote fits into my workflow. Here's what it does: I can take a screenshot/upload a picture/bookmark a website/create a text document in Evernote. I can then access all that stuff in an application on my Macbook, on the web at www.evernote.com, and on my iPhone with Evernote's app. So that's what it does. Here's how I've used it so far: take a picture of a piece of furniture on my iPhone and it's automatically synced to the web and the application on my Macbook. Take some quick notes when I don't have my Macbook and it's automatically synced....you get it. If it sounds useful, get after it. If not, move down the list.
  
• Picasa - I like options. I don't dislike iPhoto, but I use Picasa Web Albums for my online storage of images. Picasa reads my iPhoto library, so there are no duplicates of my pictures and it keeps my Macbook and my online image library synced up. Really, though, if you don't use Picasa Web Albums, iPhoto will work just fine.
  
• Skype - Don't tell any of my geeky buddies, but I don't use Skype very often. I've found that Gmail's video chat looks and sounds better, and Gmail already has all my contacts. But, in this day and age, I really have to have Skype around, just in case. The big benefit Skype has over Gmail video chat is screen sharing. It lets me show my screen (instead of my face-made-for-radio) to whoever I'm chatting with. I was going to use this with my parents in case they ever needed some troubleshooting. Unfortunately, Skype was down the day I tried to register them.
  

Utilities

• Monolingual - Do you speak Afrikaans, Albanian, or Bengali? No? Me neither. Turns out, though, that those and a hundred or so other languages are taking up space on your hard drive. Apple generously provides you with 3-4 gigabytes of language files when you install OS X. This utility deletes them for you. Just make sure you keep English around.
  
• Dropbox - I'm going to my parents' house this weekend, and installing Dropbox on their computer is #1 on my to do list. Why? It gives you a set of folders that are synced up with the web. I'll be able to create a shared folder with my parents, so that, instead of emailing pictures to them, I'll just put the pictures in my shared folder on my computer and they'll be updated on my parents computer. No downloading email attachments required. My bro-in-law and I use it to exchange articles related to education. My TAG coordinator and I used it so we always both had the most up-to-date files this school year.
  
• MenuMeters - We've arrived at our first application/utility that I truly don't see anyone installing. Until a couple weeks ago when I bought a new wireless card for my Macbook, I had flaky Wi-Fi reception. MenuMeters puts a little graph in my menu bar to let me see how many bytes/second are moving through my wireless card. I don't care what the numbers are, but if I see that it's moving, I know my Internet connection should be good.
  
• Perian - Install Perian and never worry about being able to play a video file again. It just gives you all the codecs you'll ever need. You'll also be able to edit anything in iMovie.
  
• DoubleCommand - Ever wanted to delete the letters that come after your cursor on a Mac? Miss the "delete" (not "backspace") key from your Windows keyboard? DoubleCommand lets you remap keys on your keyboard. I remapped the "enter" key that's to the left of my arrow keys to "forward delete."
  
• Growl - Here's a system-wide notification utility. Doesn't sound that great does it? It is. There's a reason it was ported to Windows and Ubuntu is basically copying it for its new notification system.
  

Quicksilver - Ahh, best for last. Quicksilver (QS) gets its own little writeup down here. QS just flat does not work for some people's workflow. That's fine. Here's QS in a nutshell -- and keep "workflow" in mind. Think about the stuff you do with your mouse. Moving files. Opening folders. Double-clicking. Boooring. QS lets users put together short "sentences". Start by searching for an object (Firefox) then apply an action to that object (open). So with a few short keystrokes, I can open Firefox. I can also create an object out of a bit of text. For example, "pizza Des Moines." The action I would take on that object is "search on Google."

It sounds redundant, I know. "I can already search on Google." "I can use the dock to open all my applications." That's cool. No peer pressure from this guy. I'll tell you this, though. I'm the fastest Googler you've never met. And someday that will come in handy. Mark my words.

Unsolicited Advice - Get to know your Mac: Expose [Advice]

If you haven't figured it out yet, Unsolicited Advice could probably be retitled Copy My Workflow. I'll say it again (I think I've said it before): If this stuff works for you, go for it; if not, no hard feelings.

At my new school, teachers are given a Macbook for their computing pleasure. I happen to love my Macbook. It's 3-years-old, and I've had to do some internal upgrades to keep it chugging along at my pace, but I love it. Since I bought it, I've also had hand-me-down laptops with Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP, and Windows 7 on them. While I can use any type of computer without too many complaints, there are just some things about my Macbook that I've found I can't live without.

