Category Archives: Low End Mac

Analysis, advice, editorial, opinion, and commentary.

A Roll-Your-Own Spelling Program

Steve Wood,  Low End Mac, Teacher Tools, View from the Classroom - 1999.12.13 -

1999 – In the dark days when we had practically no budget and seemingly unlimited kids in our special education classroom, we saw the need for a “sure thing” self-image builder to get the kids to believe in themselves again and give us a good effort. Most of our students had extremely limited reading skills […]

Monday Blues

Steve Wood,  Low End Mac, View from the Classroom - 1999.12.06 -

Monday, November 29, 1999, 7:15 a.m. – Despite my turkey hangover, I eagerly enter my classroom early, ready to face a challenging week of last minute placement conferences scheduled to beat some state or federal cutoff date. I tap the space bar of the 8550 file and print server to wake it from its peaceful […]

Teacher Tools: Teachers Love ‘Free’

Steve Wood,  Low End Mac, Teacher Tools, View from the Classroom - 1999.11.29 -

1999 – The old saying “You get what you pay for” – besides being an excellent example of a dangling preposition – is usually pretty good advice. In the area of educational software for the Mac, there are some notable exceptions to the adage. My recent experience setting up a lab with just a few […]

Teacher Tools: Gradebooks

Steve Wood,  Low End Mac, Teacher Tools, View from the Classroom - 1999.11.22 -

1999 – Every six to nine weeks, teachers face one of their less favorite tasks – grades. If they’re the diligent sort, they’ve spent every evening of the grading period carefully recording and averaging their students’ scores. For the rest of us party animals, grades mean at least a near “all-nighter” of entering scores and […]

Teacher Tools: AppleWorks

Steve Wood,  Low End Mac, Teacher Tools, View from the Classroom - 1999.11.15 -

1999 – Two of the most opinionated and product loyal groups of folks I know are teachers and Macintosh users. The old adage of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” is often their battle cry. I’ve watched fellow educators fight tooth and nail to continue using older educational materials (often with very good reason) […]

Mac OS 9: I Think I Like It!

Steve Wood,  Low End Mac, View from the Classroom - 1999.11.08 -

1999 – I’ve never been able to do a prerelease column about a Mac OS update or upgrade, as either I’ve not had access to them before release or have been gagged by an Apple NDA. After reading that Tom McKenna of the G3 All-in-one Stop Shop had received his copy of Mac OS 9 […]

Claris Home Page Lives!

Steve Wood,  Low End Mac, View from the Classroom - 1999.11.03 -

1999 – I’m writing this column under duress. I’m writing while conducting a conflict test. I’m also kicking myself for not doing this test before I dropped my excellent editor and publisher, Dan Knight, a note this week saying that Claris Home Page appears to break with Mac OS 9. Both Dan and I are […]

Lab Fun!

Steve Wood,  Low End Mac, View from the Classroom - 1999.10.25 -

1999 – Occasionally you just stumble into a job that gets bigger and bigger the more you look at it. I’d airily made a promise early last summer to help our school’s technology coordinator clean up the machines in our two elementary computer labs. “It shouldn’t be too difficult,” I thought, “just wipe the drives, […]

This Week’s ‘Non-Column’

Steve Wood,  Low End Mac, View from the Classroom - 1999.10.15 -

1999 – This week’s edition of A View from the Classroom will be appearing right here on MacInSchool sometime . . . next week! While I’d like to emulate some of my students and shift responsibility somewhere else, i.e., “But Dan, the dog ate my homework column,” I’ve got to fess up and say it […]

Mac Troubleshooting 101

Steve Wood,  Low End Mac, View from the Classroom - 1999.10.07 -

1999 – While my job is to teach special education students, I still help out with various Mac maladies around our building. If you’ve read any of my previous school columns, you may remember that my elementary is heavily populated with LC 5200s with a lesser number of 5400s and 5500s. There always seems to […]

My Menagerie of Macs

Steve Wood,  Low End Mac, View from the Classroom - 1999.09.27 -

1999 – After a summer of swimming and camping, summer jobs, and/or just generally lounging about, kids across America have been back in our nation’s classrooms for several weeks. My school started back on August 16!

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