Monthly Archives: November 2006

Snow!!

My last post, I talked about wishing for time, and I think I’m going to get some today! It’s not even 6:30 a.m. so I haven’t gotten the kids up yet and it looks wet out but not too bad. I checked out the radar on intellicast though and there looks to be a huge area of snow headed our way. The thermometer on my back porch says 40 but the weather report says it is just going to get colder. The school closings north and west of us are streaming across the bottom of the screen so I will just keep watching. My school is in town but my kids’ school has a large rural population so I expect they will decide to close first.

Growing up in Michigan snow and ice were inconveniences that made getting to school and work more troublesome but it had to really be bad for us to miss. I remember mornings when everyone on our street helped push each others’ cars out to the main road where the salt trucks and snow plows were already out working. I remember one year when the snow drifted as high as our roof in the corner by our front porch and of course we built a snow fort that we could actually get inside.

Now that I’m grown, I still get excited at the prospect of snow. Our Christmas tree is up, but looks sad and naked, it would be a good day to decorate it and make some soup.

It looks like we will be going to school after all but I suspect we will be coming home early. I’m glad I’m not the one responsible for making these decisions. I would worry more about everyone trying to get home if it gets bad. Everyone will be excited and a lot of kids won’t show up at all.

I will bring home things to work on and read and hopefully get a latte on the way home. Then I will take a minute! Be careful out there everyone!

I’d Like To Buy A Minute

All the Web 2.0 apps out there and the productivity suites and all of the wonderful things you can find on google and ebay and yet nothing that gives us more time. I know this is kind of a silly post but when the holiday season starts approaching it always seems that I am running as fast as I can just to stay in place and usually not even managing that.

I wish there was a time store with a drive through window (which would save time of course!). You could even buy gift cards there and give them to your friends and family for Christmas! I’d like an extra hour of sleep, two hours of uninterrupted work time, an extra day to catch up on laundry, and maybe a few “free” days just to set aside for whatever I want in the future. I could use a whole day at a time or maybe divide it up and use it as needed. How about a few extra hours added to a good time. You could pay them back by subtracting them from a bad time.

I purchase minutes for my daughters trac phone. Maybe I could buy some extra ones and keep them for myself.

I’d like some time for playing with Toufee (on a faster connection than I have at home LOL) and time to work on a blog strictly for the computer lab. I’d also like some time to work on learning more about creating themes for WordPress and I’d like to learn about Apple-scripting. I would also like to work more with html and css.

If anyone has any spare time I would gladly pay you Tuesday …..

Thanksgiving 2006

Well my maple-pumpkin pie is in the oven, the dressing is in the pan, ready to bake and Dale will make fruit salad while the dressing is baking before we go to Miss Billie’s and feast with friends.  Right before we leave I have to whip the cream (the best part is adding maple syrup to the whipped cream to go with the pie.  Yum! I’ll call my brothers in awhile – I miss them especially on the holidays.

Oak Park Methodist Church had free Thanksgiving dinner for the community for the last two years, but not this year.  The folks who were the core group for it have moved on due to marriage, life changes, and whatever else.  I hate that it didn’t survive.  It was my favorite thing that the church did.  There are several dinners in the community this time of year but this one and one other were the only ones that happened on Thanksgiving Day and that made it more special to me.  People should have somewhere fun to go on thanksgiving. People from the community that we had never seen came, but so did some of the church members – hope someone saw about them this year.

I’m thankful for Dale being here and doing well after such a bad summer.  His recuperation has been long and he still has a long way to go but he is putting on weight and eats all the time.  The only time he feels bad is right after dialysis – his blood pressure drops to about 80/50 and it takes at least til the next day for him to start feeling good again.  No dialysis today – just good friends and good food!  Have a happy holiday everyone!

MacHeist

I’ve been taking part in an online game called MacHeist. Each week there are clues to follow and if you solve you end up with some free applications for the Mac. It has been fun and while the applications have not all been things I would use it has been interesting to be a part of a community of Mac users. The “loot” had included Soulver, a nice calculator that uses plain English, Chat Transcript Manager, Assignment Planner, Quickscale, American History Lux (which my son LOVES), Notepad (widget), Cha-Ching, and 1Passwd. 1Passwd is a password manager, automatic web form filler and more. This is week two. As a Mac newbie it has been a great way for me to explore some different pieces of software. There is a fun and creative aspect to the Mac community that I have never seen with PCs. I know that this is a great way for some developers to promote their software but this is so much cooler than a run-of-the-mill ad. Kudos to Phill Ryu, John Casasanta, Scott Meinzer, Adam Betts, Chiraag Mundhe, and Joe kavanaugh.

