John came home from school singing a “Little Ghost” halloween song, and we decided to turn it into a Scratch project. He imagined the whole thing, and I helped him make it happen in Scratch. Lets see if I can post it (and make it available inside the school district so he can use if for show and tell today!)
My little labelmaker has lead a good life in my various classrooms over the past 10 years or so, but it is slowly dying. Two of the little printhead lines don’t work at all, leaving blank areas in the label and it is making a strange squealling noise that sounds like its last breaths. I knew that to survive the upcoming school year and meet my many labelmaking needs, I would need to replace it.
In searching this weeks Sunday paper ads (the Sunday paper is a bunch of the stuff that was current on the internet 24 hours before printed on dead trees, with some extra comics and advertisements thrown in – if you are confused ask your parents) I found what I hoped to be my new labelmaker. The Brother PT-2430 PC. It plugs into a computer and lets you design and save your label designs! Fonts! Graphics! Whoo hoo! And on sale for $40 at Staples this week! The only downside… the “PC” part. Its only for Windows, and I’m a Mac guy.
Enter the wonderful internet. I found a fine, upstanding netizen named sdschramm who who posted a YouTube video of his PT-2430PC working on a MacBook Pro. Ok, it’s possible. There were some brief explanations in his narrative, and a few more in the comments section that gave me enough clues to get started.
Before I tell you how to do it, a brief digression. Brother, the company who makes this device, makes it clear on the box and instructions that it will work great on Windows, and in no way mentions Mac. Ok, their company, their choice. I figured that their buisness folks decided that it wouldn’t be worth the money to pay the programmers to write drivers and editing software needed to run the device on Mac. Hey, if they don’t think they are going to make money, why should they do it? Makes sence, right?
Wrong.
The drivers are written, I just had to download them from the Japanese Brother site. Thank you Google Translate. The editing software is written too – I downloaded it from the American site – they released it for another version of the printer. So all the components exist, but Brother didn’t put them together in the box, or even on their website page for this printer. Sorry, none of this makes sense to me anymore. Doing whatever little testing and tweaking needed to release the already-existing components for Mac, with millions of Mac users (many of whom are hyper-organized and love labelmaking devices) just seems stupid to me.
Here is how to do it anyway…
The lesson from all this? Don’t allow yourself to get frustrated when things don’t work the way you want them to. Solutions are out there – either someone else has come up with one or you can come up with one yourself! Put in a little time to figure it out. Your stuff will work the way you want it to, and you will feel great as the master of your stuff!
Oh, one more thing…. If you are looking at this labelmaker and the price of its labels scare you, don’t worry- if you search online you will find them for about 1/2 the price of in the store!
It’s almost 48 hours since I had the privilege to stand 3 3/4 miles away from an Atlas 551 rocket as it lifted the Juno spacecraft away from Kennedy Space Center and onto its 5-year voyage to Jupiter. Juno will probe the inside of our Solar System’s biggest planet to try to figure out what lurks beneath its swirling clouds, and record Jupiters massive magnetosphere as it flies in and out of it for 12 months. For a day and a half before the launch, the NASATweetup folks treated myself and 149 lucky Tweeps to a series of speakers, presentations, and tours that for a lifetime space-geek like myself were a dream come true. A couple of thoughts…
First, I can’t remember spending time with a nicer group of people – and I mean the Tweeps, the NASATweetup folks and everyone from NASA and JPL. The speakers, the tour guides, the cafeteria workers. Everyone was just wonderful. When you stop and consider what the NASA employees and their contractors do, the life & death, the million and billion dollar budgets, the fact that one mistake can literally ”blow” all of their hard work, the only way they can be so up and positive is that they simply love what they do. A lesson for all of us.
As I wrote in my last post, NASA does live. Last week I saw the continued strength of the planetarium exploration programs, and the beginning of the rebirth of manned spaceflight from within our borders. It will happen faster than you think. After the time I’ve been allowed to spend with the Scientists and EPO staff (Education and Public Outreach – it’s NASA and you have to deal with the acronyms!) of the MESSENGER mission, none of this surprises me. This experience just confirms what good hands our space program is in, and that the people of NASA will continue to push human knowledge and experience onward.
