Idea Lab: Life Way After Head Start” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/magazine/21IDEA.html?oref=login”>The New York Times Magazine > Idea Lab: Life Way After Head Start

Not only has the Perry study set records for longevity, but it also asks the truly pertinent question: what is the impact of preschool, not on the test scores of 7-year-olds but on their life chances? The answer is positive — a well-designed program really works.

An article from the Sunday New York Times Magazine that highlights the most recent findings from the Perry Preschool Project. The study examines the lives of 123 African Americans born in poverty and at high risk of failing in school in Ypsilanti, Michigan.The subjects were randomly divided into a program group who received a high-quality preschool program based on High/Scope’s participatory learning approach and a comparison group who received no preschool program. In the study’s most recent phase, 97% of the study participants still living were interviewed at age 40.

The Times article does a nice job of outlining the findings… mainly that adults at age 40 who had the preschool program had higher earnings, were more likely to hold a job, had committed fewer crimes, and were more likely to have graduated from high school than adults who did not have preschool. The Perry Preschool Project Fact Sheet gives a good overview of the main research questions answered by the ongoing study.

Ed-Tech Insider: A New Way To Picture The News Over at eSchoolNews.com I point to 10 x 10, (Via AssortedStuff.) a web site that searches the RSS feeds of three major news organizations and returns the top 100 words associated with the stories found in those news feeds and associates them with photographs from those organizations. An interesting display of information in a graphical format…

oreilly.com — Online Catalog: Wireless Hacking

Just a few of the things you’ll learn from this book…

* Use existing Ethernet cables to provide low-voltage power to Access Points with no additional source of electricity.
* Install Linux and FreeBSD on low-cost (under $150) Soekris single-board computers.
* Modify the firmware of your Linksys WRT54g.
* Construct Solar Powered Access Points and Repeaters for your Wi-Fi network.
* WarDrive for wireless access points with tools like Kismet and NetStumbler.
* Install an antenna without killing yourself or changing the earth’s orbit.
* Expand your Wi-Fi network beyond one box and 50 users with MESH network topology.

I’m really interested in learning how to do the first one…

NASA Earth Observatory A few months ago I wrote to the folks at the NASA Earth Observatory web site and asked them if they planned to offer an RSS feed. Today I received an email from their development team indicating they now have an rss feed. The feed can be found here.

Flat Stanley Weblog
At Lewis Mrs. Crouse’s 3rd grade classroom is taking part in a Flat Stanley activity with a classroom in Vancouver, WA. The idea behind this is that students share a paper Stanley and then write about the adventures of the visiting Stanley and share these adventures with the partner classroom. This can be accomplished through traditional mail, email or in our case a weblog. We looked at ways to make it easy for Mrs. Crouse’s classroom and the one in Vancouver to share their stories. After much discussion we decided the easiest thing to do was to set up a weblog in Moveable Type running off the Lewis server and to then set up a Flickr account for the Flat Stanley classrooms to post their images to. Flickr allows users to upload images via email and also post a description from the body of the email to a blog using the XMLRPC interface. The classrooms taking part in the Flat Stanley project just have to send an email and the post will automaticly appear on the weblog along with the attached image file.

Walmart.com - 1 Hour Photo
Wal Mart is now offering 1 hour photo prints online. You upload the images to the Wal Mart site and in an hour pick them up at your local Wal Mart. Of course that means you have to actually go to Wal Mart to get the prints, but the idea is a good one. 24¢ a print…

OS X Home/Classroom Library Catalog Tool: “Delicious Library (note: the name has nothing to do with del.icio.us the social bookmarks manager.) is an Macintosh OS X application that allows for the cataloging of a home or classroom library collection, a visual card-catalog of your books, movies, music and video games. You can import your information by hand by title or author, or if you have an…”

Over at the eSchoolNews weblog I have posted about Delicious Library. A very interesting home/classroom library cataloging tool with a confusing name. It allows you to cataglog books, music CD’s, video’s, and video games. The information can be entered manually, or you can use an iSight video camera as a scanner and scan in the bar codes of your items. It then searches Amazon for the information and returns it for cataloging. I am planning to help a few teachers at Lewis Elementary set this up for check out of their classroom library books.