Beens' Blog

From Sandy Graham, chair of ACSE: Registration for the 11th Annual ACSE conference closes on Friday, October 22nd. This year's conference is being held at the University of Toronto - St. George Campus. The conference is on Saturday, October 30th, 2010 from 8:30am to 4:00pm. Follow this link to the registration page: http://cemc2.math.uwaterloo.ca/cgi-bin/WebObjects/ACSE . More information on the conference including the session offerings and descriptions can be found at the ACSE wiki: http://wiki.acse.net/index.php/11th_Conference Look forward to seeing you there!

11th Conference - ACSEWiki tags : ACSE conference wiki 201010 TEJ TEJxx ICS ICSxx Ministry of Education & Ontario Teachers Federation Curriculum Forum Meeting Notes - October, 2010 - Google Docs tags : 201010 MoE_OTF Meeting My Notes Beens education meeting Ontario Educational Resource Bank tags : MoE_OTF Meeting 201010 education resources online Ontario Quillsoft - WordQ writing software and SpeakQ speech recognition tags : OSAPAC software MoE_OTF Meeting licensed literacy ELL_ESL WordQ ...

C'mon Apple! Surely if you can design amazingly engineered products like my iPhone 4 (minus the antenna problem!) and my MacBook Pro you can figure out how to detect if iTunes is installed on my computer... (click image to enlarge)

Have you ever driven by something many times and said to yourself you must stop and take a picture of it? Yesterday was the day I finally stopped. My good camera was in the car, the weather was perfect for picture taking (when isn't it!), and I was ready to try to capture what I pictured in my mind. Here is one of the photos I shot, shot at 0  EV  (Exposure Value). I then took four more exposures of the same scene, first underexposing at -2 EV and -1 EV, and then overexposing at +1 EV, and +2 EV. The five images were then processed in Photomatix Pro to produce the following HDR : Honestly, the additional detail of the HDR just didn't work for me. It was certainly very clear, but like many HDRs, it had a certain "painted" look that just didn't appeal to me for this scene. So after a little more experimenting, I finally decided to desaturate all the colours except blue. Here is the result, with a frame added to make it stand out better from the page: ...

The Ontario Teachers' Federation Curriculum Forum is spearheading an initiative to identify the main obstacles to being more successful in the classroom. A preliminary survey was sent to the members of the Curriculum Forum, and the following broad categories were identified: Access to Current Technology Access to Self-Directed PD Bureaucracy Class Size/Composition Opportunities for Collaboration Pace of Change Resources Student Attitude Union Work/Life Balance Workload A second survey has now been prepared, and input is being solicited from as many OTF classroom teachers as possible. The results of the survey will be used to help inform discussions about how we can overcome some of these obstacles. My hope, as a member of the OTF Curriculum Forum Steering Committee, is that this will be the start of an ongoing dialogue amongst all interested parties in an effort to overcome these obstacles. If you are interested in completing the survey, please visit: http://bit.l...