Stan's List

iPods are banned at the school in Germantown, Philadelphia, and when a 17 year old teenager brought the music player to class, a 60 year old high school teacher attempted to confiscate it and an altercation took place. The teacher was hospitalized with two broken bones in his neck. A 15 year old student was allegedly an accessory to the assault, as reported by The Age. More …

While interest in the article is driven by the involvement of the iPod, the boy’s attitude is the more common element. An appropriate penalty is essential. Any comments?

BBC News is running a story on criminal gangs targeting tech students.

As the number of criminal gangs looking to move into cyber crime expanded, it got harder to recruit skilled hackers, said Mr Day. This has led criminals to target university students all around the world. ‘Some students are being sponsored through their IT degree,’ said Mr Day. Once qualified, the graduates go to work for the criminal gangs. As well as the direct route of targeting students, some organised crime gangs were trading on the glamour surrounding the ‘hacker’ label to help them recruit impressionable youngsters… More …

ZDNet speculates that Boot Camp may be Apple’s ace in the hole with regard to education. “What could defend Apple’s education turf? Boot Camp, which allows you to boot Windows XP on an Intel-based Mac. With one box and two operating systems folks like Dawson could pick and choose and OS for their clients. Educators would still have to ponder whether it made sense from a budget perspective to get a Windows license, but it is an option. Of course, it wouldn’t ease the pain for those educators that still love OS 9.” More …

Macworld UK reports that Microsoft Office alternative, OpenOffice, will ship in a native version for OS X next month. ‘OpenOffice.org is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute. Until now the software has required that users install the X11 Window System, a graphical interface that lets Unix-based applications work on Macs. The new version of the software won’t require X11, and will work just like any other OS X-native application.” More ….

It has been a while since our last look at OpenOffice. X11 has not been updated, and there apparently no request that there need be. According to Technovia, OpenOffice that has been improved. OpenOffice has always been a full featured office suite. I wonder if the author would be more pleased with iWorks if there was a spreadsheet program?

Teaching 2.0 has started a discussion on whether to to install “applications as part of a standard image or separately from the OS through Apple Remote Desktop.” NetRestore is offered as an alternative. More …

Join the discussion?

Apple released an iMac for education for $899 last week. Wednesday, individuals could not longer purchase the $899 “stripper” iMac. It remains on the store for educational institutions. It is speculated this could be due to a need to fill an extremely high demand in the educational institution channel or possibly because it was significantly cannibalizing better equipped iMacs (with much more value) starting at $1199 from the education store.

Maine Signs Off on $41M Deal With Apple Computer to Extend Laptop Program for Another 4 Years” Which will provide new laptop computers to more than 30,000 seventh- and eighth-graders and their teachers, More …

The One Laptop per Child association and its chairman, MIT Media Labs’s Nicholas Negroponte, unvelied a working model of their $100 laptop at the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange (MITX) show, and the little laptop that might was a hit. It’s got a version of Fedora Linux, is rugged, and each unit will work as part of a wireless mesh automatically. More …

In a joint press release issued today, Apple and Pearson Education announced that Pearson will acquire Apple’s PowerSchool Division. The division produces powerful and award-winning web-based solutions that provide K-12 administrators, teachers, students and parents with secure, up-to-the-minute information on student performance including grades, homework and attendance. More …