My New Favorite Commercial of All Time

When I was a teacher I used to teach a unit on advertising techniques and persuasive language. If I still taught that unit today, I would absolutely show the video below. I love it. It points out the absurdity of advertisements that attempt to connect a product to the attractiveness of the person in the ad (a form of the advertising technique often called "transfer").

The first time I saw this video, I think I laughed so hard that I almost sprayed the water I was drinking across the room.



(I can't see the video.)

P.S. Here's a bonus commercial...

A Price Too High

Saturday we spent the weekend at Eastern Kentucky University where my younger daughter competed with the rest of her team in the state Odyssey of the Mind competition (By the way, if you click that link, you can see my wife dressed in black in the last photo on the page. She's got her back turned to the camera with both her hands raised.). They did great, winning first place (for a second year in a row!), meaning they'll get to compete in the world finals at Michigan State University at the end of May.

But I'm not here today to talk about them, as proud of them as I am. I'm here today to talk about one of their competitors Saturday.

My daughter's team was the third team to do their performance Saturday morning, and we got there early enough that we were able to see the two teams before them perform. And the team that was right before them was the elementary school at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. While this second team was getting ready to perform, we struck up a conversation with the mother of one of the children. I asked her what county Fort Campbell was in, and she smiled and informed me of what I should already have known--Fort Campbell is a military base, and it's not technically in ANY county in Kentucky. It's federal land, and the schools are run by the military, not the state of Kentucky.

Either Lisa or I asked her what the mood was like in Fort Campbell with two wars going on, and she told us that things were okay now, but everyone was dreading the summer and fall. When we asked why, she informed us that the ENTIRE BASE was being deployed to Afghanistan over the next six months in four waves as part of the "surge" in troops meant to stabilize the country.

"The ENTIRE base?" I asked her.

"Yeah," she said. "There'll be no soldiers left on the base save for a few administrators and a skeleton crew. It's the first time they've ever done this." She paused before saying, "It's going to be mostly a lot of women and children."

And that got me thinking. During World War II, the entire American population made HUGE sacrifices. In 2010, though, if you're not the family of a soldier, the two wars that we're fighting don't really impact you much. About all we can get upset about is gas going up to $3 a gallon.

But for these military familes, they are paying a tremendous price. My heart just broke for the little kids who a few minutes later rolled their scenery into the middle of the gym floor and began their performance about a skunk and a wolf and a bear. In just a few months their fathers (and yes, I know, some of their mothers, too) would leave them for more than a year, and maybe some of them wouldn't come back at all. They were paying a high price, all right. Too high, if you ask me.

I am so tremendously grateful to them and to their parents for what they're doing for our country. And I'm so, so sad that they're having to do it.

Maybe I should have waited and made this post on Memorial Day or Veteran's Day, but the truth is I don't feel things on cue. And I'm terrible at stirring up feelings in myself on those days. I feel things when I feel them. And today, I feel proud and honored to have sat behind this woman and to have watched her child Saturday morning. I will think of them and pray for them when I hear on the nightly news about the buildup of troops in Afghanistan. I wish them well.

My Daughter Thinks I'm Crazy

Sunday afternoon I was helping my younger daughter study for a couple of tests she had coming up this week. At first I was helping her with her social studies, and then I helped her with her science. Over the course of the afternoon, every time she said the word "science" I'd interrupt her. The conversation would go something like this:

HER: Well, we're almost finished with social studies, but we still have to study for science."

ME: SCIENCE!

HER: Uh, okay. Anyway, my science project--

ME: SCIENCE!

HER: ...yeah...my project is due in two weeks, but we have a science test--

ME: SCIENCE!

After maybe thirteen or fourteen more times of this happening, my daughter finally said, "Dad, what are you DOING?" Her raised eyebrows and the tone of her voice let me know that she thought I might seriously have lost it.

I smiled at her. "Come on," I said as I directed her to the office. "I'll show you." I got online on youtube and showed her the video below.

