On the Threshold of Tomorrow:
Podcasting MS Windows, Mac iLife & Macromedia Pizzazz to the World!
By Bob Pauley ([email protected])
Bob Pauley, Lantana Community Middle School
Intended Audience: GI (General Interest)
Byte me! Planning for the future: Let vivid color enter your black & white world!
How tech-savvy are you in this wondrous world of digital technology? Your students?
Are they hip to the binary code? Can they decipher the hexadecimal system of
numbering? What does the ASCII code have to do with anything? Is pixilation in their
vocabulary? Do you microprocess your testing and lesson plans? Do you scan and
electronically file your important documents? Is nanotechnology coming to a
classroom near you? Have you mastered digital photography and videography?
What about podcasting? Are your computers pdf ready? Do you play a role in your
school’s Website or would you like to? What is a terabyte? A petabyte? Did you know
scientists are predicting the one-petabyte (that’s 250 – or 1.1259 X 1015 – just over a
quadrillion bytes) computer will arrive by 2010? Wow!
Dazzle those creative young learners with brilliance
For PIXILATION PIZZAZZ we should consider:
The Windows PC has features the iMac does not!
The iMac has features the Windows PC does not!
And I betcha I can show you more of that variety!
The bottom line, our kids should know about both!
Macromedia can work wonders in either of them!
It’s all simply the manipulation of ones and zeroes!
But do your students understand how that works???
These binary bits n’ bytes effortlessly manipulated!
Professionalism can be enhanced by using pdf files!
An Interactive Schoolpad adds pizzazz to any class!
A brief intro into music adds class to the classroom!
The rage of the age with today’s kids is Podcasting!
And a podcast can be in audio, text, image or video!
A podcast can be displayed to the whole wide world!
….And it looks great in COLOR, MOTION AND SOUND!
Take a byte out of life: Mastering the bountiful byte
It’s good to know where all those pixels come from: Bits n’ bytes. Zeroes and ones. It
takes 100 million of them (actually 9 digits, a 1 followed by 8 zeroes) to show the number 256
– we can check it out on our scientific calculator. Convert that to hexadecimal and you’ve got
a much more controllable 1 followed by 2 zeroes, or 100. I have my kids make an Excel table
of numbers comparing binary, decimal and hexadecimal numbers – an inside look at how
computers work. Computers like binary and hexadecimal numbers because they work so well
together – Every 1111 in binary is simply F in hex, or 15 in decimal numbering.
When binary and hex are used in combination, your computer can perform sheer
magic – every time you turn it on! When you only have zeroes and ones to work with you
have to do some outrageous things, thinking astronomically on the one hand and in nanoterms
on the other. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, 10-9 , about one hundred-thousandth the
thickness of a human hair! Here we’re dealing successfully with serious atom-sized particles.
Most students don’t know this and it’s not in our average textbook. We must tell them; teach
them. Also, Steve Forbes says your stock portfolio ought to know about nanotechnology.
Magical manipulation
Scientists accomplish amazing things at the QUANTUM level. From Physics Today:
“When matter is manipulated on the atomic scale, optical, electrical, magnetic, and other
characteristics of materials change. ‘It's quantum mechanical in nature, and quantum
mechanics is pure magic,’ says Stanley Williams, director of quantum science research at
Hewlett-Packard Co in Palo Alto, California. ‘The new properties come out and make
themselves available—and a lot of the time they are technologically useful. For example, if
you take a hard material, a clay or a ceramic, and powder it down to the nanoscale, and mix
it with a polymer, you wind up with a nanocomposite that can have a combination of
incredible hardness and toughness never seen in the natural world.’"
Just what is a BYTE?
A byte is 20, or 1, set of eight bits. A bit, of course, is a zero or a one (coming first
from a vacuum tube, later a transistor, and now from a microprocessor) that can tell the
computer go or no go, closed or open, yes or no, true or false – whatever it has been
programmed to determine. 210 is 1,024 bytes and is called a kilobyte (KB). A megabyte (MB)
is 220 bytes. Next comes the gigabyte, once the ultimate measure of computer memory, 230 or
just over a billion bytes. A terabyte, soon to be on the shelves, is a measure of computer
storage capacity that is 240 or approximately a trillion bytes (that is, a thousand gigabytes).
Bringing your classroom to the threshold of tomorrow with Digital Technology
If we were dealing only in text, gigabytes would handle all our problems. Since a book is
roughly one MB you could read a book a day and never run out of memory with a 30 gigabyte
computer. The Library of Congress, roughly 24 million books, would take just slightly more
space. Dealing with images, music and video, however, the computer fills up much more
quickly, which accounts for what you are about to read.
Now comes 240 and 250, our next hurdles. These are the terabytes and petabytes we will
get to know more quickly than we realize. Nanotechnology becomes essential to make all
those bytes manageable as scientists cram them into tiny spaces. It becomes essential for them
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to bring out the microscopes – and vastly improve them! A terabyte, as we said, is about a
trillion bytes; and a petabyte is about a quadrillion bytes. That’s a 1 followed by 15 zeroes.
Two of the most important paragraphs ever written – please read at least twice
Researchers have produced a nanoscale device that can sense magnetic fields over 100
times weaker than current techniques allow. If applied to hard disks this could increase
storage by a factor of 1,000, turning today's 200-gigabyte disks into 200-terabyte devices. The
new system uses an effect called ballistic magnetoresistance, works well at room temperature
and would be relatively easy to integrate with current disk drive manufacturing.
At this rate, the one-petabyte (1-million-gigabyte) disk should arrive just in time for 2010.
Comparatively, the world disk drive production in 1995 totaled 20 petabytes. We won’t be
worried about this for awhile, but exabytes, zettabytes and yottabytes are the new terms for
260, 270 and 280 and they’re coming within your lifetime. Mr. Webster doesn’t know about
those yet. For the record, you may want to review the following as astronomical numbers
become a little more relevant to us:
This Number
million
Has this
many Zeros
6
billion
9
trillion
12
quadrillion
15
quintillion
18
sextillion
21
septillion
24
octillion
27
nonillion
30
decillion
33
undecillion
36
duodecillion
39
tredecillion
42
quattuordecillion
45
quindecillion
48
sexdecillion
51
septendecillion
54
octodecillion
57
novemdecillion
60
vigintillion
63
centillion
303
-
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All of which brings us to podcasting. And vodcasting. And blogging. If you’re like
me, your 60-gigabyte laptop is already bursting at the seams with movie clips, pictures and
songs. Ten years from now we’ll look back upon our limited computer memory with a smile.
That problem is about to be a thing of the past. As videotaping becomes more common we’ll
use up more space than we comfortably have. Our CDs hold 700 MB and our DVDs about 4.7
GB (seven times more). When they layer and double-side DVDs they hold four times more. In
my case a 100 GB external hard drive saves the day.
So what do we do right now about our immediate shortfall of digital storage space?
We go online! And we go global – one presentation at a time! This is podcasting! This is what
lies ahead for our students – all those young and prolific minds – as they enter into the
threshold of tomorrow.
Additional info is available at
Bob Pauley: [email protected]
Brandie Natera: [email protected]
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