I opened my Facebook this afternoon and to my horror they have updated the homepage. Not to the better, but to the worse. How can Facebook not understand that people want to customize their experience once, not after every update.

There is no way to that I have have found to set any of my lists as my main feed. I don’t want the News feed as my main feed, I had it customized with another feed as the main feed but now it takes 3 clicks to get to that feed. On top of that, if I which from the main page it rests to the new Facebook default.

Let me also add that the feeds aren’t updating correctly so I can’t be sure if I am getting current information.

Let me hear what you have to say. Facebook could be a great social tool and a great way to learn in education, but not the way it’s going.

• Get the Full Schedule here
• Main FCAT Site here

I know that one of the big questions that is asked by high school students and parents is:

Is a passing score on the FCAT Writing assessment a graduation requirement?

The answer as of right now is no, although it had been for the class of 2010. Read the more complete answer here.

Good Luck to everyone testing!

FCAT Writing, Testing, Education

I met Mr. Sollenberger a few times through my father. He is a very nice man, I want to wish Mr. Sollenberger and his wife a very happy retirement.

Thank you for your service to my community.

Sarasota, Florida

Before I get started I want to poll everyone to see what smartphone they are using.

I did the test in my dining room, next to a large Window hoping to give both units good coverage. I knew what was going to happen before testing, but I wanted to verify my knowledge with a hard test. I picked the Weather Channel Application as my app of choice for this test because I wasn’t using it on either phone. I actually use Accuweather on the iPhone for its ease of use over the Weather Channel app. I did the install on one device at a time and installed it twice on the iPhone using WiFi once and 3G the next time. The Curve 8330 doesn’t do WiFi and it doesn’t have 3G so I know there is some Oranges to Bananas comparisons here. Knowing this, I didn’t expect the Blackberry to beat the install time for the iPhone, but I also understood the results I did get for reasons I will explain later.

The iPhone loaded the App Store in just over 5 seconds, found the app in search in the time it took me to type “weath” and  the install took just under 30 seconds. I then started the app, let it GPS me and I was up and running the Weather Channel in less than a minute.

Now it was the Blackberry’s turn. Open the App World…….Open the App World…..Open the App World…. Well it took 3 minutes for the App World to open. The next thing was getting the Weather Channel downloaded….DL….DL….DL, which took 1 minute 22 seconds including the accepting of the http connections. I then launched the application and GPS’d myself. Total time to a running app on  the 8330 Curve? 4 minutes and 53 seconds for me to get the weather on the Blackberry.

Now, as I said above the Curve doesn’t do 3G or WiFi so I should expect it to take 2 minutes total time based on speed of service, not the almost 5 minutes it took to install the application. So lets look closer at why it took so long for my Blackberry to download and install the same application. I knew this answer before I started and I’ll let you in on it, the carrier for the Blackberry for some reason has a dead zone around my neighborhood. Anything except the signal for email I have to go outside and walk 100 feet from the buildings to get a clear connection. I have great reception on the iPhone no matter where I am at in this area so I knew it would install in a heartbeat via 3G and the WiFi was a no brainer.

Let us conclude with this gem that I have always lived by because of the math background I have. You can massage tests and data to be whatever you want them to be by how you read the numbers and administer the test. I could just as well have done this test at another neutral location and gotten closer results, or I know of a location that I can go to that the iPhone will be a complete epic fail and not install the app at all because once I get to the front door of this location I lose service on the iPhone, but not on the Blackberry.

Moral to the story? Never believe everything you read unless you have read a lot of different opinions from a lot of different sources that have not worked together to get their results. Mileage will vary depending on the end user. Both the Blackberry and the iPhone have positives and negatives. Whether you like one over the other is more a personal choice or a business one based on your needs.

I like both, my iPhone is great for a lot of thing, my blackberry is great for a lot of things. Which do I like better? Let me ask this, can we marry them both into one smartphone?

Internet, App Store, App World

Again, go here: Beyond the Rhetoric to enter. By the way, you can follow Michael on twitter (incidentally one of the ways to enter the contest) at @michaelkwan and don’t forget to follow me, your host of Edutechation.com at @rayebersole or @edutechation.

Michael Kwan, CES, Swag, Contest

• For the complete schedule PDF click here
• For complete FCAT information please click here for the Florida DOE FCAT site

I will write more as we get closer to the test.

