Hardware Project

For my computer hardware project I decided to look in to upgrading my personal computer’s graphics and video card. I went to play an online, 3D, game and the program Second Life told me that my computer did not have a high enough processing speed or graphics card.

These are the system requirements to using Second Life:

Internet Connection: Cable or DSL Cable or DSL
Operating System: 2000, XP, or Vista XP or Vista
Computer Processor: 800 MHz Pentium III or Athlon, or better 1.5 GHz (XP), 2-GHz (Vista) 32-bit (x86) or better
Computer Memory: 512 MB or more 1 GB or more
Screen Resolution: 1024x768 pixels 1024x768 pixels or higher
Graphics Card for XP/2000**:

• NVIDIA GeForce 2, GeForce 4 MX or better
• OR ATI Radeon 8500, 9250 or better
• OR Intel 945 chipset

My system:

Cable (wireless) connection
OS: Windows XP
Processor: AMD Turion 64 2.14 Ghz
Memory: 1GB
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon Xpress 200M

MY connection is Cable but also wireless, I knew I may have some issues with speed of download. My OS is fine, my processor (although the program said it wouldn’t be fast enough) should be fine as well. My only assumption for the program thinking my processor wouldn’t work is because it is a 64 bit and perhaps Second Life hasn’t been programmed to recognize it yet. Memory should be fine as well. The only issue I see is with the graphics card not being fast enough. Oh, and did I mention I’m working on a notebook? This becomes the issue later.

When I first began playing with Second Life I didn’t know what any of this meant, so I just opened the program anyway, and to my surprise it worked just fine, as far as I know. It takes a little bit of time to load the images, but I attributed this to my wireless connection. The graphics look fine to me, (see my picture) but I don’t have a frame of reference for what they should look like or if the load speed was a result of the card. For these reasons, I decided to look in to getting a new graphics card.

Here’s what I learned:

The graphics card that I have was built for running media such as DVD’s and movie editing. It was not designed for 3D gaming. When I looked at upgrading it I found through several sources that you can’t!! The graphics card is pretty much glued to the mother board on my machine and is nearly impossible to replace. I didn’t check any prices because everywhere I looked said I couldn’t switch it, but if anyone were willing to replace it I can assume from my research that it wouldn’t be worth it. It reminds me of the transmission in a car. Even though the part is cheap, the labor is really expensive! I could look in to updating my memory, but as internet gaming advances this won’t solve the problem of the graphics issue.

I had no idea before this project that most notebooks were not meant for games. Apparently the Dell XPS is a notebook one can play games on (which makes me laugh because I watch “The Big Bang Theory” and that is the laptop they use to play online games).

So, after all of that, I have concluded that if I really want to get serious about online gaming I should probably buy a new desktop. I would buy new instead of refurbished because I would probably want at least a dual-core processor, (if not a triple or quad), for future games. If I bought an older machine I fear that a single processor won’t have enough speed to run these games in a year or so. If I buy new, then I will probably have a good 2 years before I need to upgrade the graphics card (that’s being hopeful!). There are some pretty decent desktops for gaming that run about $700-$900.

The best thing I learned in this project is that it is important to know what you want to do with your machine. After notebooks became popular I didn’t see the need for a desktop, but now it makes perfect sense. I wish I hadn’t have donated my old one. Even though the tower was 8 years old, I could have upgraded the different components and used it for much longer than I did.

Photo Editing Practice

Here's my piknik picture. I like that snow application the best! It would be really fun in a ski picture to add the snow. Also I like the clever names for the fonts. This one's jandal. Although, my favorite is probably Rock Star Whiplash. Ha ha!

NECC 2008

I recently attended the NECC conference in San Antonio, TX. It was extremely overwhelming at first. I later heard that there were 11,000 people there! The conference consisted of about 5, 1 hour sessions a day. There were probably 40 choices per time slot! I ended up going to different sessions than I originally planned the first day because the conference was so large that I didn't want to walk across the convention center. I felt like it was my first day on my college campus. Also, if you didn't arrive at a session 20 minutes early you would get shut out because it would fill up! However, I only missed 2 of my sessions; I think I did pretty well.

The session that had the most impact for me was the use of Wikipedia in the social studies classroom, combined with Alan November's keynote on the importance of teaching our students web literacy. These two sessions have completely changed the way I'm going to approach a unit I am teaching in the fall. Originally, I had decided to have my students research world religions and create a wiki of their research in groups, but after attending these two sessions I realized how limiting this is. Most likely my students would simply go to Wikipedia, find the entry on their assigned religion and copy & paste the information into their wiki. Not very valuable in the scheme of things. Instead, I'm going to have my students analyze Wikipedia as a social construct. Wikipedia is really a conversation rather than a place to find information. (As I learned at NECC). It indeed houses information, but since the information is created by Wikipedia users and is always in flux, it is a comment on what the users of Wikipedia value. I'm going to have my students analyze the content of the Wikipedia entries. I'll have them compare their textbooks to Wikipedia, analyze the hyper links in each post. I'll also have them explore the discussion & history tabs. I will then have them use their wikis as a place to discuss what they've learned. I might even add a part to the assignment where they create content in Wikipedia that they see is missing, or add to the discussion in Wikipedia. I believe that these strategies can move my students from simply consumers of information, to producers.

I attended so many great sessions it is hard to include everything in this post! Overall, the message I got from the conference was the shift that is happening as a result of having an Internet rich with information. As I have believed for a long time, teachers are no longer the keepers of the keys to knowledge. Instead, our mission is to guide our students through the world and help them understand how to collect and use knowledge!

Audacity & Second Life

Since my project for this class involves podcasting, I decided to investigate the use of the software Audacity for creation of podcasts. The software itself seems relatively easy to navigate once the user gets the hang of it. Recording is easy and the program also allows for easy mixing and fading of music. It also seems easy to post a completed podcast on podomatic.com for sharing in a community. I can think of a variety of uses for podcasting in the Social Studies classroom. One way that I think would be really neat is having students report on current events through podcasts and then share their podcasts with each other.

The only limitation that I have found on Audacity is that there doesn't seem to be a way to add visual content. For my project I would like to not only record my voice, but record my voice over a video for training purposes. I have done some preliminary research for this challenge and it seems that jing.com could serve my purpose of following my screen while I narrate.

I found the content for this week pretty interesting. I'm most intrigued by Second Life, although it does seem very odd to me to have another personality in the virtual world. I'm attending the TIE conference this week and I found that there is a session on Second Life for educators. I'm planning on going because although Second Life creeps me out (for lack of a better phrase) I think that I just need to experience it to understand it. Paul told me that many colleges & universities are creating Second Life tours for students to get an idea of the campus, and I'm extremely fascinated by the idea that people are making real money in a virtual world. I think I need to get over my hesitation and jump in to experience what Second Life has to offer.

Week 1

This week was mostly review for me, but I did learn about a few new applications of the open source software. I was really interested to learn that you can create forms and surveys with Google docs. I'm especially excited about the ability to have Google docs compile the survey data! I know a lot about Google apps as I lead a professional development class at my school on Google uses in the classroom. I have been exploring options for my project. I want to create a video that I can post on my website for my students on using the open source applications such as Google docs or Open Office. I feel like this will ease a lot of my frustration as a teacher because these tools are available everywhere. I have been dealing a lot with computer excuses; it has become the new "my dog ate my homework" excuse. I see a lot of potential with the tools we covered in class to alleviate this problem!!