Teachers, Technology, etc...

Teaching in a sectarian school has its benefits. One of which is that you are guided in all your daily routines and lessons. You have to base everything on the Bible/God and you have to observe Christian behavior at all times. Disciplining students are also affected. You have to apply Christlike character in all decisions every now and then and not just what is stated in the handbook. It really sounds hard but at the end of the day you feel that you have made a great job and not feeling that something is missing. Just last two weeks ago, the school had its Week of Spiritual Refreshing. It is a program where the whole school will pray and go to a hall and sing and worship God. Its aims are clearly seen but it also trains the students in presiding, leading the sing inspiration, share their talents, etc. This year is somewhat refreshing and different for we see and hear totally young-acts. Yes, the speakers are a few years younger than I and yet they can already do preaching with grea...

Mozilla Firefox 4 RC 2 It seems decades, since my last blog. It is due to some things that I have been busy with that I forgot about this. It's great that Google still have my account even with the long absence, unlike the other I used to post to.  Many educators are still using Internet Explorer 6 for their daily net life. We usually use what is readily available and learning something new that is not our forte is never pleasing to our ears. Most of us do not even know what is an Operating System and what we see when we load our computer is what all computers are. We are used with Windows XP and we think all computers behaves like it. Yes, there are many out there, but this is not my subject this time. We are used with clicking the e icon in our desktop that states Internet Explorer and we will surely look for that always. Internet Explorer 6 with its time but no longer the case today. There are numerous better alternatives. Not just more secure since they are regularly upd...

    One of the tiresome and boring jobs of educators is computing grades during card day. Add the fact that grade conscious students (and parents) want to see their performance most of the time even before that day. Filtering in Excel or any other spreadsheet seems a likely solution and of course programming your own in C or any other language could help but problems occur when many student ask it at the same time.     Big universities started posting their grades on their own web servers but how not on small schools and that include high and elementary schools who could not afford their own dedicated server. Besides setting up and maintenance is more of their problem.     Engrade.com is a free online service that lets you, as a teacher input your assignments (quiz, exams, homework, etc.) and set the percentage equivalence of each. Students and parents then see the results, including the items they missed so that they could make-up for t...

Windows 8 must be in beta anytime soon but most businesses are still in Windows XP and some schools, believe it or not, have Windows 98 still. Connecting Windows XP and Windows 7 is easy but not with the older Windows Operating Systems. When you go to the address bar of Windows 98 and type \\WIN7COMPUTER a message box appears stating that a network error or somewhat similar. In our situation, those few Windows 98 PCs still need to access things on my desktop or on to some other Windows 7 machines used by the other teachers. Don’t tell us to ditch Windows 98 or the really antique computers because, the school has a very tight budget, which could also be true to other schools. But to remedy that, you have to know the share directory of the items in windows 7 then access it using the run command \\your_pc_name\folder . I for one shared a directory named YearIII for a specific class on my computer named MOTHER-PC . I can open that in Windows 98 by clicking start | Run then type \\M...

    Turbo C had served us in our school days. Of course you project that you will also be using that in your teaching and hence the students will be forced to use that. I of course used the same tool, since it is a free download in the internet. Microsoft Visual C++ comes with a hefty price, besides, it is not suitable in our setup where we have slow computers. Dev C++ under Windows XP     Our requirement requires an Integrated Display Environment (IDE) since I will be teaching starters so leaving it is not likely. But as we all know, the free Turbo C is a 16 bit program and could only be run in 32 bit operating systems (No longer compatible with XP, Vista and 7 x64). I successfully made it work with Windows Seven x64 through Dosbox (at home) but we know its not a real or possible solution. Hence one remedy is to ask the administration to buy a license of Turbo C++ or Microsoft Visual C++. That is my thinking until I learned of the open source way. ...

WordPerfect X5 It is easy for others to ditch one tool for the other, but not for teachers. Many of us when trained to one product tend to stick to it until we retire. I for one was introduced to many other word processors. My first introduction was WordStar 6 when I was in high school, it is a great tool I told myself then amazed with WordPerfect 5.1. The menu system and shortcuts of WordPerfect won me over and used it for all my works and papers that time. Then came college and now a professional, I used Microsoft Word almost every time and had seen its development. I missed the straightforward way of the two DOS-based word processors and had to find a fix of the outlines, styles, footnotes that do not stay on their places and crazy tables of Microsoft Word. Many will agree with me that when they are corrupted they seem unfixable. It is really annoying. (More problematic in 2007 since I have a bad time importing them and fixing them in another product). Then came word count, tot...