I have more to say about some specific experiences, but will break it up into chunks. Stay tuned.
Atlantis returned to its home at Kennedy Space Center a few weeks ago, and as its wheels touched down the shuttle program ended. One of the things that goes along with teaching in a Planetarium is that I am the “go-to” guy for friends and aquantances to ask questions and have conversations about all things space with. I have lost count of how many people in the last few months have said to me something along the lines of “So, what do you think of the end of NASA?” My reply: “NASA Lives.”
I have no memory of Apollo, I was born in 1970, right in the middle of it, but of course completely unaware. As a child, I was always a big space-geek though, and the Shuttle program was by no means my first memories of NASA. I remember watching the first images from the Viking 1 lander on TV during the summer of 1976 – just a few days after my 6th birthday. I remember the decade-long series of images that came from the Voyager spacecraft of the outer planets – what were once blurry telescopic images were crisp, detailed worlds of amazing cloud formations, intricate ring structures, and an unbelievable variety of moons.
The Shuttle program certainly dominated space-related news during its 30 years, its amazing achievements and terrible tragedies. Often disregarded were the many unmanned craft that explored our solar system, including our own planet Earth. We have gained massive amounts of scientific knowledge through Pathfinder, Spirit, Oppurtunity, the series of Mars orbiters, Galileo, Cassini, and MESSENGER as they probed and studied Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mercury. Add in the spacecraft that have orbited our Earth and her Moon, and you can see how busy NASA has been with unmanned spacecraft during the duration of the Shuttle program. And the exploration continues! Cassini and MESSENGER are sending back gigabytes of data and Opportunity has passed 20 miles on its odometer, and is rolling towards Endeavor crater on Mars.
So NASA lives, and will continue to for the foreseeable future. I am writing this from a (thankfully air-conditioned) tent in the shadow of the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center where I am participating in the Juno #NASAtweetup. If all goes well, Juno will launch at 11:34am tomorrow and start a 5 year journey to Jupiter where it will probe the inside of the Solar System’s largest planet. Next month the twin Grail spacecraft will launch for the moon, and in November the Curiosity rover will head out for Mars. I truly believe that the US Manned Spaceflight program will build a new transportation system (we will be hitching rides Russian Soyez capsules until then to keep the ISS manned and supplied), but until then NASA and its robotic spacecraft have a lot of science to do.
Reboot is my theme for this coming school year. My school, which is full of great teachers, caring families, and amazing kids needs a reboot. What do I mean? Reboot can have a kinda harsh connotation – you reboot a computer when something has gotten so messed up, or changed so much, that you need to get rid of everything in its volatile memory and start over. No, I’m not feeling that way about Poinciana, there is a lot of wonderful stuff that goes on there that should continue. I mean a more gental reboot, sort of like what JJ Abrams did with Star Trek. Yes, a geeky analogy is approaching…
When Abrams created his new Star Trek movie a few years back, he rebooted the storyline. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty… they were all still there with their personalities intact. Some time travel by the bad (and one good) guys changed the history of the original Star Trek franchise though, and a key part of the show’s history was changed. In the universe Abrams created, nothing after the crew of the Enterprise got together and started their “5 Year Mission” can be the same now. This opens the universe up anew for new adventures, no longer constricted by the “old rules” established in the 60′s series, and built upon though the rest of the movies and later tv shows. Whoever writes the next chapter can start fresh.
In many ways Poinciana needs to start fresh too. As a member of the group of teachers who helped start the magnet program in ’94, I miss some of the spirit of those first years. We were were a staff of active learners – reading, researching, attending workshops and conferences… and the kids noticed. Students can tell when their teacher is learning along with them, and it motivates them in their own learning.