I did this in an attempt to show her that I wasn't crazy, that I was just quoting a line from a song. However, I think my attempt backfired because once the song was over she didn't say anything for a long time, and then she said, "Well, that was weird. Can we get back to studying for my science now?"

"SCI--" I began.

"DON'T!" she said as she pointed at me. "Don't do that again..."



(I can't see the video.)

Jargon

There is a huge difference between the "business world" and the "education world." In my job as technology director for a school district, I am often talked at by salesmen attempting to get me to purchase some piece of technology or some online service. These salesmen tend to break down into one of two kinds: 1) former educators now working as salesmen, or 2) pure salesmen who have been in the "business" world all along.

I can usually spot which of the two camps any salesman falls into, and it usually has to do with which type of jargon the saleman uses. Former educators use EDUCATION jargon ("This software takes your core curriculum and your aligned standards and uses a formative assessment to map back to these standards so that your professional learning communities can better plan a response to intervention!") while salesmen with a business background use BUSINESS jargon ("Our software company is well positioned to provide a 21st century virtual, embraced paradigm!"). I'll be honest, in both cases, I don't understand what the salesmen are saying about half the time. And half the time, I don't think they do, either.

However, if you want to SOUND like one of these salesmen, I have a couple of websites for you.

Website Number One will generate some meaningless edu-garble that you can throw into any conversation with educators. You can complete the sentence, "To be successful today, educators need to ____________." Will the generator throw out "assess mission-critical curriculum" or "innovate compelling functionalities?" It doesn't matter. Either way you'll sound super smart and be saying nothing!

Website Number Two will generate similarly meaningless business-garble. You can complete sentences like "The secret of our company's success is the ______________." Hit the button, and you might get "harmonized, focused mindset" as the answer, or maybe "tactical, integrated synergy." It's all blah blah blah any way you look at it.

KySTE 2010

I promise this is my LAST post about last week's Kentucky Society for Technology in Education conference in Louisville. I hadn't actually planned to make THIS post, but another member of KySTE's executive committee put the below video together, and I felt like I just HAD to share it.

The video does a tremendous job of summarizing in five minutes what went on in my week last week. On one hand, that's really cool. On the other hand, it's kind of depressing to have your whole week summed up in five minutes.

I also noticed this is the THIRD POST IN A ROW that featured a YouTube video. I promise that my next post will NOT be about a YouTube video.



(I can't see the video.)

How I Spent My Nights in Louisville

As I've mentioned before, I spent last Monday through Friday in Louisville at the Galt House at an educational technology conference. My original plan was that when I got back to my hotel room in the evenings I would get on the Internet and check my email and do whatever work I could remotely so that I wouldn't be behind when I came back to work. However, the wireless network at the Galt House was not prepared for hundreds of techy geeks to be on their laptops, all presumably trying to do the same thing I was attempting to do. As a result, the wireless network CRAWLED...if I could connect at all.

So what did I do to pass the time? I took out five blank sheets of paper and drew the keys of a piano on them, and then I fired up a program on my laptop called Finale Notepad. It used to be* a free music composition program, and it had the benefit of allowing the composer to export as a MIDI file whatever music he/she composed in the program.

I (poorly) self-taught myself to play the piano when I was in high school, and I also dabbled in composing music. But back then I never took the time to write down ANYTHING that I composed musically. I just memorized it and went on with it. Occasionally I'd pull out a cassette recorder and tape what I was playing, and that was my way of documenting it. As a result, I have a couple of tapes of music to this day, but when I play those tapes I'm amazed to realize I no longer know how to play about half of the pieces.

So during the evenings last week I put into Finale Notepad the first piece of music that I ever composed. I was 15 when I wrote the piece that is in the YouTube video below. At the time it was only the piano part. I added the other parts in my head over the years as I'd hum the piece while fixing dinner or painting a room or mowing the yard. So I finally had the time last week to put it down "on paper." And the computer "played" it for me. It doesn't exactly sound like real instruments, but hey! What are you wanting from a (used to be*) free program!

(I can't see the video.)

*Beginning with Finale Notepad 2009, the Finale company began charging a nominal $10 fee for the Notepad program.

