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This is priceless!

Rainy Day Fund or BUST in Texas!!!!!!

It is pouring in Texas! It's not enough to be aware. You MUST be vocal to your reps!

Find your representatives here.

Related articles

Joe Smith: Getting Our Legislator​s to Understand How Public Schools Got in This Fix -April 6 , 2011

House Committee Tackles School Finance

State budget cuts would cripple schools

Spring Branch ISD To Cut 350 Jobs
Katy ISD may lay off as many as 600 employees

Fort Bend ISD is cutting nearly 500 jobs

Finance-S/C on Public Education Funding - 4/7/2011: Time: 8:00 AM, Location: E1.028 (Hearing Room)

SIGs During Advisory

This is the first year, since I have been at my current campus, that we have an Advisory period each day. It lasts only thirty minutes. Every day has a specific focus, a purpose. Embedded throughout is the strong belief that building genuine positive relationships with students is fundamental to our educational system. That being said, today I'd like to share with you this "best kept secret" we've got under wraps. It's actually no secret at all, just not very many people know what we're doing. Anyone is more than welcome to come and visit. I'd be happy to roll out the red carpet. Friday is the day that's so unique. It's the day we have our SIGs (AKA Special Interest Groups) during the Advisory time period. From my perspective, it feels a bit like being in Santa's Workshop for half an hour each week.

Over the summer break each teacher was asked to think of something that they love, that they're passionate about, and could share this interest with kids. And so they did. Listed below is just a sampling of things chosen:


American Idol
Art (Paints/Pastels/More)
Basketball
Book Study
Cake Decorating
Cards
Charity Sewing
Chess
Cultural Music
Electronic Games
German
Guitar
Harry Potter
It's an "I" Thing
Jewelery Making
Legos
Medieval Studies
Mystery Theater
Old Fashioned Games
Photography
Recycling
Scrapbooking
School Spirit
Virtual Tours
Walking
Web 2.0
Yoga

There are several others. Students select their top five choices at the beginning of each of the four grading periods. They are then assigned to a SIG. During the first grading period, 87% of our 1200+ students were able to get into their number one choice. Any student that didn't, automatically gets bumped to the top of the list for the next go round. In other words, they will definitely get their first choice at the next grading period.

It's beautiful! Our nurse, receptionist, data specialist...you name it, they all get involved (by choice). We have it scheduled just prior to the last period of the day. It was placed there based upon teacher input. I was hesitant at first. I'm a believer now. It's the perfect time of the day. We debated on having students grouped by grade level, but decided against it. Students are meeting and developing positive relationships with staff members and students that they will see throughout the year; relationships that would otherwise have gone unknown. Some SIGs are very service-oriented in nature. Many involve team/group work throughout. Students look forward to it. The staff looks forward to it. More and more we have parents and community members becoming involved.  We love our SIGs!

Happy New Year!

Let me briefly state how very much I've missed posting. Suffice it to say (in brief) life happened. You just never know what individual challenges you may have the opportunity to face, seemingly coming to you from no where. Enough about that. Let's get right to the good stuff!



Some things you'll want to familiarize yourself with are the Android 2.2 Platform (2.3 is almost here), QR Codes, and the infinite potential for quality educational applications being developed for Android devices. At first glance that might sound a bit...well, boring. Believe me, once you start checking into it, it's going to knock your socks off! 

Here we go:

1.  Android 2.2 Platform (Highlights)

The Android 2.2 platform introduces many new and exciting features for users and developers. This document provides a glimpse at some of the new user features and technologies in Android 2.2. For more information about the new developer APIs, see the Android 2.2 version notes.

New User Features

Home

New Home screen tips widget assists new users on how to configure the home screen with shortcuts and widgets and how to make use of multiple home screens.

The Phone, applications Launcher, and Browser now have dedicated shortcuts on the Home screen, making it easy to access them from any of the 5 home screen panels.

Exchange support

Improved security with the addition of numeric pin or alpha-numeric password options to unlock device. Exchange administrators can enforce password policy across devices. Remote wipe: Exchange administrators can remotely reset the device to factory defaults to secure data in case device is lost or stolen. Exchange Calendars are now supported in the Calendar application. Auto-discovery: you just need to know your user-name and password to easily set up and sync an Exchange account (available for Exchange 2007 and higher). Global Address Lists look-up is now available in the Email application, enabling users to auto-complete recipient names from the director.

Camera and Gallery

Gallery allows you to peek into picture stacks using a zoom gesture.

Camera onscreen buttons provide easy access to a new UI for controling zoom, flash, white balance, geo-tagging, focus and exposure. Camcorder also provides an easy way to set video size/quality for MMS and YouTube.

With the LED flash now enabled for the Camcorder, videos can be shot at night or in low light settings.

Portable hotspot
    
Certain devices like the Nexus One can be turned into a portable Wi-Fi hotspot that can be shared with up to 8 devices.