Florida, Testing, FCAT

I have watched both, so I don’t feel bad giving mine.

Here is the most telling of the facts that Conan just needs to listen to what he’s told: He has lost two million views nightly from the viewership of the Leno Tonight Show. That loss of viewership translates into Conan losing the late night wars to David Letterman. That is something Leno was winning for 14 years.

NBC has not been winning the 10pm slot for years so Leno wasn’t hurting that fact. In fact he was bringing in the numbers the network had promised. While that was still lower than what Leno had been pulling at 11:35pm with the Tonight Show, it was never a reality that the type of viewer that watched Tonight was going to move to 10pm.

With all that in mind, the move of Leno back to 11:35pm is the smart move and Conan should just move on. He doesn’t see that he doesn’t have the main stream attraction for that time slot and viewership.

The lesson from this? People all have opinions, even if they don’t have all the facts.

I welcome Jay back to late night!

Let’s look at that as energy. The aura or energy you project at others affects them and how they interact with you. It’s kind of like a mirror, if you look in a mirror you see yourself. That is what most people will reflect back at you; yourself.

So, why not send energy that is going to get you what you want? Think before reflecting someones negative attitude back at them. You could change the whole outcome of the interaction with a positive energy. In other words, “Kill them with kindness”. Don’t let them bring you to that negative, don’t let them feel that the negative is the right answer.

It’s simple martial arts redirection or a magicians redirection. The art of war is about controlling a situation. That is all projecting the proper energy is all about.

Think about this the next time you have a child, a student or your own children. Are you projecting their bad attitude back at them when they don’t like the task you have given them? If you are, maybe you need an energy adjustment.

Technorati Tags Education, Society, School, Personal Development

• New Baby is Here – The birth of my son.
• Twitter and Facebook – Are the useful in Education? – Social Media in schools?
• Delicious as a Tool for Teachers – Social Media in schools?
• The 5 Things To Do before Calling Tech Support – You can help youself, really!
• FCAT 2009 Underway – Prediction on Scores – One of my biggest posts of the year.
• Service Desks Need Real Techs – Real people that have actual tech experience, not someone reading a script.
• Bleeding Edge Technology in the Public Sector – It takes longer than most people realize to migrate to new software.
• Stimulus Money Getting to the Right People? – We got money, but did the government get it to the right people?
• Reading Under the Stars – This is what Elementary School and teaching is all about.
• Technology Can Hinder Education – Technology, yes but is it adequate?
• Students Are Affected by Teachers – Teacher can make a difference and the students can see that.
• I’d Rather Have A Root Canal – Our personal experiences shape our lives.
• Budget Cuts Mean Layoffs – Being shortsighted leads to problems.
• Family Before Anything Else – If you don’t take care of the family, everything else has no balance.
• Manatee School District Hurting or Helping Students? – A case where common sense is absent.
• Teamwork is Nice, But Do It Yourself is More Reliable – Sometimes you need to step to the plate and win the game.
• FoxNews Clueless on Education and Safety – Media and their one sided, uneducated view of education.
• Technology Doesn’t Help Without Parent Support – You can’t do it all, parents have to be involved.
• Set a Goal and Reach It – Singapore Marathon 2009 – A friend shows us what you can do if you try.
• Runas Command for Elevated Privileges – You don’t have to run as an administrator all the time.
• A Date Which Will Live In Infamy – My birthday and no one teaches about Pearl Harbor. Lest we forget our history.
• When Outlook Express Won’t Delete Emails – This is the direction I am taking Edutechation.com. Tech Support.
• Rain Man, Kim Peek Passes Away – We are all different, we all need someone to teach us at our level with respect.
• Happy New Year – Goals, not Resolutions. If we set goals we are more apt to complete them.

The last 5 or 6 links are the direction of Edutechation.com. Real life, how does it affect me, education and technology. Straight from the hip, all connected in one way or another, but all different.

Technology, Society, Education, School, Personal Development

Let’s start by explaining that most times computers slow down because they have a lot of programs resident in memory. These programs take up space, most of them aren’t needed because they are waiting for you to open another program, printer or Adobe or iTunes or an updater. The second thing that slows down your computer is the amount of temporary data that is stored on in your local temp folder. Third, is poorly organized hard drive space and fourth is just having to many uneeded programs or pictures limiting the amount of free space for the CPU to use for swapping program information from memory to the hard drive. Lastly, and this is a touchy one for some people, is the use of major companies AntiVirus or Internet Security programs. I will explain my reasoning for disliking the major software when I get there later.

