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Oregon To Let Students Use Spell Check on State Exams 235

Posted by samzenpus from the is-there-a-proofreader-in-the-house? dept.
Starting in 2011, the Oregon Department of Education will let students spell check their work before submitting state exams. From the article: "The move is supposed to help the assessments focus less on typos and more on their writing skills. 'We are not letting a student's keyboarding skills get in the way of being able to judge their writing ability,' said state Superintendent Susan Castillo. 'As we're using technology to improve what we're doing with assessments as a nation, we believe that spell check will be one of those tools.'"
Games

More Evidence For Steam Games On Linux 256

Posted by Soulskill from the come-on-valve-spill-the-beans dept.
SheeEttin writes "Back in November 2008, Phoronix reported that Linux libraries appeared in the Left 4 Dead demo, and then in March, Valve announced that Steam and the Source engine were coming to Mac OS X. Now, Phoronix reports that launcher scripts included with the (closed beta) Mac version of Steam include explicit support for launching a Linux version."
Programming

Sid Meier and the 48-Hour Game 58

Posted by Soulskill from the crash-course dept.
MMBK writes "Sid Meier is possibly the most influential game designer ever, having developed the Civilization series, among others. This video documentary looks at his past while he travels to the University of Michigan for the 48-hour game design competition, which was hosted by his son."

Comment Ask for input from your students (Score 2, Interesting) 962

by FreshKarma (#26068131) Attached to: Best Introduction To Programming For Bright 11-14-Year-Olds?

If your students aren't total noobs, ask them about what languages or web technologies they might have thought about trying out, like, someday.

If they are total noobs, ask them what their favorite sites are. Protip: do not roll your eyes at any point after asking this question.

Either way, it will give them familiar ground to work from, and a little bit of context. myspace may be godawful, but learning from the mistakes of others is second only to learning from your own mistakes.

Comment Cobian Backup - Windows Freeware (Score 1) 393

by FreshKarma (#26022727) Attached to: I Backup My Personal Data..
I stumbled across Cobian Backup while looking for a free backup solution to replace the trialware that came with her new WD backup drive. Works great. Supports encryption, 7/zip, FTP, full/incremental/differential, multiple schedules, perform missed backup, parked backups, admin email, run as service with specified users, the list goes on and on. If it bundled tar/gzip, SFTP/NFS, and rsync, it would be the perfect Windows workstation backup solution, at any price. As it is, it's damn good.

Comment Grasshoppa, listen up (Score 2, Interesting) 212

by FreshKarma (#25859425) Attached to: Can You Be Denied the Right To Support OSS?
There is no such thing as "fairness" when it comes to corporations. This is not a criticism, just an observation. Fairness is a positive yet vague concept that is easily open to interpretation, something corporate legal departments avoid like pro-bono work in the inner-city (zing!). You make your own fairness. Your quickest path to having decisions made your way is to move up to decision maker.

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