Archive for April 2006

PowerPoint: The Blank Slide

Posted by: rkassissieh
April212006

Teachers periodically invite me into classes to give an introductory lesson on PowerPoint. Happily, I have been influenced by Presentation Zen, the leading blog on presentation techniques. The author repeatedly emphasizes principles of simplicity and clarity with, well, simplicity and clarity!

blank slide
Blank slide
Last week, I tried something new during my presentation: the blank slide. During most presentations I have seen, some slide is always on display. Even when the speaker elaborates or digresses for several minutes, audience members are distracted by some visual element not necessarily related to the point at hand. During my presentation to the kids, I put up a completely black slide, and something remarkable happened. Every student in the room stopped looking at the screen and looked squarely at me.

It makes sense. Once the slide has served its purpose of providing visual support to an idea, it should go away. I will make liberal use of this technique at NECC in July.

Now, wasn't that better than showing you my slides?

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Boot Camp: Let Us Expect More

Posted by: rkassissieh
April062006

Let us not get too excited about Boot Camp. We should have had this sort of cross-platform flexibility 15 years ago. This is what VirtualPC attempted to do, poorly.

Sure, the ability to boot a Mac into either Windows or OSX is going to have a big impact on school technology purchasing. We were just having this debate the other day. UHS has historically had two computer labs: one for PCs and one for Macs. Next semester, we will drop to one lab during construction. Should it be Mac or PC? More users want PCs, but several classes are wholly dependent on Macs. Maru a Pula is in the same situation. The computer science teachers needs PCs, as most IGCSE curriculum materials are based on Visual Basic and Frontpage. Other teachers would prefer to have Macs in order to take advantage of their strengths in the areas of desktop publishing and video. Now, it will be possible for a school to have one lab that can either function as a PC lab or Mac lab depending on the needs of the class.

How soon will people lose patience with the requirement to reboot the computer in order to switch operating systems? Should we not be able to run Mac and Windows applications simultaneously and alt-tab between them at any time? I have both a PC and a Mac on my desk. I can switch between them at any time and simultaneously run processes in both operating systems. A dual-boot Mac is not going to help with that need.
Several companies, including VMware, a subsidiary of the data storage company EMC, are working on a technology that slips a thin layer of instructions underneath the existing Macintosh operating system. Such an approach would conceivably allow the Macintosh to run Macintosh, Windows and Linux programs simultaneously at full speed.
Source: New York Times
Now that is a product I can get excited about.

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