The 5 easy steps are download, uninstall old, install new, create a Weekly Maintenance Folder folder, and run the programs. The initial setup is a one time deal that will take 15 to 30 minutes.

So lets start with what you need to download to keep your computer running well. With these 3 downloads and 2 programs already installed with Windows you are ready to go.

Step 1

1. Microsoft Security Essentials – for AntiVirus
2. MalwareBytes – click the download free version
3. CleanUp – to clean up the local profiles

After downloading these programs I highly suggest that you make a System Restore point.

Now that you have these programs downloaded and we are about to start installing and uninstalling things I will explain why we have downloaded Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) and you should remove your current antivirus. The only AV programs that I have found effective are MSE, AVG, Avira and Eset’s NOD32. All have a free version except NOD32, which precludes it from here because you have to pay for it. AVG tends to hide it’s free version so you end up downloading the pro/pay version. That knocks it out for me because I don’t recommend something that a normal person can’t find easily. Avira has a nag DLL that bothers you every time you do an update to buy the paid version and that is way to annoying to be free. I also will not bother clients with that nag. I like them all for their ability to fight viruses and their low overhead in loaded processes, but won’t use them for the reasons mentioned. That leaves MSE, which has had good reviews and has done a pretty good job in my tests with controlled virtual machines.

As for the major companies like Symantec (Norton) and McAfee, they both rate lower than anything else I have mentioned, they are bloatware with heavy memory overhead and they are just plain ineffective. I have watched McAfee let a virus or rouge antivirus install itself without question and I have had to clean it with the solutions above that you are going to use. The same programs that you are going to use in this article have caught and prevented the same viruses from installing or downloading at all when installed. That is why I will not use McAfee or Symantec on a system that I have to work on for a client. The choice is yours, a clean, fast computer or a slow infected one. Every one has an opinion on antivirus, so if you like Norton or McAfee leave them on and skip the MSE install.

Also included in the uninstall below are the Google Desktop, Search and Windows Search because they all access the hard drive all the time and slow it down immensely.

Step 2

1. Uninstall your current Antivirus, any Malware solutions and others including:
   1. AdAware
   2. SpyBot Search & Destroy
   3. RegCure
   4. Google Desktop
   5. Google Search
   6. Windows Search
   7. Reboot your computer now
2. Click Start > Run
   1. Type msconfig into the box
   2. Click the Startup tab
   3. Uncheck the following
      1. Adobe/Flash anything
      2. QTTask
      3. Java Updater
      4. Apple Updater
      5. Google Updater

Step 3

1. Install MSE, Malwarebytes and CleanUp
   1. Do any updates and set the MSE to run a scan weekly
   2. With CleanUp, uncheck the Open ReadMe and Run Application

Step 4

Now that you are done with the installs we need to create a Folder on the desktop and call it “Weekly Maintenance”. You can then drag and drop the MSE, Malwarebytes and CleanUp icons into this folder. You can also go to Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools to right click the Disk Defragmenter, hover over “Send To” then left click “Desktop (create shortcut)”. Drag the newly created shortcut to the Weekly Maintenance folder and you are ready for the last step, which is running the programs.

Step 5

The order to run the programs once a week is as follows:

1. CleanUp
   1. During your first run you need to click options and turn off Delete Cookies if you have user names and passwords saved for web sites and click “no” when it asks you if you want to run in demo mode the first time
2. Malwarebytes
   1. Always run an update first, then run a quick scan. The first time you run it you should run a complete scan

CleanUp takes 30 to 90 seconds to complete and up to 5 minutes the first time it’s run. A full scan of Malwarebytes will take from 45 minutes to 2 hours depending on how much you data you have. A quick scan takes 2o minutes.

MSE runs itself once a week from your initial setup.

The last program that you need to run is the defragmenter. You can do this manually each week or you can follow these instructions for Windows XP or in Windows 7 to setup a weekly schedule and forget about it the same as MSE.

There you go, 5 steps to a faster computer. Once a week just do Step 5 and you should have a clean running computer for a long time.

Tune Up, Computers, Antivirus, Malware, Defragment