Nelly’s Musings

I currently have one of my freshman level classes blogging and doing other web2.0 type activities to earn 40% of their class grades. I have thought about how I should grade the blogs and decided to ask my Twitter Personal Learning Network (PLN) for help.

Received a response from Professor Wendy Drexler whom is teaching a graduate level class and she shared her rubric blog checklist with me. I thought it was pretty good but it did not fit my needs as her class was blogging to earn their participation grade. I then decided to do a little research to see what I could find.

I found several great rubrics which were freely shared and after sharing them with Professor Wendy Drexler, I decided to blog and share them with others.

Here were my findings:

From Professor Barbara Nixon’s blog here whom I follow on Twitter:

Professor Barbara Nixon demonstrates how she uses Google Forms to allow her students to self evaluate their own blogs before she grades them. Great idea, I will be revising this for my own class.

She also provides a link to the actual rubric that she will use to grade her student’s blog. Again, another awesome idea which I will adopt.

Here is a blog rubric from another professor who teaches, “Using Tech in Education” at a University.

Also found another blog rubric used in an Education class at the Univ of Regina. I later found out that I do follow Professor Alec Courosa who created this rubric, on Twitter.

Here is another provided by a Tech ed consultant, Tony Vincent for free on his site here

Lastly, I found another freely shared rubric from
this site which is a higher education rubric creation site.

I plan to revise one of these to use with my class. As you can already see, most of these resources came from the wonderful colleagues that I follow on Twitter. I cannot say this enough, I have learned so much from my PLN and the members just rock!! Hope this collection helps someone find the perfect rubric for grading their student’s blogs.

Last week, I decided to make up a very small assignment for my college level Multimedia Presentations Class. The assignment was to use a royalty free picture site such as Http://www.sxc.hu to find 10 Jpg formatted photos in a topic relating to multimedia. For example: 10 photos of musical instruments to represent sound.

They were supposed to download them to their desktop and then use the MS Paint software to save 2 each in the following formats, Tiff, Gif, Png, Monochome BMP and regular BMP. Our book chapter concerning graphics had discussed all of these. After converting these, they were to use their Google sites , create a new page and insert a table that would display one photo in each cell.

Well, at first I was thinking that this assignment was very elementary and probably an insult to their level of graphics related knowledge because most students in this class were digital media majors. However, I was in for a big surprise.

As the students started working on this assignment, one student called me over.  She had just converted the first photo to a Gif format. She asked me why the image did not look as good as before and seemed blurry.

Well, this gave me the opportunity to tell her and the class that the Gif format should never be used for regular photos. It should only be used for logos, thumbnails and small animated images. It had a limit of only 256 colors which were not enough to create sharp looking photos.

The next student quickly called me over and asked me why the photo she just converted to the Monochrome BMP  format was now black and white. I quickly told her and the class that this was exactly what Monochrome BMP format was supposed to do.

Still another student called me to her workstation and asked why she could not upload the two .Tiff format images to her Google site to insert into her table. This gave me the opportunity to tell the class that when you convert a .jpg to a .tiff format, the image sometimes gets corrupted and that is why it would not upload.

Of course, most of this information was covered in the chapter in our book but I guess that the information did not hit home until they actually completed the hands on assignment.

So I guess I learned a valuable lesson.  I should never overestimate what my students already know as doing so might result in a missed opportunity for my students to learn new things. I am now more confident that none of the students are going to miss questions about these topics during the midterm exam.

A few weekends ago, my youngest son’s Apple Power Macintosh G4 867 DP Mirrored drive Door Model # M8787LL/A computer crashed. The specs for this computer can be found on this site: http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g4/stats/powermac_g4_867_dp_mdd.html

He was running Mac OS Tiger version 10.4. 6. The OS somehow got corrupt and kept booting into single user mode and presenting the Darwin Command Line shell. If you have never seen it, it looks like this:

In this stage,the terminal would appear, cover the entire length of the monitor screen and it would present a black login command line window. When the user types in the login name and password, it seemed to start to boot normally but would promptly just come back to the same terminal. It seemed to be locked into an endless loop.

I thought I would be able to fix the situation quickly since I had previously installed AppleJack troubleshooting assistant software from: http://applejack.sourceforge.netwhich can be run in the Darwin command line window. Here is a screen shot of it:

I ran all of the tests shown on the screen shot. All worked correctly except it would not repair the disk successfully. At first, this led me to believe that my son’s hard drive was defective. However, since I teach Computer Programming, I know that error messages may not really mean what they state. A lot of times, a error message appears because it is the default and the program really doesn’t know what is wrong.

However, to double check, I quickly did a Google search on one of my other computers to find out which hard drive had originally shipped with the computer and found out it was an IBM 60 GB Ultra 7200rpm ATA/100 hard drive model # IC35L060AVVA07-0. I then did a search on this particular hard drive and found the shocking information found on this page about IBM hard drives: http://www.datarecovery24.co.uk/IBM%20IC35L060AVVA07-0.html Wow, what a eye opener. I guess this time, the error message was correct.

I quickly searched for a replacement hard drive and found a good alternative, I ordered a 80GB Western Digital Caviar 7200rpm UltraDMA 100/ATA drive for a very reasonable price. I used the video instructions shown on this site to install it: http://eshop.macsales.com/tech_center/index.cfm?page=Video/harddrive/g4mddata66/g4mddata66h.html I installed it as a secondary drive but made it the master drive. I left the original drive in the case and just pulled the cable off of it that connects it to the mother board.  Since the new drive is now the master drive, the original drive is now no longer recognized nor used by the system.