Select Band

Okay, this post is mostly for out of town family...

On Saturday, our older daughter participated in the Northern Kentucky Select Middle School band concert at Greaves Hall on the campus of Northern Kentucky University. The select band is made up of students from 44 schools in several counties of Northern Kentucky. Students had to audition for the band, and our older daughter was delighted that she was selected.

Several family members from out of town said they would LIKE to come up and see the concert but just couldn't swing it, so we filmed the concert, which was made up of five separate pieces, and here are the first two.

(I can't see the video.)

The Good News about Technology in Kentucky

Holy Cow--This is what you get when someone tells me to man an Information booth and no one has any questions--one of the longest posts I've ever written...


As I've mentioned in several of the last few posts and tweets I've made, I've spent this entire week in Louisville at the Kentucky Society for Technology in Education conference. While I was sitting in on a session today, something occurred to me that I've thought about often in the past, but never written about on this blog. It's a good news story, one that I think it's about time more Kentucky tax payers knew about, so I'm making it my mission tonight to write about it.

It's easy for people to knock "Big Government" and to complain about the many ways that government can waste your money. And from $500 hammers to "pork" spending stuck into health care legislation to Bridges to Nowhere, the government does supply plenty of easy targets. But in Kentucky, at least, there's one place where "big government" actually saves money, and that is in education technology spending.

When it comes to education technology spending, Kentucky does something that almost no other state in the union does: it standardizes on just a few models. Rather than the free for all that happens in most of the other states, the 174 school districts in Kentucky are REQUIRED by statute to purchase technology off of state approved bid lists. Thus, every school district in Kentucky that buys a computer buys either a Dell, HP, Lenovo, or Apple machine. You won't walk into (or at least, you SHOULDN'T walk into) a public school classroom anywhere in the state of Kentucky and find a Gateway computer or an eMachines computer. And more than that, we aren't just required to purchase from those makers--we're required to purchase specific models of products from those manufacturers.

At first blush, I guess, maybe that sounds like a BAD thing. This is America, after all, the land of the FREE! No one likes to be REQUIRED to do anything. It's unAmerican. And there are people out there who complain about the requirement. "Why should I pay state prices for that Dell computer," someone might ask, "when I can get this other Dell computer that looks just like it for $100 less at Wal-Mart?" And computers aren't even where the biggest price differential appears. In networking equipment, it's much worse. Someone who doesn't know much about computer networking (and I'll admit that I'm an educator first and a techy second, so I don't know a WHOLE lot about networking) might wonder why that 24 port switch (a device that you plug all of the computers in a building into to give them Internet access) on the state contract is $2,000 when there's a 24 port switch from another manufaturer online for $300. Is this another $500 hammer?

But there's more to this story than just the initial purchase price. Kentucky's usage of standardization has saved the Kentucky Department of Education, individual school districts, and ultimately, we Kentuckians, literally millions of dollars. Let me tell you how standardization is saving the state money:

1. The Purchase Price Savings. It may not seem like it with that network switch I described above (I'll get back to that in a moment), but standardizing allows the state to drive down costs. My school district has 2,300 students. We spend somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 a year on desktop and laptop machines. That's quite a bit more than--say--the average individual consumer spends on computers, but in the grand scheme of things, we're a little fish in the sea. Dell or HP or Apple or Lenovo isn't very motivated to give us much of a break on prices for computers compared to say--Jefferson County Schools in Louisville--which has an enrollment of almost 100,000 and which spends I'm not sure how much on computers a year, probably something like seventy kajillion dollars. Dell and HP and Apple and Lenovo are VERY interested in making sure they provide the most competitive price to Jefferson County Schools.

But in Kentucky, it's not just Jefferson County Schools that get special treatment. By combining Jefferson County Schools with Fayette County Schools with Kenton County Schools with my school district and with every public school district in the state, Kentucky becomes a behemoth of a buyer, and those computer makers are VERY, VERY, VERY motivated to provide the lowest price possible. As a result, Kentucky often gets products that are just a few dollars above cost, and occasionally even below cost for the manufacturer who would rather lose a few dollars per machine on tens of thousands of sales rather than allow its competitor to make those sales.

