I was up in the mountains about 7 miles away when it started... It's ridiculously dry right now, high winds, and high temps. All that's going to be possible is evacuating people. The bad thing is it's going in the opposite direction of the 2000 fire, so there's plenty of fuel. The Bandalier National park has had about half of it's area burned so far as of earlier today. Thoughts and prayers to all who are in its path.

Most superintendents tend to be teachers, turned principals, turned superintendents. In a lot of states, such as Texas where I teach, they base retirement based on the last 5 year average of salary earned... When a superintendent may make 80k-130k per year that's a pretty big incentive. That does not mean they were good teachers, and for the most part means a large gap between college and becoming a superintendent.

Overall I thought the premise of the letter rang very true.

The core teachers at the school I teach at were all issued iPads around November or December. They are stock models, the only major thing that seems to be locked down is install of applications? I'm a band director that was overlooked on it - so I'm not sure on the administrative situation there.

As far as using them in the classroom? I actually have a student who owns one and uses it around school I think more than the netbook that she was issued. I don't honestly believe they are any better/or worse than the netbook on writing papers. The Dell netbooks that our school bought last year are terrible to the point of being unusable without an external mouse. The screen on the iPad + thinness really makes it better on that point. An external bluetooth keyboard in theory could make it as useable as the netbook.

My biggest concerns about passing out iPads to kids though are the costs of replacement screens. As it is the netbooks this year have been dying at a higher rate than the first year (dropped, stepped on, etc.) The iPad 2 screens in particular are not supposed to be cheap if I remember correctly. The flip side though, is that if people would start allowing students to access their textbooks from them - and be able to annotate on them - it might be better there. Most of the time though our teachers are so locked into this curriculum system (C-SCOPE) that I don't even know how much they use their textbooks. They use a lot of materials from there that could be just as easily shared via PDF on iPads.

For me I love the device. It's great for so many things, and I love the flexibility to have music scores - and hopefully marching drill this year - on it.

Nobody could predict that... well not until after the fiasco that was the Star Spangled Banner!

Not sure exactly about the filtering, but I know that the singing was recorded with the performers listening and matching with headphones on. I also know there was a TON of entries to get into this video. Whitacre has almost a cult following in the choral world, and many people jumped at the chance. It could be that one of the ways they selected the vocalists was to throw out poor audio files.

The composer, Eric Whitacre, has been doing quite a few cool new things integrating multi-media into his works recently. This internet video is the biggest one so far, and I find it absolutely amazing how the project came off. The person who did the video editing did a great job. It's been talked about on CNN, BBC, and now much more imporantly Slashdot! ;-) He's got a pretty faithful following on Facebook.

If you're into music at all check out some of his compositions. I'm a band person (director), but his choral stuff is amazing. He's also transcribed many of his pieces (including this one) into band works and written a number of orchestral pieces. (October is by far my favorite)