I'm co-teaching the journalism/yearbook class this year. My part of the class focuses on graphic design and page layout. When I was studying design I had a grumpy old teacher who learned his craft from some of the original Bauhaus people in Chicago. Of course, all modern design work is done on computers but he didn't let us touch a computer for the entire first semester. Instead we practiced all the classic techniques of cutting with X-Acto knives, pasting things onto poster board, hand lettering, drawing logos, etc.

One of the most useful assignments for me was a cut/paste exercise designed to teach us about the grid system. I decided that before I would let the class start designing on computers I would at least make them spend one day doing some real, physical cutting and pasting. I
gave a short demonstration and showed them a video about old-school graphic design technique. Then I gave them poster board, pencils, T squares, glue sticks, cutting tools, and old magazines. The assignment was to draw a grid then cut out images and text from the magazines to paste into the grid.

The idea is to show students first hand how using a grid for layout makes a composition more coherent and pleasing to the eye/brain. They did some great work and I think the hands-on exercise got them much more engaged in thinking about the design process that jumping straight to the computer would have. Of course, they still wanted to listen to music on their laptops while they worked.

Our Lower School science teacher recently asked me to help her find a good system for creating a field guide for our campus. Our school is located in a semi-rural area on about 10.5 acres. There are lots of trees, flowers, bugs, and woodland creatures. I did some research and found a great site called iNaturalist. The have good IOS and Android apps that allow the students to roam around campus and take pictures of interesting flora/fauna. Once they take a photo they can add some field notes and save their observation. The observations are then uploaded to the iNaturalist site where other members of the community can comment and help make identifications.

The students used iPads from our cart and had a great time. One thing I learned from the first group was to spend time emphasizing that 'less is more'. The students tended to take a lot of pictures of the same things. With our second group we asked them to limit their observations and spend more time writing detailed notes.

I created this inventory management system because I couldn't find one with features specific to schools and without a lot of other unnecessary features cluttering up the UI.

The code is on Github here:

https://github.com/rabbitfighter/inventory

I set up a demo system on my personal website so people can try it out and see if it would work for them.

http://www.imipolex.org/inventory/

username: admin
password: admin

I ordered new Chromebooks for our 3rd and 4th grade classrooms this summer. The Chromebooks are going to stay in the classrooms so I needed to find a good storage and charging option. This is what I ended up with.

Copernicus Tech Tubs:
http://www.amazon.com/Copernicus-School-Classroom-Office-Version/dp/B00GFTAA6E/

Blue Lounge Cable Drops:
http://www.amazon.com/Bluelounge-Design-CableDrop-Management-System/dp/B004K2YBQI/

Self Adhesive Velcro (for power bricks):
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FQ937NM

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has published a report that attempts to identify key skills students need to learn now in order to be well prepared when they enter the workforce. The report was sponsored by Google and is based on polling of business leaders and students.

It's no surprise to me that the skills they recommend are communication, collaboration, and problem solving. It is difficult to predict what specific skills will be useful in twenty years but it's a safe bet that these general skills will prove useful in helping people adapt. I think there is a basic assumption embedded in this list of skills that students need to be encouraged to become adaptable, lifelong learners.

My main takeaway from the report is this sentence:

"Technology is changing teaching, but education systems are keeping up with the transformation rather than leading it."

While I'm configuring new computers and installing new networking equipment this summer I'm going to be thinking about how my school can lead transformation instead of just 'keeping up'.

I taught a beginning Python programming class this Spring using the Codecademy intro to Python curriculum (http://www.codecademy.com/en/tracks/python). The class went well and the students seemed to enjoy it. Here are a few things I would do differently next time though:

1. The codecademy curriculum is self-guided and each student can work at his/her own pace. However, I noticed some key concepts that most students had trouble with. I would give short presentations on the following concepts so that I could be sure everybody understood them and thus avoid frustration. It would be fun to do some 'unplugged' activities (a set of activities that teach CS concepts through physical action--http://csunplugged.org/) to help kids understand these ideas.

Variables -- Python is dynamically typed (variable types do not need to be stated when creating the variable). I don't think codecademy does a very good job of explaining this and I noticed a lot of confusion.

Functions -- Students didn't seem to really learn what a function is and what it is good for simply by reading the text.

Lists -- Also not well/thoroughly explained.

2. I would stop at the 'Advanced Topics in Python' unit and have the students work on real, hands-on projects instead. This could include projects with programming raspberry pi microcomputers, playing around with Sonic Pi (http://sonic-pi.net/), or maybe writing a simple game using something like pygame (http://www.pygame.org/).

3. It might be a good idea to introduce the students to Monty Python's Flying Circus via some curated youtube clips. My class was 7th and 8th graders most of whom have never seen Monty Python. The examples and activities use a lot of references to Monty Python sketches (this is a Python tradition) so it would be helpful for the students to have some idea of where the stuff is coming from.

This OS X command line tool is very handy. Every time I need it though I have to google it to remember what it's called. So, I'm making a blog post to remind myself. Hopefully it will be useful to others who happen across this post.

> sips -Z 200 *.jpg

The -Z tells to utility to maintain aspect ratio
The 200 can be changed to any maximum height/width (in pixels)
The *.jpg tells the utility to resize all jpg files in the current directory. This can be changed to *.png, *.gif, etc.

You can also change the format of a folder of images by running the following command:

> for i in *.jpg; do sips -s format png $i --out $i.png;done

This would convert all jpg images to png.