2) The Reliability. But the purchase price isn't the only benefit of the state contract, and it isn't the only way that the state saves money. Another benefit of standardization is increased reliability. This comes about because the state has something which many school districts (including my own) do not--people who work there with the knowledge and expertise to understand the needs of enterprise level technology. This takes us back to that $300 switch I mentioned earlier. Paying $300 for a switch instead of $2,000 seems like a great idea...until that switch a) breaks because it's cheaply made or b) doesn't provide the speed necessary for teachers and students to do the things they need to do or c) can't be managed to allow district staff to do things like limit how much of the network is used for gaming or Facebook so that teachers and students can get out on the Internet to the sites where they're going to really learn something.

And that Dell computer at Wal-Mart might really be $100 cheaper than the similar looking Dell computer on the state contract, but has anyone considered that the state contract has a next day, onsite, 3 year warranty, whereas that Wal-Mart computer has a 90 day mail in warranty? And that Wal-Mart computer is consumer grade instead of commercial grade, made from bottom to top cover with flimsier parts than what are in that Kentucky education system?

I can speak to this one personally. Until about five years ago there was a state contract for ink jet printers. Everyone complained that ink jet printers had gotten so cheap that there really wasn't a need for a state contract anymore. Why pay $149 for a printer on the contract when there were printers being sold in department stores for $50? Heck, there were computer manufacturers GIVING printers away when a computer was purchased.

The state agreed, and released districts to purchase what they wanted. One school in my district decided that it was going to purchase a whole bunch of $50 HP printer/scanner/copiers. They all worked great..for about three months. And then I started getting complaints, almost every day and always at least once a week, that the printers stopped feeding paper. They ended up trashing the majority of them at the end of the year.

I'm not saying that the state SHOULDN'T have dropped printers from the state contract. They should have. They WERE too inexpensive to justify all of the added expense of testing the products on the state level. After all, there isn't a state price contract for pencils, either. Just too cheap to justify the expense of standardizing. All I'm saying is that during that two month time period when all of those printers died at once, I really wished someone at the state level had tested the printer and looked at the specs regarding monthly usage, ink capacity, and so on.

3) A Community of Users. The last really big positive with standardization, as I see it, I don't think was an intentional thing on the part of the state. I think it actually is a byproduct. But it's still pretty cool, and in the end it's another way to save money. Since everyone in the state has similar products in their school districts, we all share an understanding of the technology that we're each working with...because we're all working with pretty much the same technology. Because we live outside of my school district, my children go to a different district from where I work, and when I walk into a classroom in that district, I can tell you exactly how old the equipment in that room is. The same when I go to other districts in the state for trainings. That's a Dell Optiplex GX260, I'll say to myself. That thing is seven years old, and probably by now as slow as Christmas. If that thing is being used for anything other than word processing, the user is probably pretty frustrated.

And because we all use the same stuff, we are all a resource to each other. I belong to an email group and not a day goes by that someone doesn't post a question like, "Okay, I have an Enterasys switch as my core router, and I'm having an issue with it dropping packets mysteriously. Anyone have any idea why that's happening?" Within just a few minutes people from another district have emailed replies, and usually someone is able to help.

And we help in other ways as well. A few years ago one of my routers died (Routers are basically like traffic cops--they make sure than the information from the network gets sent to the right place. When you type in google.com, it's a router that makes sure that Google's homepage makes it to YOUR computer and not your neighbor's). It was an old router, a VERY old router, and it occurred to me that--since Kentucky has always had standards--there was probably a district nearby that had retired the exact same piece of equipment and would be willing to loan it to me. I sent out an email and in 30 minutes had gotten a reply from a district that was about 40 minutes away that it had five they would GIVE me if I'd come get them. I did so, and the school that was being serviced by the router ended up being down for a couple of hours rather than days.