I want to take this post to break down one of my favorite features of the Mac: Expose.

It's funny (to me) that I can't really think of a good reason why Expose is so useful to me. It completely replicates functionality that is in all operating systems, from every Windows released to all flavors of Linux. I guess the thing about Expose is not what it does but how it does it. (How Apple is that of me to say? I am gulping down the Kool-aid in this post.)

Expose lets you switch between applications. That's it. Like I said, though, it's the how not the what.

So here's a screencast of Expose in action:

Note: When I don't get the chance to edit my thoughts -- like I do in this blog -- I'm a bit of a rambler. My apologies. Believe it or not, this was my fourth take.



To get your Expose set up like mine (with the bottom right and left "hot corners"), go to your System Preferences, then to Expose and Spaces, then be sure you're working under Expose, and make sure your corners match mine:

A sports metaphor for traditonal letter grades [Hmm]

I was reading an article titled "30 Is the New 40" in ESPN the Magazine. It's about Major League Baseball teams losing faith in free-agent players over 30 in the face of stiffer drug testing, which has resulted in fewer 30+ players finding the "fountain of youth". Teams have now turned their attention to younger players, which has resulted in a greater focus on scouting. There is a section about scouting that parallels my thoughts on traditional letter grades (A-, D+, etc.) almost exactly:

For years, scouts have graded player tools on a scale of 20 to 80; for example, No. 1 pitching phenom Stephen Strasburg has an 80 fastball. A general manager recently gathered his scouts and asked them how they define their evaluations. So if a scout assigned a rating of 60 to a pitcher's curveball, what does that mean? What are the characteristics of a 60 curveball? Is it a tighter spin? A tighter break? Is the rating of a 60 changeup because of deceptive arm speed, or because of the movement on the pitch? The goal of the exercise was for everybody in the organization to speak the same player-evaluation language.

Link to article (must be ESPN Insider to access) Also available in July 27, 2009 issue of ESPN the Mag

Sound familiar? Is my "A" in Language Arts the same as an "A" in California? Is it even the same as an "A" down the block? There's been some hubub over a recent push for National Standards in regard to curriculum. In my opinion, any push for National Standards without a concurrent push for National Standards-Based Assessments is a band-aid. Now that I've written that out, I'm not sure how I feel about National Standards-Based Assessments (or National Standards).

I do know this: If colleges are going to look at grade-point averages to make pretty big decisions in the lives of the young people in which we've invested a lot of energy, it would be nice if they were averaging something with a little meaning.

Example: What if I use only the grades from essays and tests to figure my grades, but the gentleman down the block factors in classroom participation, attendance, and daily homework assignments. Hypothetically, this could result in a C grade for a student who doesn't participate in class, has sporadic attendance, and doesn't do homework, but would have aced my class because of high-quality essays and tests. This isn't to say that my (made up) way of grading is better. It's just different.

And that's what baseball executives are figuring out. If they're going to use an arbitrary system that (for them) goes from 20-80, they may as well figure out what it means when someone gets a 60.

Unsolicited Advice - Be a realdealist [Advice]

I've never purposely tried to create a buzzword, so if I'm doing it wrong, let me know.

Here's the deal: I'm an idealist. It's how I've lived since embracing my passion of teaching. Examples of idealism: American public education can (and should) deliver quality education to every child in America, no ifs, ands, or buts; students should be intrinsically motivated, so I can get rid of my external motivators; learning can be made meaningful for every student, individually; paperless classrooms are a goal for the present, not a dream for the future.

So, idealism is great. It keeps those of us who think idealistically in the mindset to set big goals. But here's the rub: we can't always be idealistic. It doesn't work. That's why we need to pepper in some realism.

Realism gives us the ability to get things done. Idealism sets us the lofty goals, while realism shows us how it can -- or possibly cannot -- be done. Let's take my "motivation" example from the first paragraph. External motivators are a part of life. It took my idealistic brain a while to realize this. I read in Ron Clark's Book The Essential 55 about how Mr. Clark used the idea from one of those "Accident-free for X days" signs to create his own "This class has completed its homework for X straight days" sign.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/veen/22281276/

Now, I'm not big on homework, so I won't be assigning it enough to warrant that exact sign. I've decided my sign is going to focus on students bringing their supplies to class. It's something they will have to have with them every day, it's a goal classmates can help each other with without it getting weird (in the book, Mr. Clark brings the class food every day after a certain number of days -- the temptation to do someone's homework for them would be pretty high), and it reinforces a behavior I'm cool with being reinforced.

