Archive for: October 2005
§ ¶Previewing InqScribe 1.1
Over on the InqScribe News page, we’ve begun to preview some of the new features of the upcoming InqScribe 1.1. First up: Pitch Lock. Head over and take a look.
§ ¶2005 NAEP Results
The most recent NAEP results are out. The site is pretty cool; you can explore data by state, by demographic group, lots of ways. In terms of NAEP results and policy, here’s a relevant response from a StatChat:
Elizabeth from Arlington, VA asked: Can we really tie No Child Left Behind to these scores? Flat reading scores and upward trends in math are nothing new. How can we chalk these scores up to NCLB, positively or negatively?
Dr. Peggy G. Carr : Elizabeth, NAEP data is of particular use to policymakers, because it provides reliable information about students’ achievement—indicating whether or not we are meeting our educational goals. As a large-scale assessment survey, however, it is not designed to answer causal questions—or explain why results look the way they do.
Here’s a general story about national NAEP results, as well as one local to Washington state.
§ ¶RSS and Search
Steve Rubel gives 10 great ways to leverage RSS, reminding me that some of the best feeds might actually be custom searches — not just those orange buttons you see in blogs.
§ ¶OS X Trends from Omni
Omni has posted some demographic data about its OS X users.
Granted, Omni users probably trend more current than education users, especially since their software ships on new Macs. But a couple things jumped out at me:
- 85% of their users are using Tiger.
- 73% are using English. Japanese, German, and French are the other significant languages.
- Less than 3% use G3s; everyone else has a G4 or a G5.
Note that Omni doesn’t support Classic at all, so there’s no indication of whether there are OS 9 users still out there.
§ ¶RSS Roundup
I’ve mostly stayed away from the “RSS is going to revolutionize education” bandwagon. But I do believe RSS has been playing an important role tying together a variety of (mostly) web-based services. This week seems to have brought a particularly interesting set of RSS-related news.
NewsGator acquires NetNewsWire, the leading Macintosh RSS aggregator. Great news for Brent.
Verisign acquires weblogs.com, a long-established source for RSS feeds. Great news for Dave.
Google makes a splash with their web-based RSS aggregator. Given their facility with AJAX, as shown in Google Maps, this could be a dynamite service.
Yahoo releases a really interesting report on RSS use and awareness (PDF file).
See a theme?
On a less earth-shattering note, I just noticed that my local library offers RSS feeds to let me keep track of what I’ve checked out and what I’ve requested. Nice.
§ ¶NECC 2006 Registration Opens
NECC 2006 is in San Diego July 5-7. Online registration has begun.
Register today to attend the 27th Annual National Educational Computing Conference (NECC). Join ISTE members and more than 16,000 teachers, technology coordinators, library media specialists, teacher educators, administrators, policy makers, industry representatives, and students from all over the world who’ll gather in San Diego, California, July, 2006.