It's a savings for the state in so many ways. It's really a big deal. So the next time you complain about government spending out of control, keep in mind that at least one part of the Kentucky Department of Education has gotten it right. The Office of Educational Technology has long been a good steward of the taxpayer's money.

Downtown Louisville

I've been in downtown Louisville since Monday for the Kentucky Society for Technology in Education annual conference. The conference was yesterday, today, and tomorrow, but I'm an officer in the organization so I came down early to help get everything ready.

But I'm not here today to talk about KySTE. I'm here to talk about downtown Louisville. I have to say this: As a potential long weekend getaway, I LOVE this place!

What really impresses me about downtown Louisville is how everything is compacted into one place. I'm staying at the Galt House, and within walking distance of the hotel is the Louisville Slugger museum, the science center, 4th Street Live, and a multitude of other touristy type stuff. Sure, Churchill Downs, The Lousville Zoo, and Kentucky Kingdom are outside of downtown, but there is so much to do within walking distance of the major hotels in the downtown area to keep people satisfied.

There's nothing in Louisville that Cincinnati doesn't have, too, but it's spread out all over the Greater Cincinnati area.

I've always thought of Louisville as a sort of big city wannabe. I think I'm going to have to rethink that position.

Hide!

I tell this story at the risk of perhaps losing some Facebook "friends"...

I really enjoy Facebook. Social networking is great. And I currently (Again, this was BEFORE I posted this blog entry) have 279 friends, that can be generally broken into five groups: 1) Family, 2) co-workers, 3) former students, 4) former classmates, and 5) actual friends (Ironically enough, this is by far the smallest group). And I really appreciate the opportunity to connect with all of them. Honest. For real.

But I noticed something last night. I was scrolling down through the "Most Recent News" on my Facebook page and I caught myself saying to myself, "Not interested about THAT person. Don't care what quiz SHE just took. HE only talks about himself. SHE's obsessed with politics. Don't even really remember who THAT person is! " And on and on. Eventually it occurred to me that there were only maybe 1 in 10 status updates that I really cared about, and I was missing some of them as I quickly scrolled past all of the others.

So what did I do? I thought about unfriending a bunch of people, but I didn't really want to do that. After all, I DO care about most of these people and I do want to keep up with them, just on MY schedule, not on theirs. So I've been going through my Facebook page and "hiding" the people that I would otherwise have ignored anyway. Is that mean? I don't know. Maybe it's not mean to do it. Maybe it's mean to make this blog post telling people that I did it. But hey, I'm just being honest here.

A friend of mine suggested that I could have created separate groups within Facebook for each of the five groups I mentioned above, and maybe one day I will do that. For now, though, that just seems like too much work.

I am enjoying Facebook more now.

Drumming up Business

This morning I was driving into downtown Louisville during rush hour (I was headed to the Galt House for the KySTE 2010 Technology Conference). About two miles from the river traffic came to a standstill, and I found myself sitting on the interstate staring at the billboard to the right. Immediately two things struck me:

1) I think these lawyers are trying to drum up business. Seems to me that the headline of the billboard is a not so subtle prodding for people in the cars to get aggressive in their driving. Maybe that way those drivers will get into an accident and need to call Winters and Yonker.

2) I feel sorry for the guy on the left. I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but doesn't it cost EXTRA to have additional items on a billboard besides just the normal rectangle shape? Whose idea was it to extend the head shots of the two attorneys above the top of the billboard? All that does is really emphasize the fact that Mr. Winters is bald. If they HADN'T paid the extra money to do that, then the top of each attorney's head would have been cut off, and it would have looked like both of them had a full head of hair.

I bet it was Yonkers' idea. He wanted that big, wavy head of hair of his to stand out.

On a final note, before anyone worries, no I did NOT take the photo above. I pulled it off of the Courier Journal Website. There is an article on the website about the two attorneys, and apparently they're a little on the sleazy side. You can read about it here.

Big Weekend for the Kids...and the Arts

It was a big weekend for my two girls...and the arts!

