This may be the most annoying video I have ever seen, but then again I apparently suck at marketing because the guy who remixed the original into this got millions of views.

Thank goodness it did though as the technology could be a major breakthrough and it has helped the inventors blow through their fundraising goal at Indiegogo. (Go pitch in.)

With an apparently working prototype, the idea of paving roads, driveways and parking lots with solar panels opens up all kinds of possibilities. Think about the end of polluting power plants, lights in the roads that can change on the fly and can warn us when there are road issues, not to mention they are heated so no more unplowed winter roads. It’s almost too good to be true. For once I hope I’m wrong. I’d love for this to be true!

Yesterday I discussed Apple’s squeeze, where Chromebooks at a couple hundred dollars each are becoming “good enough” devices for our classrooms and will crowd out the significantly more expensive Macbooks. Today I wanted to share the teacher perspective.

The demand among teachers at my daughter’s school is extremely high. They are literally jockeying for position to get their hands on laptops and tablets.

What a change from 10 years ago when I was working on handhelds in schools. Back then very few wanted them. The teachers in place were mostly scared of technology and the fact that the students knew more than they did. Not now. The teachers are dieing for them.

In fact the only ones who are still scared of all this seem to be the parents. A few can’t understand how students could possibly be using these devices to deeper their understanding and further their educations. I get the impression too many parents think the kids are using them to play games and give the teachers slack time. My guess is that’s how these parents use the devices with their kids at home, which is a real shame.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I couldn’t be more impressed with the teachers and their desire to utilize technology as an educational device. I think next year I might have to put together a video of what these kids are doing to help the parents.

In the upper elementary grades the students keep blogs on what they are reading, sharing them with other kids who comment and have discussions online. They are all learning to be good online citizens. They produce presentations and even use video to help them practice. They research what they are studying, watch videos of lessons and examples that further their knowledge and understanding of topics.

I’m barely scratching the surface of what they are up to.

In the meantime in ten short years we’ve gone from “why in the world would students use a computer to study” to “of course they need to learn with computers,” at least from our school and educators.

For me, all I can utter is, “finally!” I’m so excited to be so intricately involved in making this happen, and so thankful that the school, educators and parent’s organization are all motivated.

One place where Apple is about to get squeezed is in education. My daughter’s elementary school has aging Macbook laptops which the district bought for the school when it opened six years ago. Those laptops are ancient, the batteries are dying and we are looking at new solutions. Luckily we have a very strong parent organization that funds a lot of programs and has the desire to put money into technology.

Last year, our first year putting money into tech, we bought the school 20 Macbook Airs at $1000 each and 50 iPad minis at $500. The Macbook Airs replaced one of the old Macbook carts. All of the systems are in such high demand that the lower grades can’t get their hands on any of them. Our expectation was to replace laptops each year, meaning that the school would end up with a total refresh of devices over five years.

For next year we looked at Macbook Airs but have instead decided, after consultation with our teachers and input from people who have worked with them, to purchase Chromebooks. The price difference is substantial. We can buy 3-5 Chromebooks for the price of one Macbook. Add in the drop in price for iPad minis (now $280 educational purchase) and the parent organization can buy more systems for less money.

Next year not only will we replace laptops and add more iPad minis for 3-5 grades, but we will also be able to purchase iPad minis for the lower grades as well. They will still be shared, of course, but now we will have full classes of devices (30 in a cart) at 3-5 and a couple of partial carts for K-2. We couldn’t do that if we were acquiring Macbooks.

And that’s the problem for Apple. As more students do everything online — and these kids are almost completely on the web and Google Docs — then the logo on the box no longer matters. This same effect helped Apple sell devices when the world was Windows. Now it is about to happen to Apple, too, at least in education. A completely online device is fine for students who are doing everything online, and the price is hard to beat.

Of course, this is where tablets come in for Apple. I think they see this writing on the wall — that an online, ridiculously inexpensive Chromebook laptop could be the laptop of choice — and is working hard to make iPads an educational alternative. Notice in our school there is more than enough demand for both.

Apple’s at an inflection point. Chromebooks are finally good enough. It will be interesting to see what happens in our classrooms the next few years.

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UPDATE: Let me simplify: 6 grades, 4 classes per grade, 30 computers per class = 720 computers

720 iPad minis = $201,600
720 Chromebooks = $144,000
720 Macbook Airs = $720,000

Assuming we had $720,000 lying around to buy computers, which we don’t, instead of buying Macbooks we could buy EVERY STUDENT IN THE SCHOOL TWO Chromebooks AND TWO iPads and still have almost $30,000 left over.

Of course we are looking very closely at Chromebooks and iPads. This is not good news for Apple in one of its best markets for laptops.

I started programming in 1986 when I got my first computer at age 13. It was an Apple IIc and the primary language on that machine was BASIC, so that’s what I learned. I exclusively programmed in BASIC until 1989 when my high school got Macintoshes and we spent the next two years working in Pascal.

When I graduated from high school I stopped programming for a few years. I started again in 1994, the year I moved to Oregon, and programmed steadily until 2001. In those years I learned C, a little assembly language, a little Microsoft’s foundation classes and finally Palm OS’ libraries. I also worked in BASIC for Excel and Access.

In 2001 my development team kicked me out of the dev room and told me to go focus on the business, which I did until the company shrunk again and I had to write code. That year was 2007. I learned Java and the Blackberry OS’ libraries, learned Ruby and Rails, and then got back into C development, this time with iOS’ libraries and Objective-C. I focused on Rails and iOS for the next few years before I started learning Javascript last summer. In the last year I’ve written more Javascript then Objective-C.

I left off one “language” that I’ve learned in the last year, probably the one I find most powerful and flexible: regular expressions. Regular expressions, or RegEx for short, is a way of finding and pattern matching text. It is unbelievably powerful and fairly easy to learn the basics. I thought I’d learn a little RegEx, use it a little bit, and never really need it again.

Not only does it turn out that Equals uses them constantly, I’ve also found other uses as well. For instance, my daughters’ school needed some content extracted from email messages. This task would have been impossible without regular expressions, and was so thankful I knew them before I started.

The book I learned with is Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl. I also use a Mac app called Oyster, which allows me to write expressions, set up tests so I can verify that my changes work, and then copy my RegEx to the clipboard in one of 12 different languages that supports regular expressions.

If you write code or process text and haven’t spent any time learning RegEx, I highly recommend it.