Welcome to the Dark Side

By Hayden Hilgenhold

The internet.  A place where you can do almost anything as long as you have the knowhow and a good connection.  However, you’re usually exposed.  Out in the open where the world can see you, so crime can usually be cracked down on with relative ease.  However, there is a place in the internet where crime runs rampant, and it is completely anonymous.  The Deep Web, little known to the general public, is the dark desolate ghetto of the beautiful Utopia of the internet, where the law doesn’t have a leg to stand on, unable to make a dent in the corruption.

The Deep Web, made by the government as a tool for intelligence agents, law enforcement, and anyone else who would need to conduct their online affairs privately and/or anonymously.  However, like many things that are made for the greater good, such as dynamite or nuclear power, it had limitless dark potential that became easily exploited.  Now it is used as a bazaar for many vendors of illegal and questionable items and services such as, drugs, weapons, fake passports, counterfeit money, hired thieves and thugs, and even assassins.  

So how does it work? How do you keep complete anonymity over the internet?  Well not through any normal web browser.  First you have to have a special browser known as Tor.  Using Tor your data is completely encrypted, and then passed through several relays, running it through any other computer using Tor, bouncing you around the globe making you near impossible to trace.  Not only that but most of the sites that are selling illegal items are only available through Tor, and are hosted on private servers owned by Tor.  To break it down for you the indexed, easy to find and search internet is about 19 terabytes, or about 3,800,000 songs.  That’s a lot, right? But when you consider the non-indexed part of the internet is 7500 terabytes or 1,500,000,000 songs, it shows you just how much of the internet is relatively hard for the law to get a grip on, and with programs such as Tor it is even harder to find the culprits.  

So why doesn’t the government stop Tor in its tracks? Shut down its servers and wipe them of all these illegal sites? Well, you have to remember, Tor has become vital to many intelligence and law and enforcement agencies.  Since it is so vital, it would endanger a lot of our own law enforcement.  So Tor is here to stay, dark side and all.   

Some New Middle and High School Resources to Share

Kris Walsh

I know many of you have been suffering from withdrawal since missing Techy Tuesday last week due to our snow-cation. I know many teachers who spent at least part of the time grading, planning and getting caught up on paperwork and other tasks that need to be done. I was able to get caught up on some reading and professional social networking that often gets buried during a typical work week. I found a couple of resources that I thought were worth sharing to the group at large.

These resources that I have are mainly focused on middle and high school classrooms, but they do have applications in other settings, such as the upper elementary. These resources came to me through the DOE Google+ network for Indiana eLearning Coaches.

       (As a quick aside, there are several great Google+ networks for most subject areas and grades. They are a great way to use social networking professionally. Please let any of the e Coaches know if you would like to know more about how to get involved)

The first resource comes courtesy of Jeff Chicki. It is a link to a great mindmap (a great tool on its own) of iOS apps that can be used in the classroom. I cannot say that I have had personal experience with all of the resources that are shown, but I have used many of them and the ones that he has listed and I have used are all good. He does a good job of separating the apps out into subject areas and or tool categories. Even if you do not have access to an iDevice, many of the listed tools can also be found on the web as well. Follow the link below to access the mindmap Jeff has created.

http://www.mindmeister.com/406649297/ios-apps-for-middle-school-education

The other resource I would like to share comes to us from Maria Sellers. She shared a resource for finding free academic articles that students can use for research. The articles are in .pdf format that students can use to markup and highlight. I have messed around with the site a little and it seems to be a great and easy place for students to use for research. The sites and articles that I found were all reliable sources that would be useful in completing a project which required it. One warning is that the first 2 or 3 search results are ads. They are marked as such, but students may not notice that, you may want to let them know this. Ads are often a sad fact of life when looking for free web resources. Follow the link below to access the site.

PDF search engine for free scientific publications - FreeFullPDF

Flash Storage Vs. Traditional Hard Drives

By Sean Bybee

Even before I began working for Mr. Wright, I was already well aware of the beating that our school laptops endured on a day to day basis. Every day, I see laptops dropped, crammed into backpacks with heavy textbooks, and hit by frustrated users. Last year, my little brothers laptop was taken and dropped from the gym’s second floor into a trash can fifteen feet below. When laptops are given to young students, there is very little guarantee that any care will be taken to ensure that it stays in good condition. That being said, while we cannot easily prevent students from ripping optical drives out or shattering displays, there is one step we can take (that I can think of) to minimize necessary repairs, and potentially even lower the total costs of laptop repairs.