First, on Saturday, we spent the entire day at my younger daughter's Odyssey of the Mind competition. She and her team did an OUTSTANDING job presenting their solution to the "Nature Trailer" problem. She was the narrator in the performance, and she played the part of a wise, old sapling telling the story that was their solution to a younger tree.

There are multiple problems in Odyssey of the Mind competitions, and multiple grade levels (elementary, middle, and high school). My daughter's team won first prize in the elementary grade level for their problem, which means they get to move on to the state competition in three weeks. More importantly, though, they won the Ranatra Fusca award, which is given to the overall most creative solution to a problem at all grade levels. They were told over and over again by more experienced Odyssey of the Mind veterans what a big deal that was, that it was almost unprecedented for an elementary team to win that.

But that wasn't the end of it! On Sunday we all went to Thomas More College for the presentation of the 2010 Northern Kentucky Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. My older daughter entered two poems into the competition, and she won a silver medal for one and a certificate of merit for the other. She was one of only two seventh graders to get a silver medal. She got to go up to the podium and introduce herself and tell what she won and who her teacher was.

And if all of that wasn't enough, Saturday night we walked up to the high school and watched the high school musical!

I'm all creative arted out now. I'm ready to spend a week doing technology stuff! But it was a GREAT weekend around here! Lisa and I are so proud of BOTH of them!

Bush-o-Matic

The Internet is GREAT for wasting your time in little five or ten minute chunks. I just found a site you can visit the next time you're looking to waste some time in such a way.

This all goes back to my post about a few days ago about Roger Ebert's Text to Speech voice. I got curious about the company that created the voice, and so I went to their website and started poking around.

I found the link below, which will take you to a web site that has a custom built President George Bush voice engine. Now you can make the former President say whatever you want!

Click here to go to the site.

Roger Ebert not a Great Salesman for Technology

I'm a big fan of film critic Roger Ebert. I grew up watching him and the late Gene Siskel on TV reviewing movies on AT THE MOVIES. Of the two, I almost always agreed with Ebert's take on films. Sure, for whatever reason he seemed to HATE Stark Trek films and LOVE Star Wars films, something I never really understood, but more often than not if Ebert liked a movie, I knew I would like it. I was saddened a few years ago to learn about the poor health that Ebert was in and that he had permanently lost the ability to both speak and eat.

I still read Ebert's column online every week, and I was excited when earlier this week I read an article on his website called "Hello, this is Me Speaking." In the article, Ebert talks about how a technology company sifted through the hours and hours of Ebert speaking to create a Text to Speech voice (think Stephen Hawking) that would utilize and exactly replicate Ebert's speech. That way, Ebert could type, and HIS VOICE would come out of the computer.

I was intrigued by this, and in the article he states that he would be on Oprah this week and that he would use "his" text to speech voice in the interview. I watched it on YouTube just now, and I have to say...I was disappointed. The voice didn't sound like Ebert. Heck, it wasn't even the best text to speech voice I've ever heard.

I guess the technology still has a long way to go.

Check it out for yourself. Here's video of Roger Ebert speaking BEFORE his malady:

(I can't see the video.)

And in the video below, you can hear the Roger Ebert text to speech engine. Not even close.

(I can't see the video.)

How Stupid Do You Have to Be?

A few posts ago I mentioned how up in arms teachers all over the Commonwealth of Kentucky are that two days of instruction are being cut, meaning less time for student learning and an effective pay cut for teachers. And teachers are not alone in suffering legislative cuts. In fact, education has been spared most of the cuts that other parts of the Kentucky public budget has faced. In some areas, cuts in recent years have totaled 20 percent or more.

Which is why it was so shocking over the weekend to learn that--in the currently proposed budget--the state legislature wants to increase ITS budget by 3 percent.

I am sure that there must be some valid reason for the legislature wanting to do this, but I can't fathom why they would try it in this political climate. They had to KNOW this was going to look bad, and it's only increased the fervor of people who are saying "Vote ALL incumbents out of office--regardless of party!" Normally, with people like that, I think they're idiots.

I'm starting to buy into their philosophy now, though.

Read more here.