Earth Hour

Every year the World Wildlife Federation sponsors an event called Earth Hour. It is a chance for EVERYONE to turn off all lights for one hour world wide. If you want to participate all you need to do is to turn off your electric lights from 8:30-9:30 on Saturday, March 28th.



On the website there is a pretty cool video of the lights going off in the "Birds Nest" building in China.

I hope you will turn off your lights.

Upgrading your Operating System

I just went from Tiger OS to Leopard. I did this because I KNOW I need to be backing up regularly and I never do it. (It reminds me of flossing my teeth that way.) I decided to do it in December after Christmas, so I purchased an external hard drive online. It has taken 3 months of trial and error for me to successfully do the upgrade. It should not be that hard.

Doing this has helped me to experience the feelings of most computer users my age and older. Everything is so much of a mystery that you MIGHT just be really messing things up without knowing it. So, many people decide not to do anything. I really felt the need for handholding when I got this going. The first external hard drive I purchased offered only email support. After going back and forth several times I ended up sending it back for a refund. I don't know if the HD was defective or if it was operator error, but I had tried hard enough and it was NOT working. I finally decided to purchase a more expensive external hard drive with PHONE support from the Apple Store. Having someone to talk to and walk me through it REALLY helped. I am copying and pasting my notes from the process. I was looking for this type of help online and did not find it. Maybe it can help someone.

NOTES ON UPGRADING YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM
March 21, 2009

I am writing this because I just went through several months of effort and agony and I was hoping to find a step-by-step explanation and could not find one.

I have a MacBook and was upgrading from the Tiger OS to Leopard. I am pretty comfortable with technology, but this is something I have never done before and it brought out all of my insecurities. I learned that a good listening tech support person can be an amazingly wonderful help. Often I really did know what to do, but I needed the comfort of someone who knew a bit more and could “hold my hand” while I did it.

Maybe this can help someone else have a much smoother time of doing this.

Here are the steps:
Purchase an external hard drive to back up your current system. Since I was upgrading to Leopard so that I would have Time Machine to do regular back ups an external hard drive made sense. I was told that creating a bootable copy of my hard drive was important. Upgrading to a new OS in Mac should not erase all of your data, but you always want to have a back up just in case.

CREATING A BOOTABLE COPY OF YOUR CURRENT COMPUTER

1. The new operating system is supposed to install over what is already there without changing things, but just in case you want to have a back up.
2. You must boot your computer with the CD that came with it instead of normally if you are going to create a copy (image). To do this put the CD into the disk drive and restart while pressing down the c key.
1. The first thing you will see is a box asking what language you want to use. When you have chosen English it goes to a window, which asks you if you want to install. WAIT until the menu appears at the top of the screen.
2. Choose Utilities and then Disk Utility from the menu that appears.
3. When the disk Utility opens it will show all of the drives that are attached to your computer. It should show three things if you have your external hard drive plugged in. The Macintosh, the startup disk, and the external hard drive.
4. Choose “New Image” and indicate that you want an image of your Macintosh. It will ask you where you want the image to be put and you can choose your external hard drive.
5. Then it will take a while to make an image of your hard drive onto the external drive.
6. After that has completed it will restart. You can then remove the CD. Open your Macintosh Hard Drive and find the HOME (It looks like a picture of a house). Drag that onto the icon of the external hard drive on the desktop.
7. Restart your computer. Now your initial back up is done and you can use the install disk to install the new OS onto your computer.

INSTALLING THE NEW OS
1. Unplug the external hard drive.
2. Put the new operating system CD into the drive. Follow instructions to install the OS.
3. This takes a while (longer than I thought it would), but in my case it remembered all of my old stuff. I did not have to go and reinstall anything.
4. The one thing that I had to do was to open my mail program and put all of the information about the pop server and the smtp back into it. Once it was redone all of my saved mail and my new mail was restored.

