Building a Treadmill Desk

Wrote about treadmill desks back in September 2008. Here is a handy tutorial at Instructables on how to build one or around $150. I sold my treadmill last year to gain a little elbow room in my house so I can't try this one out. Still think it's a good idea though.

Here's a link to one study done with school age children and treadmills:  Physical Activity May Strengthen Children's Ability To Pay Attention. (This was not the one I was looking for originally, I think there is one other study out there somewhere that looked at eighth graders, but can't find it.  Anyone?)

The authors three recomendations:

• scheduling outdoor recess as a part of each school day;
• offering formal physical education 150 minutes per week at the elementary level, 225 minutes at the secondary level;
• encouraging classroom teachers to integrate physical activity into learning.

Wonder what a study looking at teachers and the amount of exercise they get during a day might reveal about their health?  Their stress levels?  Their ability to think and plan?

[Image captured from Instructables: http://www.instructables.com/id/Treadmill-Desk/]

Preparing students

This article, Encouraging Student Success, on Adobe Education Leaders discusses some areas where our web students could improve in terms of preparing themselves for the work place. He lists the following areas of possible focus for students involved in web design.

• Develop a good understanding of web standards (and why they are important – for maintainability of the code, for improved search engine ranking, for increased accessibility and all the other reasons). Tools are important, but students need to know the fundamentals before they can effectively employ those tools.
• Increase the emphasis on web accessibility and usability in the curriculum.
  Increase the emphasis on professional behaviors (arrive on time, test your work before turning it in, admit when you don’t know something and so forth).
• Help students develop a solid understanding of the use of the appropriate tool and when one must go beyond a given tool.

I am giving these ideas some thought as I plan for my web classes next year. I struggle with how much time to spend on basic file structure and HTML before getting the kids into a web editor. It seems that I often err on too little of the basics. I am looking for the perfect balance.

[ Image: Flickr: "Internet Splat Map"; Uploaded on October 17, 2004 by jurvetson: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/916142/ (CC: Attribution 2.0-Generic)]