I decided to get my original OS OS Jaguar v10.2 G4 CD’s that came with the computer, put the cd in the DVD drive, held down the C key on the keyboard and started the install. I chose to install the original OS since it has some of my favorite apps that have been removed in Mac OS Tiger v10.4. 6. such as Iphoto and a few others. I then used Google to find instructions on how to update from this version to Tiger. I did so because there is another version of the Mac OS which is between these two and it is Mac OS X 10.3 Panther and I did not currently own it.

Found several pages that said to install Apple update fixes to Mac OS Jaguar v10.2 and that then I would be able to just skip the Mac OS X 10.3 Panther OS upgrade and just use my OS Tiger v10.4. 6 DVD to upgrade directly to it. They also stated that all I had to do was boot from my OS Tiger v10.4. 6 DVD to finish the upgrade. I followed these instructions which were unfortunately wrong.Everything crashed as soon as I tried to boot from the DVD and the computer started again in the Darwin Command line shell. The same situation happened again as in the beginning of this blog.

To make a long story short, this is what I learned about to completing the upgrade:

1. First boot from the Mac OS Jaguar v10.2 CD by holding down the C key on your keyboard. When you get the screen that states,”Welcome to the Mac OS System”. From the Installer Menu Bar, click Open Disk Utility. You will then see the Disk Utility window. Now complete the following instructions:

a. In the left pane of the Disk Utility window, click the drive you want to erase.

b. In the right pane of the Disk Utility window, click the Erase tab.

c. From the Volume Format drop-down menu, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

d. In the Name field, highlight the existing text and type in a name for the hard drive and click on ERASE. Now quit the Disk Utility and then click on CONTINUE to start your Install.

2. After it gets done with the first CD, will ask you for the second Mac OS Jaguar v10.2 CD and it will finally boot. When it finishes booting. Remove the Mac OS Jaguar v10.2 CD from your DVD drive and insert your Mac OS Tiger version 10.4.6 DVD. You do need a DVD drive to do this.

3. The Tiger OS cd will start automatically and open a Window. Now click on INSTALL. You will get a message that it will require a restart and then start the install process. Click on ok.

4. After it finishes installing, your version will now be Mac OS Tiger version 10.4.6. You should download the five upgrades for this version.

5. Here are some do’s and don’ts:

a. Do not install any third party applications yet such as Firefox. Use Safari to download the upgrades. This is because third party applications may cause a conflict with the upgrade installs.

b. Do not use the automatic Apple Update utility to do this. It does not work well and may corrupt your OS system again. For example, if it is used to upgrade Java only, the next upgrade that contains the same version of Java will corrupt your OS system when you try to install it.

c. Do not use the combo update download packages available on the Apple site. They also do not work well and may corrupt your OS system again for similar reasons listed above.

d. Just download each update individually for your computer system which is either an Intel or PowerPC based system, directly to your desktop. The last OS upgrade you need to download will be 10.4.11. When you are ready to download, just go to the Apple page located here:

Apple Support Downloads

and type in, “update 10.4.7″, to get started.

For example: the first PowerPC upgrade is located here:

http://support.apple.com/downloads/Mac_OS_X_Update_10_4_7_PPC

the first Intel based upgrade is located here:

http://support.apple.com/downloads/Mac_OS_X_Update_10_4_7_Intel

6. After downloading Mac OS X update 10.4.11, also go to this site:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/macosx_updates/x11update2006113.html

and download the X11 Update 2006 Version 1.1.3 . This is the latest update and will be the last one that you will install manually.

After you download all of them, double click on your internal hard drive and then on the Applications folder. Then open up your utility folder and double click on Disk Utility. Select your hard drive from the left when it starts and then click on REPAIR PERMISSIONS.

7. Now double click on the first install and install it. When the computer restarts, then use Disk Utility again to Repair Permissions again. Sometimes they will be right, but do not take chances, do this every time after an upgrade install.

8. Continue with this routine for each upgrade.

9. Once all the upgrades are done, now start installing third party applications if you like. Do not install Adobe Shockwave Player as I believe that one of the updates from Apple already includes it. Once you get done installing third party applications, repair the permissions again. After all the third party applications are installed, now use the Apple Update Utility, to install all Java related updates ending with Java for Mac OS, version 1.4 release 9 which can be found here: Java for Mac OS  Version 1.4,  release # 9. Also install all security related updates.

Your computer will now run efficiently and correctly. Hope this blog helps someone out there who may in the same situation.

Note: This blog was revised the day after I wrote it because I did further research and found out that the original hard drive was indeed defective.

This is an amazing video created as a keynote for the Net Generation Education Project

In a nutshell, students are asking today’s schools to stop the practice of blocking websites. They state this practice is preventing the future from being a part of their education.

I have to agree with these students 100%. I believe that educational institutions should teach students how to navigate the web safely instead of pretending that it does not exist.

Since the Internet has only been available to the public since 1994, most parents are not web savvy enough to teach their children cyber-safety skills. This means that if schools do not teach this, then students will have no choice to learn cyber-safety lessons the hard way.

As a nation, we cannot and should not let this happen. So, as these students state, lets start allowing our student’s futures into our educational institutions.