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- ZDNet Author Biography
Christopher Dawson grew up in Seattle, back in the days of pre-antitrust Microsoft, coffeeshops owned by something other than Starbucks, and really loud, inarticulate music. He escaped to the right coast in the early 90's and received a degree in Information Systems from Johns Hopkins University. While there,...- more about Christopher Dawson »
ZDNet Resources
- When will textbook publishers get a clue?
- Have you bought any textbooks recently? K-12 book prices are outlandish; college textbooks border on criminal and publishers are moving slower than molasses in January when it comes to moving towards any sort of electronic publishing model. I know, let's cut down countless trees, print on them with toxic...
- Tags: K-12, Student, Textbook, K-12 Book Price, Christopher Dawson
- Blog posts 2008-07-28
- Just what do techies really need to know?
- Most of our districts have techies in some form or another. I'm talking about the folks who provide direct hardware and software support to end users. Maybe they are just well-trained power/champion users among faculty (hopefully with a stipend of some sort, or just a deep vein of...
- Tags: K-12, Software, Skill, Teacher, Tools & Techniques, Productivity, Internet, Management, Christopher Dawson
- Blog posts 2007-11-25
- Got something to say?
- Obviously, Marc Wagner and I bring very different perspectives to this blog. His focus is higher education in a well-established, Windows-centric IT department at a major research university. I, on the other hand, am more of an in-the-trenches, K-12 sort of guy. I have a lot more...
- Tags: K-12, Blog, Blogging, Internet, Christopher Dawson
- Blog posts 2007-11-21
- Back to school? Make sure you get Office 2007
- The Kane County Chronicle is reporting that one district in this Illinois county has recommended that all high school students have a copy of Office 2007 running on their home computers before heading back to school this fall. Since the district (Batavia, Illinois, if anyone outside Kane County cares)...
- Tags: K-12, Education Technology
- Blog posts 2007-07-29
- What if I get hit by a bus?
- After reading Marc Wagner's post "Don't be fooled, Linux is not free," I was struck by a few items. First and foremost, Marc is right. Linux is not a panacea. It doesn't take away the cost of doing business and it certainly requires a degree of expertise,...
- Tags: Open Source, K-12, Education Technology
- Blog posts 2007-07-09
- The computer can do that?
- We're finally hitting the home stretch on scheduling our students for next year. I have a so-called "Master Schedule" that I'm pretty happy with and I'm loading students into it to see just how well it works. If any of my favorite students get bumped out of the...
- Tags: K-12, Education Technology
- Blog posts 2007-06-29
- Easy (sort of) and free (sort of) webcam security
- True closed-circuit security systems are pricey often unobtainable for K-12 educational institutions. However, there are many times and places where video surveillance would be both useful and appropriate. Front entrances, main offices, final exams, and standardized tests could all benefit. Enter Motion, an open source bit of...
- Tags: K-12, Education Technology
- Blog posts 2007-06-28
- Privacy is for the ignorant
- Lately, Ive increasingly had trouble understanding why people worry about privacy, particularly online. Several people responded to Teachers + MySpace = Bad Idea? and Google spyware? Fine by me… with concerns about privacy. This includes people who were worried about their personal information floating around Googles servers as...
- Tags: Legal Issues, K-12, Education Technology
- Blog posts 2007-04-30
- Bringing tech to the most rural schools
- Whats this? An actual use for iPods in the classroom? I cant say that Ive ever bought into the idea that iPods can be of any use for educational purposes. However, ars technica is reporting on an initiative in Arkansas to outfit schoolbuses with wireless Internet access,...
- Tags: K-12, Classroom Tech, Education Technology
- Blog posts 2007-04-18
- Schools roll out remediation software for standardized tests
- Schools across the country are looking for the best ways to bring children up to speed on standardized testing materials. All too often, there simply isnt enough time in class to address remediation needs for students who perform poorly. Given that the stakes on these tests are so...
