The good fairy

The RAM fairy paid my classroom a visit and left me 10 128mb RAM chips for my Mac resurrection project! Actually, it was our technology specialist who left them for me, she just neglected to tell me she had left them in my box a week ago. I found them Friday and was positively giddy! I have been sticking the two chips that I had into a computer, firing it up, updating the firmware and the OS, shutting it down, removing the RAM and repeating the process with the next computer. Whew! Now they are all getting their very own RAM and are all working nicely, humming along with OS X 10.3.9. I have one G3 b&w in need of a video card, but I found the stock cards go for $10 on ebay. Now I just need 6 keyboards and mice (I'm still having to share the one that I have with each of the computers) and everybody will be complete. My students are finishing up their cell stories and are getting excited about producing a digital media final project, so these computers have fallen in my lap at the perfect time. I have Comic life on one so that my students who want to produce a comic book are all set. I'm getting iMovie on them for digital editing for the students doing plays and puppet shows. Some of the students are asking about putting together booklets or posters, because "it would be easy", but I think that is missing the point of trying to do things a little more 21st century, don't you think?

One thing that I have gotten some positive feedback on has been the class homepage. I have lecture notes linked there (courtesy of Google Docs and Spreadsheets), I have my powerpoint presentations (actually done with the opensource office suite, NeoOffice) embeded there (courtesy of Zoho.com) and I have every student's grades in a spreadsheet listed by student id number (Google again) linked there. Parents and students alike have expressed an appreciation for being able to see up to the minute grade information. I think it is empowering the kids to see how their grade changes with each assignment. I'm definitely going to do this again next year, only this time it will be right from the beginning!