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Saturday, August 30, 2008
Comcast's Decision To Cap Bandwidth And It's Effects On Homeschooling
Many of you may not know this but Comcast cable internet provider will begin "capping" bandwidth beginning October 1 of this year. For those who do not know what this means let me explain. Comcast will begin putting a 250 gigabit cap, or limit, on how much internet you use each month. Comcast already has a system in place called a tiered usage rate for choosing plans of different internet connection speeds. Now it will be penalizing you if you use more than 250 gigabites of what is called "bandwidth." Simply put, bandwidth is how much sending and recieving of information over the internet you comsume. Downloading, watching movies and voip phoning (skype) for instance takes quite a bit of bandwidth. Comcast will begin keeping track of this on a monthly basis and if you pass their limit then they will begin taking penalizing measures. First time offenders will be warned and second time offenders will be cut off from using comcast internet for a year and/or charged for usage over that amount. The details have been rolled out in Comcast's excessive use policy located here,
While this cap may sound like a fairly large limit, for a homeschooling family it could be easily reached if you are a frequent downloader of homeschool information (like us), you use internet phone, chat, online conferencing, game systems like xboxes that connect to the internet for gaming, or anything else you do through the internet like trying to manage a homeschool web page or get tons of mail you have to sort through. Below is a link explaining the details of Comcast's decision and it's effects.
Comcast will not be providing a meter of sorts to help in judging how much bandwidth you use and if you use several operating systems like we do, (linux, BSD unix, as well as windows), keeping track of such usage could be a nightmare. Programs provided on the internet are almost all windows based and useless for us. If you are network savy and use a broadcom based wireless router there are programs out there that will provide a usage meter for your router. This is the best bet anyway since it will give you a total of bandwidth comsumed for your whole household at the source of the connection as opposed to having one on each computer. The links to the firmware to install on supported routers are here,
http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv3/
or
http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato
I am currently looking on ebay for such a router to replace our non-broadcom based one.
I do not know how we can fight this but if someone has constructive comments they are welcome. I could only wish there was more competion against Comcast. I would certainly switch. As with many of you, we can only get Comcast in our area.
By Courtlyn Phillips-(Debbie's Husband)
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
contest
http://learningathisfeet.blogspot.com/2008/08/tos-digital-subscription-giveaway.html
Friday, August 8, 2008
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Free Preview Chat for Back to School Blast
Preview Chat (Invite your friends!)
Tonight, August 7, 2008--8PM CST- (Note the time is Central Standard time... make adjustments for your time zone... it is 9pm Eastern time for me)
How to Plan and Implement Lapbooks!
with Katie Kubesh from http://www.HandsofaChild.com
For joining the Preview Chats, here are directions
How to Join Us Online in Our Conference Room...
We provide the software download-free. Here is the link:
http://www.cindyrushton.com/Conference.exe
Click to begin download or copy/paste into your internet browser and click ENTER. It will only take a few minutes to download into your computer, but you want to do it ahead of time so you don't miss a minute in the Conference Room. After it is downloaded on your computer, it will set up an icon on your desktop that says CONFERENCE. Then, you will only have to click it to open up the room. Here are your instructions from there:
When you are ready to enter, you will enter your NAME or EMAIL ADDRESS in the first blank.
Add the following information when prompted:
Name of Room: Talk-a-Latte
Password: letschat (password is case sensitive-do not enter any extra characters or spaces-password is only in effect during the actual chat) Remember...your password is different for chats and other classes. It only works for the room when the room is open for the study.
See you there,
Debbie
More links for the Olympics
This site has two great free pdf's with samples of their Journey to Beijing Activity books for two different age groups. The free sample looks great... I wish I had the $10 to buy the whole book. Well at least we get a couple of great free pages. They have a number of related products for sale also.
http://www.teachercreated.com/free/activities.php
I found this link on Dori's Tumble from yesterday - thanks Dori-- check it out here - she posts more great free stuff every day.
http://dorioakes.tumblr.com/
Here are some links that give info about the history of the Olympic games:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Olympics/
http://www.crystalinks.com/greekolympics.html
http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/greeks/games/olympics.htm
Donn's History site
http://members.aol.com/MrDonnUnits/GreekOlympics.html
Here are some Lesson Plans
http://www.picadome.fcps.net/lab/teacherl/lesson_plans/olympics/default.htm
This is an article on how major sports events affect the environment in a negative way and what is being to done to solve some problems. Beijing and the 2008 Olympics are included. Beijing is one of the world's most polluted cities but steps are being taken to improve the situation:
http://www.boyslife.org/gogreenseries/4551/go-green-team/
Lots of info about the Olympics on this site: details about the city, how to encourage good sportsmanship, all about the different sports included in the Olympics, fun activities for the whole family, and fun facts.
http://fun.familyeducation.com/olympic-games/outdoor-activities/32826.html
On this page you will find many activities and ideas for an exciting week of Olympic festivities. Introduce your children to the idea of people from many countries all over the world gathering to compete and have fun. Give each child who participates in an event an Olympic Badge.
http://www.childfun.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=170
Olympic-inspired activities and games for fun, exercise, and challenges for the whole family!
http://home.howstuffworks.com/backyard-games-for-kids.htm/printable
The following is the search results in Internet archive for out of copyright books related to the Olympics http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=olympics%20AND%20mediatype%3Atexts
click this link, Then click on the book cover. It will take you to the flash version of the book. Pages 30 - 37 are about the ancient Olympics.
http://www.evan-moor.com/Title.aspx?CurriculumID=3&ClassID=232&SeriesID=92&TitleID=347&EmcID=355
this is a link to another blog with a list of links for the olympics
http://learning-adventures.blogspot.com/2008/07/2008-summer-olympic-games-unit-study.html
Olympic Games
Celebrate the world's biggest sporting festival.
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Monday, August 4, 2008
Great Idea from a friend's site
If you use Saxon Math this is a great idea... if you don't use Saxon this is a great idea!!!
The Geography stuff on the back is great too!!!
I ALMOST wish I had little ones to do this with... guess I will have to wait for future grandkids... someday!
Here is the site...
http://www.wayzleyacademy.homeschooljournal.net/2008/08/02/portable-circle-time-revisted/