- Tags: K-12, Education Technology, Classroom Tech
- Blog posts 2007-04-17
- But my printer is out of ink...
- Pink may be the new black if you believe my trendier students, but this is the new "My dog ate my homework." Since most of us require assignments to be typed, students often show up the morning a paper is due lamenting their lack of ink or their broken...
- Tags: K-12, Classroom Tech, Education Technology
- Blog posts 2007-04-15
- What did we ever do before laptops?
- Laptops are quickly joining mobile phones in the ranks of technology we cant live without. David Berlind refers to this sort of thing as "Dead Finger Tech," the pieces of technology that you could only pry from our cold dead fingers. I probably spend a fair amount more...
- Tags: Mobile, K-12, Funding, Education Technology, Classroom Tech
- Blog posts 2007-04-07
- Should I have bought those Macs?
- Five little Mac minis came in yesterday. The packages were so small and nondescript with ACI on the return address and mixed in amongst some book orders that I didnt even know theyd been delivered. I ordered them at the request of our journalism/yearbook teacher, who was a...
- Tags: Education Technology, K-12, Apple, Classroom Tech
- Blog posts 2007-02-22
- Student information systems meet Web 2.0
- Although I have had few kind words for web-based student information systems in the past, recent previews of latest generation Web 2.0-style SIS apps have certainly given me reason to reconsider. I currently administer an implementation of Chancery SMS that was dumped in my lap a few years ago....
- Tags: Education Technology, Information Systems, K-12, Student information services
- Blog posts 2007-02-19
- What are students really losing without technology?
- Negroponte wants a laptop on every kids lap, especially if theyre in a developing country. But do kids really lose anything without technology in their schools? Our accreditors think they do - they think our kids wont be competitive nationally or internationally without technological immersion. Yet comparisons...
- Tags: Education Technology, K-12, Classroom Tech
- Blog posts 2007-01-17
- K-12, Higher Ed, Apples, Oranges...
- My colleague, Marc Wagner, and I have written a couple of articles lately on thin clients and we have fairly different perspectives on them (The truth about thin clients, and Why you should actually pay for thin clients). Marcs been in this game a little longer than I have...
- Tags: Education Technology, thin client, K-12
- Blog posts 2007-01-11
- No more donations for me.
- My last monster load of dead hardware was being taken away for recycling over the holiday break, making way for the new hardware that will be arriving in a month or so. Were keeping plenty of monitors and the better PCs are being distributed around the school as either...
- Tags: computer, donation, K-12, Donations, Education Technology
- Blog posts 2006-12-28
- Will your students be using Linux in 2007?
- Im writing this post using Fedora Core 6 on my new laptop. Ive been running some flavor of Linux for a while now and I think Ive finally settled on Fedora Core since its doing such a nice job with both multimedia and office productivity tasks. Overall, it...
- Tags: Instant messaging, UNIX, OPEN SOURCE, Operating systems, IM, Linux, 64-bit, Fedora Project
- Blog posts 2006-12-13
- So about those thin clients...
- Im writing this post from my new and now somewhat infamous laptop. More importantly, Im connected to my LAN wirelessly under Linux. Whoo Hoo! After lots of fussing with ndiswrapper and SUSE this weekend, I pretty well hosed the networking portion of my SUSE install. I have...
- Tags: Terminal services, Microsoft Windows, Thin clients, Operating systems, Instant messaging, OPEN SOURCE, Edubuntu, Ubuntu, Linux, Linux Terminal Server Project
- Blog posts 2006-11-06
Additional Resources
- ZDNet blogger: working from home
- More and more people work from home every day. Not only that, more and more people don't work from their offices, or "where they're meant to work". With the Internet, intranet's and extranet's, email and unified communications with VoIP and Blackberry devices, it makes life much easier...
- Tags: Phone, Tea, Blogger, E-mail, Online Communications, Zack Whittaker
- Blog posts 2008-10-06
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