With fewer moving parts, a solid state drive (or SSD) has a much lower chance of going bad as a result of dropping or being hit repeatedly by the user. To those not familiar with the internal operation of a traditional hard drive, it is important to know that the basic operation is dependent on an internal disk, most commonly spinning at 7200 rpm. This, in combination with a small arm that “reads” the disk, allows information to be stored on the disk magnetically. These constantly moving parts are always at risk of being jammed or otherwise damaged. An SSD operates similarly to flash drives in that they have absolutely no moving parts and operate on the concept of flash storage. While the initial investment of an SSD is slightly higher than that of a hard drive, the increased durability would likely allow it to pay for itself in the long run. It seems like it is a daily occurrence that someone’s hard drive has gone bad and needs replaced. With a lack of moving parts, I feel that replacing the traditional hard drives in our school laptops with SSDs would help to save Mr. Wright some hassle, and perhaps even save the school some money.

Lasting durability is not the only advantage of SSDs over hard drives. Because a solid state drive is not dependent on moving parts, access to the information stored on the drive is much quicker compared to that of a traditional hard drive. In a hard drive, in order to access information, the disk must spin to proper position, and then a mechanical arm must maneuver to the exact position at which that information is stored on the disk. Anyone that has ever seen the inside of a hard drive during operation will know that this all happens extremely quickly. However, regardless of how fast we are able to make the disk spin (10000 rpm drives currently exist), that hard drive could never be quite as fast as a solid state drive, because they do not have these physical limitations at all. This is relevant to Perry Central, because anyone that has used our laptops even once will be well aware of the time consuming process of booting them up. 

Overall, I think that SSDs for the school laptops would be a worthy investment. The increase in speed would hopefully increase the productivity of students, allowing them to spend more time working rather than trying to boot their computers. In addition despite the higher price per gigabyte of flash memory, the price is steadily dropping. This, in combination with the longer lifetime of the devices could potentially save the school money in the long run.

More Power for Steam

By Chris Bybee

Graphics cards such as brands like ASUS, can provide vital resources like extra memory. Some of these graphics cards are already used in computers, like in the wood shop and the yearbook room specifically for editing and graphic design. Should this equipment be added ti all computers that are owned by the school such as in the lower grade classes on the other side of the school? No computer in the school (laptops) besides the computers in the shop and yearbook room have these and I believe that they should! Laptops however, with no graphic changes available to them, can stay as is. I’ve seen the insides of our old desktops, and they are not all that expensive, so putting even the same types of cards into the desktops we already have can greatly improve the speeds of our students work, while using programs like Autodesk or another 3D render program.

As far as laptops go, cards are not really needed because normal students with laptops will have no need for a 3D render program, however for those who do, a computer that has that upgraded technology like a graphics card, could be supplied to them if it is needed for the education of that specific student. Now, from my old blog about RAM, this can be the same concept because of how much memory can be stored inside the graphics card itself. I believe that the cards in our desktops now have about 512 megabytes of random access memory stored inside of them to help with the speeds of the game and or program it is trying to run that just needed a little bit more of the computers system resources.

With this new equipment, students can work a little faster than they would have been able to because of how fast the program could be running. So let’s say that a student spends 10 minutes of his time waiting for the program to load up while the student next to him waits 5 with the new equipment. Even with that short of a time difference, it can make a large impact in how much work can be done for these students allowing teachers to move on to any new lesson faster to get their work done just a tad faster too! I’ve stated my reasons as to why I think that this is needed for our students in programs such as Steam and LEAF because they can get so much more done than before.

Prezi

By Lain Knieriem

 Presentation tools are something of a wide topic, I mean there are millions of them, and some people think that some are better than others. Though I have my pick, the one that I will be talking about is giving Google docs and PowerPoint a run for their money. I enjoy using this presentation tool called Prezi.

Prezi is a tool that has become more popular especially in college, and marketing careers. I was taught to use this last year because they said that PowerPoint, which we used before, was simply Stone Age compared to the options that the internet offers us today. After using Prezi, I can see that they are right. Creating with Prezi is a good skill to learn and use, not just for your school career but for college and life.

There are just some things that make Prezi a new hip way to get a point across. Like most presentation tools, you put the content on a slide of some sort and you cycle through them. On Prezi, it is all designed the same way only not on slides but a big plot map of info. There are thousands of Prezi designs that you can chose from to make your presentation stand out.  With this big plot map of info you may need to zoom into each one, and Prezi has it covered. After creating the Prezi you can program the Prezi to zoom into a specific info template that you want, and in any order that you want.