Thinking About Creativity

It’s the week of Thanksgiving and I am on vacation. I’ve been doing a lot of “stream-of-consciousness” reading on the internet. One article about something leads to another about something else and so on….A couple of good reads on GapingVoid – one on creativity and one on Idea Amplification. Another good read about Constrained Creativity on by Kathy Sierra on CreatingPassionateUsers.

Hugh MacLoud Talks about how the actual manfufacture of a product is incidental to how they make us feel about the product. He mentions three companies – Apple, Starbucks, and Nike. The attractiveness of these companies is not that they make a wonderful product (though I’m personally partial to Starbucks and Apple) but that they promote the belief of our human potential and that’s what we buy into because that is what we all want to believe in. In a related article he says “The market for human potential is infinite” and “the soul cannot be outsourced”.

The article on creativity is a list of suggestions he expands on and because it is a thoughtful list of what has worked for him it includes some very practical advice – such as keeping your day job – along with some just plain inspiring ones such as “Merit can be bought – passion can’t” and “Don’t try to stand out in the crowd – avoid crowds altogether”.

Kathy sierra’s article “Don’t Wait For the Muse” tells us to do something! The ideas will follow. “You can’t try things if you’re waiting for the muse to show up”

As I read Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat” I worry about the jobs that are being outsourced. I also think about the wealth of creativity we have in this country and wonder what we need to do for our students to encourage growth in that area. I want to be able to say that the “company” or industry that gets me excited and makes me believe in the potential of humanity is education. Creativity takes energy and energy comes from passion. We have to be willing to try new things sometimes even when we are running low on energy. Trying new things will allow us to experience the creativity that comes from the learning process and I believe that is how we can keep our passion alive. Passion and creativity are the greatest gifts we can give our students.

Mr. Henry’s Passing

Mr. Henry Thielman passed away at 1:30 this morning. Dale and I were going to try to go see him today and we were too late. For those who didn’t know him, he personified the phrase “saints of the church”. I’ve never in my life met anyone who wore his religion so easily. You knew just being around him that you were closer to God’s presence. I feel profoundly saddened by the fact that we didn’t get to say good-bye but I know that he is where he should be and heaven seems a more welcome place knowing he is there waiting. No matter what bible study I might attend or theologic discussion I listen to, I will always hear his voice in my head saying “not essential to my salvation”. Godspeed Mr. Henry, if heaven holds hearts, it’s a lot bigger today.

Setting Up a Classroom Blog

I have been searching for a way for teachers to ease into using blogs for classroom activities. We do not have student email at this time and so I wanted to come up with a way for students and teachers to blog without it being complicated. This is what I have come up with for a beginning.

Setting up the blog:

Go to http://learnerblogs.org/

Register a blog for yourself.

  • There are some tutorials you can go through if you like.
  • You can come to the lab and I will help you set it up.
  • You will be the administrator and monitor all comments.

Create a rubric

Create a post that your students must respond to.

You can also require students to respond to one other student’s comment on the post Some suggestions for comment requirements:

  • Comment must relate to the post.
  • Comment must not contain any inappropriate material
  • Comments must not contain instant messaging language, must use proper grammar, correct spelling and punctuation.

Before you have your students post their comments spend some time discussing what you feel is appropriate and what you expect. You can show them some examples of some educational blogs (see me if you need some links to use) to illustrate how this can be done.

Create a spreadsheet of student names and elements from the rubric and anything else you want to base your grades on.

  • Open your spreadsheet and check off the elements as you read the student comments.

This is a starting point that that will allow you to use a classroom blog using student comments. If you want to include some posts by the students you as the administrator will have to post for them. They could write their post and save it to their folder on the server and I can retrieve it and send it to you so you can post it to the blog. I can point you to some class blogs for some examples of how other teachers have utilized blogging with their classes. I would appreciate any suggestions out there.

All of this information came from other sources. In particular I want to thank http://mhetherington.net/blogs/ and http://anne.teachesme.com/

New Theme and Old Thoughts

Be patient – I know it has some bugs but it’s late and I will have to play with it later. I like the blue though!

We are planning to go to see the model of the Viet Nam war memorial tomorrow afternoon. It’s a strange deja vu kind of experience to watch the news about the war in Iraq these days. It brings back a lot of memories and some of the same conflicting feelings. I was and am opposed to war and yet I also believe that whenever you are able in this world you should do good and stand up for what is right. I just worry about our true motives as a nation for being in Iraq. I hate waste and I know that people are being tortured and killed for their beliefs but there are so many places that is happening. I read about Darfur and I am sickened. I read about Viet Nam now and I wonder what did we actually accomplish? What will the history books say about the war in Iraq? What will they say about President Bush?