You can use your Android-powered phone as a 3G connection for a Windows or Linux laptop by connecting their phone to the computer with a USB cable. The connection is then shared between the two devices.

Multi-lingual languages

Multi-lingual users can add multiple languages to the keyboard and switch between multiple Latin-based input languages by swiping across the space bar. This changes the keys as well as the auto-suggest dictionary.

Improved performance

Performance of the browser has been enhanced using the V8 engine, which enables faster loading of JavaScript-heavy pages.
Dalvik Performance Boost: 2x-5x performance speedup for CPU-heavy code over Android 2.1 with Dalvik JIT.
The graph to the right shows the performance speedup from Android 2.1 to Android 2.2 using various benchmark tests. For example, LinPack is now more than 5 times faster.
Kernel Memory Management Boost: Improved memory reclaim by up to 20x, which results in faster app switching and smoother performance on memory-constrained devices.
New Platform Technologies

Media framework

• New media framework (Stagefright) that supports local file playback and HTTP progressive streaming
• Continued support for OpenCore in Android 2.2

Bluetooth

• Voice dialing over Bluetooth
• Ability to share contacts with other phones
• Support for Bluetooth enabled car and desk docks
• Improved compatibility matrix with car kits and headsets

2.6.32 kernel upgrade

• HIGHMEM support for RAM >256MB
• SDIO scheduling and BT improvements

New Developer Services

Android Cloud to Device Messaging

Apps can utilize Android Cloud to Device Messaging to enable mobile alert, send to phone, and two-way push sync functionality.

Android Application Error Reports

New bug reporting feature for Android Market apps enables developers to receive crash and freeze reports from their users. The reports will be available when they log into their publisher account.

New Developer APIs

Apps on external storage

Applications can now request installation on the shared external storage (such as an SD card).

Media framework

Provides new APIs for audio focus, routing audio to SCO, and auto-scan of files to media database. Also provides APIs to let applications detect completion of sound loading and auto-pause and auto-resume audio playback.

Camera and Camcorder

New preview API doubles the frame rate from ~10FPS to ~20FPS. Camera now supports portrait orientation, zoom controls, access to exposure data, and a thumbnail utility. A new camcorder profile enables apps to determine device hardware capablities.

Graphics

New APIs for OpenGL ES 2.0, working with YUV image format, and ETC1 for texture compression.

Data backup

Apps can participate in data backup and restore, to ensure that users maintain their data after performing a factory reset or when switching devices.

Device policy manager

New device policy management APIs allow developers to write "device administrator" applications that can control security features on the device, such as the minimum password strength, data wipe, and so on. Users can select the administrators that are enabled on their devices.

UI framework

New "car mode" and "night mode" controls and configurations allow applications to adjust their UI for these situations. A scale gesture detector API provides improved definition of multi-touch events. Applications can now customize the bottom strip of a TabWidget.

2.  QR code


(Quick Response code) A two-dimensional matrix bar code that is used to identify products. It can store up to 4,296 alphanumeric or 7,089 numeric characters. Depending on the level of error correction applied, it can restore from seven to 30% of the missing data.

Created by Japanese Denso Wave, Inc. and standardized by ISO, Japanese Industrial Standard (JIS), JEIDA and AIM, QR codes are increasingly used to identify the URL of a company's Web site so that mobile phone users can photograph the code and retrieve information about the organization. Some companies have created billboard-sized QR codes for this purpose. To promote the use of its Android phone visual search application, in 2009, Google sent more than 100,000 custom-coded QR codes to U.S. establishments. It suggested they place the code in a prominent location for "mobile tagging." See bar code and Google Goggles.

Roll Your Own
To create your own QR code, visit the Kaywa QR code generator at http://qrcode.kaywa.com.

2D QR Code

The QR code is used to mark products as well as identify establishments. It is recognizable by its four squares with dots in the middle and holds up to 4,296 alphanumeric and 7,089 numeric characters. For more details, see QR code.

QR Codes

QR codes can contain a phone number, text message, plain text or a URL (examples above are the URL www.computerlanguage.com). QR codes are identified by the four squares with dots in the middle (red arrows), used for alignment. The horizontal and vertical lines (highlighted in yellow) that alternate light and dark are also alignment symbols.

3.  Android (Educational) Apps - Androlib.com is my most favorite place to locate apps. It's search capabilities are a bit more advanced then some of the other sites of used. Don't get me wrong, there are others that I like. This just happens to be the one that gives me the most bang for the buck, within the shortest amount of time.  Go try some searches for yourself (example - "Math Applications"). Watch and be amazed!

There are many Android capable devices out there. You may even have one already, and not even know it.

1.   Android .2 Platform Information taken directly from:  http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-2.2-highlights.html

2.  QR Code Information taken directly from:  http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=QR+code&i=61424,00.asp

I plan to post biweekly. Don't ever hesitate to shoot me a quick e-mail @ SusanF95@gmail.com, with any topics you'd be interested in seeing me cover.