Liz Lane Lawley discusses a presentation by demographer Dr. Harold (“Bud”) Hodgkinson about the number of children living in poverty in the US.

Particularly striking—and distressing—were the numbers reflecting child poverty. Twenty-two percent of children in the United States live in poverty. Twenty-two percent. That’s the highest rate of any developed nation. And yet, as Hodgkinson pointed out, there’s little or no public outcry or outrage over this horrifying number… [mamamusings]

A Whole Lotta Features:Beyound the Blog… Matt Haughey writes about using Movable Type as more than just a weblog tool. Lots of good ideas and examples… At Buckman Elementary School we use Movable Type to power the teacher pages and the main school web page. For the most part the teacher pages are just blogs, but a few teachers have tweaked their templates and they have more of a look of a traditional page. The main page is also set up not to look like a blog. I plan to do some more work with this before the school year begins.

I’ve been playing with the Typepad beta. So far I’m pretty impressed. Very nice interface for page design, editing and such. Very easy to do things like blogrolls, and book and music lists… Take a look… http://lauer.typepad.com/weblog

I have encountered a few issues with the css layouts. (At least on my PC at home, the page doesn’t load correctly in IE. ) It will be interesting to see how they price this…

Ed Tech Dev: Microsoft vs. Open Source at NECC

I think educators and the general public still largely know nothing about OpenOffice, because if they did they’d realize there is no need to purchase Microsoft Office. They may not realize that OpenOffice and other free and open source software work just fine on Windows and MacOS too. Trying open source software doesn’t require immediately leaping over to Linux and dropping Windows completely.

Over at Ed Tech Dev they discuss an
article
from the Seattle Post Intellgencer about the large Microsoft presence at NECC.
While you had to hunt to find them, Paul Nelson of Riverdale
High School had a group of students there in the poster session area running
a Linux Terminal Server lab.
He had quite a bit of traffic, even though you really had to hike to find the
room. Maybe next year we can get someone to underwrite a booth for them on the
exhibit floor. Maybe right across from Apple and Microsoft…

I took two teachers from my school to visit his set up and they were very impressed. The lack of the ability to run Microsoft Office did not concern them
As one of them said; "A word processor is a word processor. As long
as my kids can browse the web and write, I really don’t need much more than
that."

She also was very impressed with the whole thin client set up. Each student
has a login and can work from any terminal. You can even boot to it from Windows
boxes and it will run in Mac OS
X. This fall we are planning to set it up for her classroom and for our
other 5th grade classes at Buckman.

BuzzMachine… by Jeff Jarvis
Jeff Jarvis reports on his sneak peak of AOL’s upcoming entry into the weblog world…

ieSpell - Spell Checker add-on for Internet Explorer

ieSpell is a free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a webpage. It should come in particularly handy for users who do a lot of web-based text entry (e.g. web mails, forums, blogs, diaries).

Laura Gibbs, of XPLANA points to this Internet Explorer extention for Windows users that adds spell checking cabilities to browser.

For Mac OS X users, Safari 1.0 has the ability to spell check web forms. The tool is off by default and needs to be enabled. To do so, open a web form page, insert the cursor, then go to the Edit menu and choose: Spelling > Check Spelling as you Type… [by way of...Steve Gillmor's Emerging Opps]