My mother grew up in Canada and because times were hard she quit school and went to work. When I was still in high school she went to night school and got her G.E.D. She had several discussions about differences in the history class she had at that time and the history she learned in Canada. Their textbooks were written from a British viewpoint and had a different slant on a lot of things we take for granted as truth. I used to believe you shouldn’t trust anyone over thirty ha ha. Truth like beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.

Maps Are Fun

A friends’ blog had a link to a site to make a map of all the places you have travelled and it looked like fun so I did two – one for travels and one for all the places I’ve lived.

I’d especially like to go to the northwest and to D. C. someday.


I’ve also been to Ontario, Canada, Mexico, and Great Britain. Here’s where I’ve lived


create your own visited states map or check out these Google Hacks.

It would be fun to have students research where certain crops are raised or states with certain types of industry are found and have them blog on their findings and use this app to create a map to go with their research blog entry.

hmmm…the main column of my theme is too narrow to show the entire map.  I guess I’m going to have to get more intentional about creating my own theme.

My Tech Meeting Shares

Four Links To Share


World History For Us All
http://worldhistoryforusall.sdsu.edu/dev/default.htm“World History for Us All is a comprehensive model curriculum for teaching world history in middle and high schools.”This curriculum:

  • offers a treasury of teaching units, lesson plans, activities, and resources.
  • introduces educators to an integrative approach to world history, culture, and geography.
  • presents the human past as a single story rather than unconnected stories of many civilizations.
  • helps teachers meet state and national standards.
  • helps students relate the histories of particular regions to world history as a whole.
  • enables teachers to survey world history without excluding major peoples, regions, or time periods.
  • helps students understand the past by connecting specific subject matter to larger historical patterns.
  • draws on up-to-date research in comparative, cross-cultural, and global history.
  • may be readily adapted to a variety of world history programs.


World History for Us All is a national collaboration of K-12 teachers, college and university instructors, and educational technology specialists. It is a project of San Diego State University in cooperation with the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA. World History for Us All is a continuing project. Elements under development will appear on the site in the coming months.”

ZohoWriter

http://www.zohowriter.com

  • “Create, format, & edit documents online with a powerful WYSIWIG editor
  • Access & share your documents from anywhere using just your browser
  • Lock your documents while in shared mode
  • Post to your blogs (Blogger/Typepad/LiveJournal) from within ZohoWriter
  • Export your docs in word, pdf & sxw formats
  • Periodic auto-saving of your documents to prevent data loss
  • Spell check, tag your documents for ease of use”

K12Station Educational Site of the Day
http://www.k12station.blogspot.com

A Blog featuring educational websites.

30Boxes
http://30boxes.com
An online calendar with features for color coded multiple calendars.

  • “organize your day and your web stuff
  • share the things that you want to share (like parts of your schedule on your blog or myspace)
  • follow your buddies’ myspace, flickr, webshots, livejournal, heck, any personal blog”


Online Web part 2

Someone else did all the work and did a great job! Jonas Back has a blog titled myuninstalledlife where he looks into the feasibility of uninstalling desktop software and doing everything on the web. This is something I’ve thought about a lot and he has some great articles and howto’s on his blog. You can check out different online word processors here and he also mentions some new applications that are still in beta but look promising. One is an online calendar called Scribe that is supposed to work offline without installing anything. I signed up for an invite so I hope to try it out soon. Another drawing program that looks good is Cumulate Draw also talked about on Mr. Back’s blog. He suggests this and Gliffy as replacements for Visio for flowcharts and network drawings. You can save your drawings in several formats to insert into other documents.

If you go to his main page he has everything broken down into categories of software to replace and you can navigate to the articles about the individual apps from there. Mr. Back also challenges the technology. He gives an example of a request:

“I want to have a fully blown Adobe Premiere alternative (video editor) on the web and nothing installed on my PC. It shouldn’t take more than 2 seconds to load.“

An online app that would take the place of Photoshop would be my dream! I look forward to his future articles and on seeing what the future web will be like.

Another link for tonight that isn’t an application but another online community. Recipe Thing is a site similar to online bookmarking only for recipes. You can register and tag your recipes, save them to your recipe box, share your favorites, and even have it find recipes according to what you have in your pantry. For the times when I actually get off the computer and cook, this is a fun and handy place to start cooking. Now if I can just find an online community that will clean my house….