Codepad – The ClassHelper.org™ Blog

This week’s education news roundup brings updates on the efficacy of school voucher programs in D.C., the ongoing legal saga surrounding a university professor, presidential job picks, and the continued impact of recession on education.

Study Supports School Vouchers (The Washington Post) – A study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education has found that D.C. students who used vouchers to attend private schools outperformed students at public schools. This has sparked new debate on already controversial voucher programs.

Jury Says Professor Was Wrongly Fired (The New York Times) – A jury has ruled in favor of Ward L. Churchill, a University of Colorado professor who was terminated for statements referring to World Trade Center victims as “little Eichmanns.” The jury awarded the professor $1 in the case, the smallest amount legally permissible in consideration of the verdict. The professor has asked the judge to order his job be reinstated.

Obama Unveils Picks for Key Ed. Dept. Jobs (Education Week) – President Obama has publicly announced two choices for major Department of Education posts, naming John Q. Easton and Martha J. Kanter.

College Grads Face Worst Job Market In Years (USA Today) – With employers planning to hire 22% fewer graduates this spring, many recent college grads are thankful for any job they can get.

Northern Arizona to Lay Off 45, Close 4 Campuses (U.S. News & World Report) – Northern Arizona University has announced plans to lay off 45 employees and close four college campuses amidst the economic turmoil of the recession. Approximately $21 billion has been cut from the university’s budget.

ClassHelper.org’s computer science section has a new addition. The Linux VPS host tutorial will teach you how to turn any reasonably modern computer into a virtual private server hosting platform. The guide uses Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS as the base server operating system, with virtualization provided by VMware Server 2.0. It includes full instructions for creating a Debian Linux virtual machine with the ISPConfig hosting control panel installed on it.

This weeks’s news digest examines zero tolerance laws and the effects they have on children, the Texas evolution battle, federal stimulus money, and how the economy is affecting student university choices. Read the rest of this entry »

As a follow-up to my post about Celestia, here’s a video produced of the demo mode. It was created on my Toshiba Satellite laptop (AMD Turion X2, 3 GB RAM, ATI Radeon 3100 256 MB). If you create your own videos from Celestia sequences, please be aware that the real-time frame rate will drop considerably while video recording is in progress; this is normal, due to the need to grab a lot of information from the animation. Read the rest of this entry »

Fractals have always held a certain sway over me; they’re a beautiful representation of math, with nearly limitless possibilities for learning and exploration. You can use the open source application Xaos to get acquainted with a diverse range of fractal functions, from the famous Mandelbrot set to less well-known examples. This package is available for Linux, MacOSX, and Windows operating systems. Read the rest of this entry »

This classroom software review focuses on KGeography, a free and open source application from the KDE-Edu suite of educational software for Linux-based operating systems. The examples shown here are running under Ubuntu Linux, but the application is available for a wide variety of distributions. Check your favorite distro’s package manager; you’ll probably find it there.

With support for hundreds of countries, this application is fully capable of helping students learn and reinforce a ton of geography knowledge. Here’s the default startup view, allowing the user to pick a country to work with. Read the rest of this entry »

We experienced a few hours of downtime while investigating a kernel issue on the server that hosts the ClassHelper.org network of sites; things are back to nomal now, with a shiny new kernel installed. We apologize to anyone who was inconvenienced by this outage. Thanks again for your support!

Everyone needs a little down time every now and again. Whether you’re taking a break from hours of programming, trying to calm a conference-induced headache, or just relaxing at home, these Linux-based games offer a nice chance to unwind. The titles listed here are all available in the Ubuntu software repositories; just search for “games” in Synaptic if you want an idea of just how many choices are available. Read the rest of this entry »