Of course, much has changed in our educational universe since then – most notably the high-stakes test system implemented upon us. No, we cannot ignore it – but we must pretend to. Teaching to the test can, unfortunately, show easy short-term gains in student performance. Long term it hurts kids though, because they miss out on the details higher-level skills. Analysis, debate, creativity, the things that make learning interesting and useful are left out for too many of our students when the focus is on the limited standards that are tested with multiple-choice questions. Teaching this way is like feeding kids sugar, they get a quick burst and may do better for a short time, but then they crash, and are less energetic and productive in the long-term.
When I say we should “pretend” that the FCAT doesn’t exist, I mean that we should use the techniques shown by research and our own experience to be most effective for students to learn at high-levels instead of bowing down to the district and textbook folks who want us to ask every question like an FCAT question. If we really teach kids to read, write, compute, and think they will do just fine on FCAT – better in the long run if we stick to it.
Much of what I think we need to do is shift our priorities, and this process has begun at Poinciana. We are giving more help to primary students who come to us behind in reading and math skills. This alone will reap huge benefits in the coming years. The staff seems ready to jump in and learn new things, focusing on our new name: Poinciana STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Magnet as a place to rally our training around. I’m excited about this next year, and the energy that is coming back to Poinciana. I’m a bit nervous about being able to do my part in helping the staff learn how to do what we need to so that Poinciana becomes a model of effective STEM education, but I usually do my best when I’m a little nervous.
MESSENGER is in orbit around Mercury and sending back lots of cool images and data! Now, how do you and your students dive in? Here are a few suggestions…
Now have them ask questions, and send them to me! See my last post for more info.
Next week I’ll be attending the MESSENGER Science Team meeting – the first one since MESSENGER entered orbit around Mercury and the thousands of images and other data sets started streaming in. I’m excited to go and want to share the experience with as many other teachers and students as I can. I would love to get questions from teachers and students about Mercury and what MESSENGER is learning about it to bring with me and get answers on video from some of the science team members that I meet.
I should have internet access in DC, so I will edit together videos of the questions and answers and post them as soon as I can. I’ll send out email updates to you as videos are posted.
If you need to introduce or refresh your students on MESSENGER and Mercury, check out my next post!
Send me questions this week – no later than Friday, May 6th. I’m happy to take questions in emails or as videos. Here are a few guidelines…
Email Questions:
Video Questions: If you are able to videotape some of your students asking questions, that would be wonderful! I’ll show the video to the scientists and have them answer it, and then merge the videos together. I’ve done this with students working with other NASA missions before and they really enjoy it as do the scientists!
Good luck, and I look forward to your questions!
Ah, Spring Break. While I would love to say that I was staying away from all things school related – I can’t. 1 1/2 days in Poinciana’s Courtyard Botany Lab with Mr. A, lesson plans, writing up stuff for the eMobilize iPad project, and NASA MESSENGER stuff to get ready for MESSENGER to go into Mercury orbit on Thursday… I’ve been busy but with “fun stuff” that I have a hard time considering work.
Traditionally over spring break I plow through a couple of novels. The last few years I’ve read the new novels that come out in January or February from my two favorite Florida authors – Randy Wayne White (Night Vision) and Tim Dorsey (Electric Barracuda) . Not this year though, as I couldn’t control myself and read them both already.
Instead I’m making good on a long-standing goal to re-read one of my favorite science fiction trilogies – the “Mars Trilogy” by Kim Stanley Robinson. The 2nd and 3rd books have been sitting on my bookshelf since college. I lent the the first book, Red Mars, to someone sometime in the 20 or so years since I first read it or I probably would have done this long ago. Anyway, I picked it up this week and dove in.
Its as wonderful as I remember it. Interesting characters, great story, and what’s more the science and politics have largely held up and even been very accurately predictive of reality. The story supposedly begins in 2026 – and the state of science and politics is largely on target. The huge exception is the lack of progress in the world’s space programs – a political failure more than a scientific one.
Having a hard time putting it down – think I’ll pick it up now….
I hope you enjoyed my presentations this morning and are ready to get your students involved with NASA and the MESSENGER mission to Mercury. Use the links above to get to more info.