Realistically, these kids will need some external motivation to remember their supplies every day. Ideally, through discussions of this point, they'll learn that they should bring their supplies so they're prepared to learn (intrinsic). Best of both worlds.

So here's your buzzword: Realism + Idealism = realdealsim. Be a realdealist.

Yeah, that's never going to catch on.

I've been thinking about Enrichment lately [Enrichment, Survey]

I'm still losing sleep over the sub-standard job I feel I did with my Enrichment groups this year. That may be a tad dramatic, but only a tad. I never felt comfortable with the setup of my Enrichment schedule. I did not do enough (anything) in regard to collaboration with classroom teachers. If I were teaching talented and gifted again next year, a long reflection and revision of my Enrichment setup would be priority number one.

That said, I'm really interested in what others think of their Enrichment programming. What can we learn from each other?

I've embedded the survey below.

Here is a link to the results: Spreadsheet.

Leadership Day 2009 [Leadership Day 2009]

I walked in the door to our apartment ten minutes ago, primed to scan through Google Reader before closing my eyes for the night after a four-hour drive home from Minneapolis. I spent the weekend with aunts and uncles, my grandma, my parents, and my wife celebrating our annual Baseball Weekend, which includes a St. Paul Saints game, a grill-out lunch, a Twins game, and the celebration of my dad's and my shared birth date: July 12.

I had taken time enough to check on my feeds this weekend to see a couple of posts stemming from Dr. Scott Mcleod's Leadership Day 2009. Before digging through the Twitter hashtag #leadershipday09
I'll be reading more thoroughly the four posts from Google Reader that I starred: Evan Abbey, Richard Byrne, Sylvia Martinez, and Kevin Jarret.

My Take

There are aspects of teaching where I consider myself a leader, and there are others where I am happy to be a follower. A year into my career as an educator, I know what I perceive to be my strengths and my weaknesses. I know I have much more to gain from others than I have to offer -- right now. I take as much pride in my ability to follow as my ability to lead.

Leadership is about goals and vision. What I respect about those I consider great leaders is their ability to be organizers of those two components. I don't expect my leaders to be the ones providing all the goals and all the vision. I expect them to pull from those who are following, combine with their own goals and their own vision, and create opportunity for students. In an educational setting, the leaders I gravitate toward are the ones who are student-focused.

This past Tuesday, two administrators, five teachers, and I gathered at Panera to discuss Literacy 2.0. This was the fourth of our 7:30 a.m. meetings. What started as a one-laptop affair a month ago, steadily grew to the point that we all had laptops on this fateful day. The administrators took the lead, deciding that "today is going to be the day" that we all figured out Diigo, Google Reader, and Google Docs. These administrators had never heard of any of those three web tools a month earlier, but, because of their goal for our teachers to become the 21st century learners we want our students to be, had taken on the vision of learning in a new way.

5 hours later, I left for an appointment. At 3:30 that afternoon (8 hours after their Tech Day at Panera began), I got an email from my principal saying that the last of them were finally packing up, that she had never eaten two meals at the same restaurant in one day, and that she was able to learn so much because of the mistakes she was able to make and the group of learners around her, making mistakes and learning from them together.

That is leadership.

Critical thinking, probability, socialization -- Settlers of Catan [Games, Summer Activities]

This post has been a long time in the making. It's taken so long because I haven't been sure how to tackle it. I'm going to tell you about a great board game that I think is perfect for the mind of a Gifted child (why am I capitalizing Gifted all of a sudden?) I think it's great for all minds, but there are aspects of this game that are helpful for gifted kids (lowercase is probably better).

The game is Settlers of Catan, and it takes some initial explanation to understand. I was worried that all the explaining would turn people off, but I decided that I'm just going to get after it and if you read all, you read it all, and if you don't, you don't. I'm not going to get into all the minute details of the rules, but the overview itself is a bit wordy by nature.

Note: there will be screenshots. So at least there are pictures to look at.

A decent nutshell is that it's a combination of Monopoly and Risk. Somewhat. But with bartering. I love the social aspect of it for gifted kids. I noticed this year that my kids struggled working in small groups. There wasn't much give in the give-and-take. Settlers is a board game, but it can also be played online (for free!)