THINGS I LEARNED
1. Apple has AMAZING customer service. They speak English and help you with a smile. It does not seem like they are complaining about you behind their backs. If you purchase the new OS you have 90 days of phone support. You can also sign up for time with a “genius” at the Apple Store. They were extremely helpful. The thing about phone support is that they can walk you through things and then if a process takes a long time call you back and continue. At the Genius Bar you don’t have that much time.
2. I ended up buying an external hard drive from the Apple Store. I learned that most Hard Drives are formatted FAT 32 ( I am not sure what that means) and need to be reformatted in order to work with all of the Mac stuff.
3. You cannot just download an operating system upgrade. You need to purchase the CD and install it from the CD.

Spring Break and Future Travel

One thing I am doing this Spring Break is working on planning the trip I will be taking this summer with my husband the professor. In the past I have blogged about my trip and I have always tried to engage followers to ask questions and share thoughts. This has really enriched my traveling and so I plan to do it again. I am adding a Google Map that anyone who is interested in following can use to mark their location as well as a place where I can add information. I am not sure how it will work, but I am learning as I go. Here is the Google Map so far. I have just started using it. Feel free to mark yourself if you will be following some of the trip! You can manipulate this map, so be sure to zoom in. I have not learned how to put lines showing travel routes yet, but I plan to.


View Larger Map

Women's History Month

It is a little late (I should have thought of this earlier in the month), but I have created some teaching resources that might be helpful for Women's History Month. I am sharing them here for two reasons. First because they might be helpful and second to point you toward a resource that has been helpful to me for many years. The best thing about My eCoach for me is that I have a locker there that keeps track of projects I have done. My friend, Barbara, who has given everything for years to see that My eCoach keeps on the cutting edge, often says that she will always keep resources available and I trust her.

So here they are
A web resourse list called How did Women get the Vote?
http://my-ecoach.com/online/webresourcelist.php?rlid=9474

and a project called Suffering for Suffrage and Civil Rights
http://my-ecoach.com/online/teacherguide.php?projectid=9476

I hope that these are helpful to someone and that you will comment if you are able to use them.

Picturing the Future of School

This morning I listened to the Seedlings Podcast and they were talking with Michael Horn, the author of Disrupting Class. It reminded me of a picture of the school of the future which I may have written here before, but I can't find it, so maybe I have not. It is a thought I am not forgetting, so maybe there is something to it!

I am thinking that we will still have all of these school buildings from the last hundred years. We will still have all of these kids that need to be learning and need a place to do it. How can it be done any differently?

What if some things were the same... Kids and teachers all went to a building each day to work together. Everyone still needs to eat lunch. Kids still need to play and move. However, the whole school is organized around a passion for learning and both students and teachers are involved. Of course at the early ages there will be a bit more structure because students still need to have a foundation. They need to be able to read and write. The school will not be organized artificially around grades (first, second, third, etc...) but will be organized around interests, passions and certain learning expectations. When a student has developed certain basics and they begin to have questions and interests in things teachers will guide them to do projects of different lengths depending upon the goal. Students will learn things that they need to learn through these projects. For example, all students will need to understand fractions and demonstrate it somehow. One student may be passionate about art and will be able to explore fractions through art. Another student may enjoy mathematical problem solving and will follow a more traditional path of learning fractions. Another may enjoy cooking and learn fractions through measuring ingredients.

The thing is teaching will totally change. Right now an important problem is that there is not enough TIME and a lack of professional development. Those who do professional development say that there is no time to work with teachers. They don't want to stay after school or work on weekends and it is difficult and expensive to get substitutes. What if instead of each teacher doing EVERYTHING with 20-30 kids all year a group of teachers worked together in an area of their passion guiding kids and collaborating with each other to design projects and learning experiences that those kids need? What if TIME to collaborate was built into the system?

Also teachers would not only collaborate with those in their buildings, but with a network of other teachers around the world who are interested in the same things. Online learning would be really important for teachers.

I know that these thoughts are sort of vague... and I am not sure how we would ever get there from here... but they are thoughts just the same...