Alvin's Educational Technology Blog

The Moving Forward wiki caught my attention today.  As I looked through the list of 21st century skills, I noticed several absent items as compared to lists from just one or two years ago.

There is no mention of productivity tools.  There is usually an emphasis on learning to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint in most sets of 21st century skills.  There is a bullet for computerized presentation skills, but I think the lists is referring more to the skill of presenting effectively and not the skill of using PowerPoint.  This is a great step forward.  It shows we are moving from an emphasis on learning to use specific programs to an environment where programs are viewed as tools to accomplish grander things.

The new ISTE NETS for Students has a similar ring.

1. Creativity and Innovation
2. Communication and Collaboration
3. Research and Information Fluency
4. Critical Thinking, Problem-Solving & Decision-Making
5. Digital Citizenship
6. Technology Operations and Concepts

This is an exciting list if you are a teacher.  Look at that first item!  Our students must be creative and innovation.  This sounds like the post I had a couple of days ago.  The ISTE set looks a lot like the original 21st century skills I linked to.

The Ohio Academic Content Standards for Technology will have to be updated to reflect these new ISTE standards, but that may take years.  As educators we need to focus on how we can begin to implement these standards now.  Each year our young students lose is much more than a year in the life of a life-long-learning adult.

I have eased into Vista over the last couple of months.  I had too many critical programs on my old system to risk an upgrade.  I had my data backed up, but I could not risk the chance of some of my applications would not be able to handle the upgrade.

I did a fresh install on a machine with 2 GB of RAM.  I moved my good video card over with both of my monitors.  So far I have had very few problems, but there is one thing I can’t solve.  I can’t get VNC to wake my machine up if the screen is locked.  I run VNC and Hamachi on all my computers.  The free version of RealVNC (my favorite flavor) isn’t compatible with Vista.  I tried Ultr@VNC and it worked until my password protected screen saver kicked in.  Once that happens, there is no response from Vista.  I don’t have hibernate turned on, but the screen password seems to kick the machine into a different video mode that cuts the VNC connection.

There are some huge positives in my short Vista experience.  I love the Start menu.  I click the Windows-Key and a letter or two of the program I want to start and Vista finds it.  It does the same with documents.  Actually, it works with anything.

I do a lot of file renaming.  F2 still does the trick, but Vista doesn’t automatically highlight the file extension.  If I rename a file, the OS assumes I still want those last three letters to remain the same.  It takes an extra click to highlight the extension to change it (which I rarely do).  This is more efficient for me about 99.44% of the time.

I use the Sidebar with a few widgets.  I like the quick loading calendar that pops up with Windows-Space Bar.

The snipping tool is great for quick screen captures. 

The user directories are much better.  Everything is in a folder called “users” instead of “documents and settings” (what a dumb name).  All the “my” prefixes are gone too.  Now it’s “Documents”, “Pictures” and “Videos” instead of “My Documents”, “My Pictures” and “My Videos”.  Vista also included a “Downloads” folder.  This is something I have manually created on all my computers for years.  Where else would anyone store downloaded programs?  Finally it is built in and pre-programmed to communicate with applications that download files.

The “User Access Control” isn’t nearly as bad as the Apple commercial would have you believe.  I get beeped once a day at most.  As I get my machine tweaked, I will hardly see it at all.