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An extremely well written article on datamining and why you need to get familiar with this term.

PowerSchool changing hands?

Check out the scoop

There can be only one

The owner of Cedar Point amusement park, Cedar Fair has signed papers buying Paramount Parks for somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.2 billion. Cedar Point and King's Island are now under the same owner! It appears that no significant changes will be made for a couple years due to licensing contracts. Read the press release here

Technology in Education Frustration

It must be the end of May. My tolerance for, well anything outside of the daily norm is extremely low. Let's just say I have a full plate of personal stress and that has to be factored in to my demeanor. That aside, being in the business of technology and education everyday brings its own basket of stresses to the table. The root of which is the forced situation of trying to provided technology with little or no budget. So get ready for another list - a list of... well I guess things you deal with.

1. MS Office & its many versions
   This is huge, especially this time of year with projects due. You have a presentation. You work on it in class but need more time so you bring it home with you on your USB jumpdrive. **Editors note** this is actually the making of 2 problems in that one little sentence - it will be addressed in point 2. You work tirelessly at home on this presentation, making sure to include eye pleasing transitions & fonts then save it dutifully to your jumpdrive. Days pass and finally it is time to present. You load up your presentation at school only to find that it is not working right; the timing is off, the transitions are gone and the fonts are ARIAL of all things. Enter the tech guy - "what happened?" inquires the student. Well you see there are different versions of PowerPoint and with the newer versions come new bells / whistles (no new advancement in the software just fluff - but thats neither here nor there). The school cannot afford to buy licensing for MS Office everytime a new transition arrives so we have a 6 year old product. Since you just recently bought your home pc / software it has the latest greatest transitions. Now you can take your old .ppt and it will work wonderfully in the new, but going backwards will strip your presentation without warning. You can go download the viewer from microsoft, but you will be logged in as a student so nevermind you won't be able to install it. So create 2 copies of your presentation (like you have the time) one that is full featured and the other generic, right? Yea, right.


2. USB removable media & network drives
   Remember in the above when said student saved their work to the jumpdrive? Let's revisit that little scenario and play out scene 2a as it would have happened. Student logs into the school network ***editors note** due to our network drives and the letters assigned by someone other than myself this problem is constent. Ok, so student logs in, plugs in the usb drive and nothing happens. Unplug and try again, same result. Enter tech guy - who attempts to explain why this is to people that don't care, just fix it. Well try disconnecting from the first alphabetical network drive; Oh wait you don't have permission. Well assign the usb drive a new letter; oh wait not only do you not have persmission, well lets just leave it at that. I will be down. Repeat this process X times for every new drive used in class. Leading me to the opinion that using mobile labs (laptop) either setup your network drives leaving some alphabetical spaces to allow for removable media or don't log onto the local machine only and not the network.

Blah

The Talent Show

So today at school was the field day / talent show end of the year festivities. This morning was the talent show portion in the auditorium which began with an all-school salute to our principal who is saying goodbye at the end this year. I like talent shows but they tend to make me uncomfortable, kind of nervous even. I have to laugh when we do these because they tend to be very loosely organized and relatively off the cuff. That in mind - the first act was a band who took their inspiration from The Doors and you know you are in for it when they admit they are more or less just gonna jam; no real song to be played. The continue to play for around 20 minutes, seriously. Part of me applauds them for getting up and just playing loud obnoxious rock at school. The larger part of me is wondering how they made it on stage without someone inquiring about the direction of their program. It was funny because they were playing so loud that the applauding that the audience was doing, in hopes of giving them a prompt of when to call it quits was not even close to audible. I am laughing.
Overall, it was very interesting to see in the course of 9 months or so how much students mature, esecially as juniors / seniors. We are blessed with some very talented young adults that I am sure will go on to great things.

compiling a list

So I am driving in to work this morning and mentally making a list of things that when they happen, cause stomach pains and generally ruin your day. I am keeping the list to nondeath /noninjury nobody gets hurt annoyances that can often be the "icing on the cake". Here is what I have so far:

1. Discovering you have a flat tire - this can be elevated to higher levels of annoyance depending place and time


2. Receiving insufficient funds notifications


3. Receiving speeding tickets - for me this is big, because I rarely get stopped and even more rarely actaully get ticketed


4. got more? email me - calebphan11@yahoo.com

More to come...

Happy Birthday to me!

Logging in to blogger this morning I see that my last post was back in March. This gives me pause as I think about everything that has happened over the past couple months, as well as things I hope happen in the coming 2 months.
As the title suggests - today is my birthday, 31 to be spot on. I guess I don't feel one way or the other about the age, though I am becoming more conscious of what I left behind in my 20's.
I made reference to changes, so I feel I should throw them out there in capsulated, nutshell form; moved back to Union City, resigned from my job (which I had tried so hard to get) finishing the year out though so now I am back to driving 90 miles /2 hours 1 way, add that with the price of gas and I get sick thinking of $$ going nowhere - its like paying rent, yeah it works but you aren't really owning anything for your money. Ok so where was I, oh right - let my teaching license run out so needed to enroll in Masters Program, signed on for a summer course @ damn near 1k in fees.. shabang, did I mention I have no job? So here I sit on my birthday with money / finances / jobs on the brain; how can you get excited about gifts (just give me money so i can survive) how can you not feel guilt buying yourself a 4 pack of Guiness ( money that should be saved) and don't even think about saving money to buy and xbox 360 you selfish prick.

Well, there it is not only a new post but a slightly dirty screen covered window into where I am at. I promise next one will be back in the saddle! oh, and I have dsl @ home now so I have no excuse :)