Intro

The players in the game have all landed on the island of Catan. They will spend the game building settlements, roads, and cities, attempting to build a bigger civilization than the other players. Here are the game pieces for each player (each player uses different colors):

cc licensed flickr photo shared by super.heavy

Clockwise from the top left: settlements, roads, and cities. Players spend the game collecting and trading for resources of five types: wood, wheat, clay, wool, and ore. Players then use these resources to "activate" one of their game pieces. For example, once play has begun, to build a road, a player must trade in a wood plus a clay resource card to use a road.

Here is the default game board before play has begun (from the online version):


The game begins with each player building two sets of settlements and roads:

As the screenshot states, one of the rules is that settlements must be two hexagon sides away from each other. Once each player has placed their two settlements/roads, play begins. (The placement of these initial settlements is decided by rolling the dice. If there are three players, the highest roll places first and last, the player to the left of the highest roll places second and fifth, the third player places third and fourth.)

Probability

This is the first aspect of the game that I see being of a learning benefit to students. Let's take another look at the default map:
Think about two dice. The closer to seven, the higher the probability number has to being rolled. For example, there is only one way to roll a twelve: two sixes. However, there are three ways (six if you count each die independently) to roll an eight. Since settlements are built on the corners of hexes, players want to look for corners where three hexes connect with high probabilities. Let's look at an example of a spot where a player would not want to build:

The spot the arrow points to is at the junction of an eleven, a three, and a ten. There is no worse spot on this example board.

Why are our settlement spots so important?

We can finally begin to start discussing gameplay. Each player's turn begins with a roll of the dice. Let's say a six is rolled. Any player who has a settlement on a hex with the number six will receive one resource card of that resource. Our example board:
My color in this game is orange, so I would get one ore resource card. The game continues to move along in this manner with players' turns consisting of a roll of the dice, the passing out of resource cards, bartering and trading, and building.

The online game keeps track of the numbers that have been rolled. Take a look at these two screenshots. The first is from the first few minutes of the game, the second from the end.


You can see that by the end of the game, the rolls have aligned to a normal distribution. A perfect opportunity to discuss probability with students.

Social Aspects

I love how the board game forces players who want to win to become social. During a player's turn, that player is allowed to field trade offers and to make offers to other players. Attitude becomes important. Arrogant players who attempt to "do it on their own" will find that in the end, they will be helpless with their trade routes cut off. It is nearly impossible to find a good spot on every resource to begin a game. All players will be left in a situation where they have a deficiency of some resource. Some players use a strategy of hoarding one resource to use as a trade piece.

This social aspect of the game offers students the chance to work in a competitive group. The can learn from the different relationships that are built. For example, I remember playing in a game where every time a six was rolled, I received two wood cards, and another player received two clay cards. As was noted earlier, it takes both a wood and a clay to build a road. Toward the end of that game, the "clay player" and I had an unspoken truce, where every time a six was rolled, we would trade each other one clay for one wood, thereby giving each of us the cards needed to build a road. Near the end, though, I turned him down once, then needed the trade a few rolls later. I had burned the bridge and couldn't make the trade again.

Critical Thinking

Before playing their first piece, players must create a strategy. Perhaps they will attempt to have a monopoly on wood. The player with the longest continual road gets 2 bonus points. Maybe a player will decide this is their strategy.

We haven't talked about cities at all yet. Players can upgrade settlements to cities by trading in three ore cards plus two wheat cards. When a player has a city on the board, they are given two resource cards instead of one when a number is rolled that their city touches. Another strategy is to monopolize the ore, as toward the end of the game, ore becomes extremely important.

Game Over

The game is won when a player reaches ten points. Each settlement on the board is worth one point. Each city is worth two points. Players can earn two more points for having the longest road. There is another aspect of the game I didn't discuss that involves buying "chance-type" cards. These cards can give a player points.

Let's look at a screenshot from just before the online game I played was over:


At this point, I had five points on the board: three settlements and one city. I also had two points in my hand with a longest road card. I ended up building another city and a settlement to win.

Go Get It!

I hope this has shown you the benefits this game can have for kids. Some friends of ours have a fifth grade daughter. It took her multiple times playing the game to catch the hang of it, but now she loves it.

You can buy Settlers of Catan on Amazon.
You can also play for free online at Games.AsoBrain.com. The game is called Xplorers there. I would suggest spectating a few games there before diving in. There is more to the nuances of the game than the overview I've given.