  One of the cool features of Prezi is the video option. Using this you can insert a video directly from YouTube with the click of a button. You later program the Prezi to zoom in and play the video at any time you like. Another neat feature of Prezi that is different is the background music option. This allows you to insert some of your personal music from your computer to be playing softly in the background of your Prezi to really set the mood. Though this option is widely used, I myself have never really used it. The next feature to me is really weird. If you use Prezi, then why do you need this? You can actually insert PowerPoint slides into your Prezi content. Though this is really backwards it could come in handy if you were using an online PowerPoint for information. Even though these are only three features of Prezi, it also has all of the same things as the other presentation tools, though I think they are easier to use, and look better. 

With all of this being said I think the only way to fully learn a subject is to see for yourself. So if you are interested in this awesome presentation tool just visit Prezi.com and create a free account where you can explore and create.

If you have any further questions or need some help you can E-mail me at knierieml@pccommodores.org. 

Hope you enjoyed this entry, and thanks for reading. 

The Unbroken Effect

By: Phil Zellers

I really don't have any new technology tips or tools to share with you this time but I do have a story to share related to our theme, "Be Brave."  Recently, I read a book about some truly incredible acts of bravery.  They are a source of inspiration and really put things into perspective for me.  Stories and books like this can have such an impact on the way we view the world.  The book, Unbroken, was also recently made into a movie, which I saw over the weekend.    

Louis Zamperini, whose life is detailed in the book Unbroken, was a 1936 Olympian and a shoe-in for making it to the 1940 Olympics.  Unfortunately, those Olympics, set to take place in Tokyo, Japan, never happened.  WWII happened instead and Louis joined the military.  The plane he was a bombardier on went down in the Pacific and he was lost at sea for 47 days (a record at the time).  When he and another survivor were discovered, unfortunately, it was by the Japanese.  Zamperini was then severely beaten and tortured for two years as a POW, all the while, refusing to sell out his country and give up valuable information.  The injuries he sustained as a POW meant he would never have a chance to be an Olympian again.  Zamperini suffered from PTSD for years but regained a footing in his life.  He even eventually went back to Japan and faced his captors, forgiving them.  He has also carried the Olympic torch in a number of Olympics, including the 1998 games held in Japan.  It's a remarkable story of bravery!

When thinking about our theme of the year "Be Brave," Zamperini stands out.  He faced so many struggles and with determination and courage, overcame them.  In the end, he had such a positive impact on so many people's live.  He is inspirational on so many levels.  The two lessons I take away from Zamperini's life are:  1) Don't give up no matter what the circumstances are and 2) Have the courage to do what you know is right, even if it's not the easy thing to do.  In the end, you can always have a positive influence on people.  I know that sounds cliche and simplified but you can't help but be inspired and moved by his story.  It makes me want to take advantage of the opportunities I have to be a positive influence.  If you're looking for a source of inspiration, I recommend reading Unbroken or at least seeing the movie.       

       

PowerED Up, the Sequel
by Jamie Guillaume

The Perry Central tech team is proud to announce that we have again been awarded one of the Indiana Department of Education’s, Summer of eLearning grants!  Perry Central will host PowerED Up June 2^nd-3^rd, 2015.  Although the funds are not yet in hand, planning has commenced.

When I think of characteristics of a successful conference, criteria that comes to mind includes motivational speakers, free wi-fi and most importantly, excellent food! Luckily with the support of the DOE, sponsorships, our administration and teamwork all of this criteria will be met.

Last year Dave Burgess, the author of Teach Like a Pirate and Leslie Fisher, director of Fisher technologies were both standout keynote speakers.  Our opening day keynote speaker for the conference this year will be, Don Wettrick.  Wettrick has recently published a book titled, Pure Genius that was actually published by Dave Burgess Consulting.  I recently had the opportunity to hear Wettrick at a conference and concluded that he is the definition of innovative teaching!  He was very inspiring and will be sure to hook, motivate and inspire conference attendees. 

Our opening keynote on the 2nd day of our conference will be Jeff Charbonneau who will come to us from Seattle, Washington.  Charbonneau was named National Teacher of the Year by the Council of Chief State School Officers.  He is a science teacher whose favorite part of teaching is being present at the moment of discovery for a student.

In addition to our keynotes, Matt Miller, author of Ditch that Textbook will also be a featured speaker and will be present for both days of the conference.  He also has a book that will be published soon by Dave Burgess Consulting. 

Now as I mentioned, motivational speakers is a key component to a successful conference along with free wifi.  There is nothing worse than attending a conference and having to pay for wi-fi, except for bad food! Luckily not only will our wi-fi be free and strong but your taste buds will not be disappointed!

It may sound trivial to feature the food at a conference but when we looked out our evaluations from last year, we learned that our Mexican feast and southern fried chicken meal were both a huge hit! Although confirmation with catering has not be finalized, similar meals will be served.

Be sure to mark your calendars for June 2nd and June 3rd; PowerED Up, the Sequel will be a conference you do not want to miss!