Alabama Supercomputer Authority

The Alabama Supercomputer Authority network engineers will be attending Networkers, Cisco Systems' annual user conference, an intense 4 day training program that meets the highest standards of quality, value, and relevance in network management. Donnie Moss, James Duncan, Charles Wright, Rick Bagwell and Jeff Horton are Cisco Certified Network Professionals (CCNP) and are working toward the next level of Cisco Certification. Joseph Caston has completed 3 of the 4 CCNP certification tests. Harold Townsend is a Cisco Certified Network Administrator (CCNA) and is working toward his CCNP. Participation in this event provides our engineers with the knowledge needed to stay informed, to stay current, and to move our network, the Alabama Research and Education Network (AREN) forward. If you ever need to call our help desk for support, please know that you are getting answers from highly skilled engineers. We are most fortunate to have them on our team.

Reading about Technology

TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) has launched its "Taking TCO to the Classroom" project to provide school leaders with tools to help them estimate the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) invovled when they build a network of computers and wire their classrooms to the Internet. This is available online and includes questionnaires that define key educational technology expenses. The website also provides access to a wealth of resources related to planning for computer networks and the costs associated with maintenance, training, replacement, etc. http://www.classroomtco.org

Education and the Internet

SREB RESOURCES FOR MIDDLE SCHOOL This web pages links to bookmarks that list websites where middle school educators can find standards-based language arts, math, and social studies lessons and resources, assessment instruments, or topics to enhance teaching practices. There are also annotated bibliographies for language arts, math, science, and social studies resourcs for K-12 teachers and students. New websites are evaluated and added frequently, and links are checked regularly. http://www.evalutech.sreb.org/InstResources/index.asp

DIGITAL HISTORY This website was designed and developed to support the teaching of American History in K-12 schools and colleges and is supported by the Department of History and the College of Education at the University of Houston. Users may pose qustions to professional historians via the Ask the HyperHistorian feature. http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu

PDFCreator is a free tool to create PDFs easily from nearly any application. With the PDFCreator Printer driver you turn any program into a PDF-machine. Download this free application from http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator. To use it, simply open a Word, Powerpoint, StarCalc, etc. document and "print" it. The default printer is now PDFCreator (you probably want to change the default printer back to the printer you normally use). When you try to print, you will have a few minutes where you think nothing is happening. WAIT!! A window will open that asks you if you want to save this document or send it as an email or a few other options. Mark save and indicate where you want the document saved. You will then have a pdf document that can be read with Adobe Acrobat Reader, another free download. This is a great way to protect your work before sharing it with others or posting it to a website.

PLANET ESME is a great site for children's books! Are you a first-year teacher, or a veteran? Are you a school librarian? Do you like to use themes in your teaching? Do you like to read aloud? Are you a parent? Are you a book lover? Are you a fun lover? This site exists with the goal of getting great children's books into the hands of great children.

HAPPY 4TH OF JULY (http://www.aristotle.net/july4th/index.html)! This site provides great resources to help you celebrate your patriotism on a very American holiday--Independence Day. You can Create Your Own Fireworks, test your knowledge of United States history, or play patriotic themed games in the The Fourth 4 Kids section. The Fourth 4 Kids section includes a Patriotic Crossword Puzzle; an All-American Word Search; and a U.S. Word Unscramble. There is also a section entitled What Makes America Great? that allows students to submit their ideas on what makes our country great. Students can also receive a Patriot Certificate upon completion of all the activities. Other sites to help you celebrate:

4th of July--Independence Day (http://www.usacitylink.com/usa)
Independence Day on the Net (http://holidays.net/independence)
Today in History (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/jul04.html)

HURRICANES! The Atlantic hurricane season is from June 1-November 30, 2003. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) maintains a continuous watch on tropical cyclones during the hurricane season; prepares and issues forecasts, watches, and warnings; and, provides text advisories and graphical products. Eduhound has compiled some sites that can help you understand this force of nature:

CNN.com Special Report: Hurricane Season http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/hurricanes/
CNN.com Student News: Hurricane Lessons http://fyi.cnn.com/2002/fyi/lesson.plans/05/29/hurricane.overview/index.html
USAToday.com: Hurricanes http://www.usatoday.com/weather/hurricane/whur0.htm
Miami Museum of Science-Hurricane Education http://www.miamisci.org/hurricane/hurricane0.html

TEMPLATES provide pre-designed layouts for your presentations. We all know about the designs we receive in our Microsoft products, but did you know there are others? The Microsoft Template Gallery has additional templates for students and teachers. Eduhound has identified some other options, some for free and some for a small fee:

Hewlett-Packard-Office Templates (http://www.hp.com/sbso/productivity/office/index.html)
School Web Page Templates (http://www.massnetworks.org/resources/sun/schools/template/Template-OV.html)
WebQuest Design Templates (http://webquest.sdsu.edu/designpatterns/all.htm)

News You Can Use

COMPUTER TRAINING TUTORIALS This website provides explanations, tutorials, and tips about computers and the web. The links are grouped by subject heading: Hardware, Software, Internet, Email, and the Web. http://www.ckls.org/~crippel/computerlab/tutorials

ACCESS CHILDREN'S BOOKS ONLINE The International Children's Digital Library (ICDL) is a digital library of international children's books. The collection's focus is on identifying materials that help children understand the world around them. It is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. http://www.icdlbooks.org

NEWS FOR EDUCATORS ONLINE NOW! Each month, the writers at NEON take a look at one of the National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers (NETS) at http://cnets.iste.org/teachers/t_stands.html and identify resources for helping teachers meet those standards. This month, the focus is on Evaluation and Assessment. The Related Resource Sites are:

Assessment & Rubric Information http://school.discovery.com/schrockguide/assess.html
From Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators, this web page includes links to examples of and information on Student Web Page Rubrics, Subject-Specific and General Rubrics, and Electronic Portfolios.

Assessment: Information Technologies in the K-12 Curriculum http://www.iste.org/research/roadahead/assess.cfm
Current research is presented and analyzed from an information-technologies point of view. The focus is on student assessment in instructional settings where information technologies are woven into the everyday curriculum.

U.S. Department of Education Evaluation & Assessment http://www.ed.gov/Technology/evaluation.html
Provides background information and evaluation and assessment research from the US Office of Educational Technology:

Portfolios http://transition.alaska.edu/www/portfolios.html
This set of web pages describes and discusses the use of technology to support alternative assessment from a number of perspectives. Developed and maintained by Dr. Helen Barrett, Assistant Professor, Educational Technology, School of Education, University of Alaska Anchorage.

The Consortium of School Networking (CoSN) continues to urge E-Rate supporters to contact their representatives in Congress and tell them how critical E-Rate discounts are. Be sure to include the amount of E-Rate discounts that your institution has received since its inception, what services your institution has been able to purchase through E-Rate discounts, and the educational opportunities (e.g. distance learning courses, professional development, parental involvement, etc.) that the E-Rate has made possible. The CoSN web site has lots of information you can use to make your case, including a template letter that can be used to contact Congress at http://news.techlearning.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eMWK0FKlBC0D7D0Bz810Au