Monthly Archives: July 2006

Dale is Better

He still has a long way to go but today he fixed the toilet. He replaced the fill valve. He has been getting around the house with a cane and yesterday he put a coat of primer on some cabinet doors for me. I don’t think he even realizes how much progress this is. We seem to have moved to a new stage. Different foods give him problems because his belly is still real sensitive, but he at least is awake all day, wanting to do things, and wanting to eat. He still needs the walker if we go to Wal-Mart or Home Depot where he will have to do a lot of walking and he has trouble with his balance so he has to go slow and he tends to stay near things he can hold on to but progress is progress and I thank God and each and every person who has prayed for him.

We try to go somewhere twice a day so he can get out and walk a little. It’s too hot to walk outside so we have to find inside walking places. I am nearly done painting the bathroom cabinets and we went to Home Depot and bought new handles and hinges to go with the new towel bar and paper holder. I discovered that Zinzer BullsEye 1-2-3 primer covers pretty well but if I want to do my kitchen cabinets I will be buying a lot of primer and it is going to take a long time. It will take two coats of primer, a coat of paint, and a coat of glaze to do what I want and because they are dark the inside needs to painted as well. This may be an ongoing project (like painting the living room!)

This week my daughter is at church camp and so I am going to “help” my son clean out his room. We will use her room for a temporary storage place as we take everything out of his room, clean it and hopefully put less stuff back in. If no one sees me for a week please come looking – it’s a jungle in there!

Just an Update

I haven’t posted in a little while because it’s been a calm period  and I hate to even mention it because Dale is still having stomach pain occasionally and I feel like another trip to Baylor is in the future, I just don’t know when.  He fights it because he just hates to go.  I just hope if we go it is soon – before school starts.  I am determined to try to miss as little as possible and that may mean driving back and forth and I’m already burned out from running on adrenaline.  My sister-in-laws came for a visit and he really enjoyed it.  Today was Jessica’s fifteenth birthday and we spent some girl time shopping and eating ice cream.  It wasn’t much but she knows things are shaky right now.   She has grown up so much this summer.  She has been such a lot of help and so has Kinsey.

I should be learning how to use a MacBook by next week.  I am so excited.  I have been reading online about it as much as I can but I will learn much faster by doing.  I promise to write more about it as I learn.

Interesting Times

I read a post by David Jakes that likened all the fuss about blogging being the way we will change education as one big taffy pull.

I get excited about new things whether it is software, gadgets, a new book by a favorite author, and yes – blogging. I don’t see it as the answer to all the things that are wrong with education.

I see it as an appropriate tool to enhance what is right with education. It is a fairly new tool and like anything new, we will experience growing pains and we will change it and mold it according to what works for us and it will eventually evolve or be discarded for the next new tool.

That’s what technology does. It changes. Change isn’t inherently good or bad. That’s why we have to constantly learn, test, evaluate, and adjust.

Our young people constantly dive into the pool without always checking the depth of the water. We can’t always stand on the side waving a warning they will find relevant if we refuse to go into the water ourselves.

Kathy Sierra has a post that talks about the space between the notes – where the music is. The important pause, the time to reflect.

“But real learning takes place between exposures to content! Long-term memory from learning happens after the training. The space between the lessons and practice is where the learning is made permanent. If we don’t leave that space, new content keeps rushing in to overwrite the previous content, before the learner’s brain has a chance to pause, reflect, and synthesize the proteins needed for long-term memory storage. “

I’m glad that there are people like Mr. Jakes who caution us to stop and look around as we try to navigate the ever-changing landscape of technology. I’m glad that there are people like Kathy Sierra who urge us to take time and space to reflect on where we have been and where we are going. I’m also grateful for the folks that urge us to wade in and get our feet wet.

We live in interesting times….

Bloggers Are Just Nice

I have been working on putting together material for teaching blogging to teachers and as usual find that people much more experienced that I am have already charted a lot of these waters. I have tried to be vary careful about obtaining their permission to use their work and without exception I have not only gotten permission to use and modify, but the responses have been enthusiastic, encouraging, and helpful. It just proved what I already knew – bloggers are just nice.

And So It Goes..

We may well be going back to the hospital Monday. Dale stayed home three weeks this time with one week of no antibiotics but he is having pain and fever again. I have packed just in case and had time last night to save a bunch of webpages to my jump drive. I will load them on my laptop so I can continue working even if I don’t have internet access. I have been getting my presentation on blogging together and this week I will work on suggestions for rubrics to facilitate assessment. I have completed handouts for reasons for reading blogs and reasons for writing and some basic instructions on using a feedreader to subscribe to blogs. I think the first step in getting teachers interested in using blogs is to show them some great examples and get them reading.

It’s funny to think about it now that I am so excited about blogging in education but the blogs that hooked me from the very start were not anything to do with public education. I began reading WaiterRant on a regular basis. There is some adult content there but I love his storytelling ability. The next was Creating Passionate Users and I never fail to get a boost of enthusiasm and excitement there. There are others on my blogroll that I read all the time and several are education oriented and I have learned so much from them and will continue to do so but in all the excitement of this tool for learning I will remember that like books, sometimes you just need to read for the pure enjoyment of it.

It’s been a very emotional week for me. The shock of walking in and seeing (or NOT seeing to be more accurate) my lab had been broken in to, and then the panic mode of realizing that Dale was showing signs of infection again, my son leaving for a two week trip – I’d like to borrow a cup of boredom from someone. If anyone out there has some to spare – please send it! If you are bored and want to make a trade we can talk…

Hard Lesson Learned

I am a very disorganized fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of person. I am constantly fighting this side of my nature. Today I learned a hard lesson. I went in to school to try to get some work done and as soon as I walked in I realized something was not right. Someone broke in and took some of the nicer equipment from the lab.

I just this year gave in and ordered a large flat screen monitor for myself. I hate to spend budget money on something that only benefits me but a good part of many of my days is spent staring at spreadsheets and I was having a lot of headaches. My computer, monitor, and mouse were gone. Also gone was the data projector, an older digital camera, an older but larger computer that the lab had just inherited, plus a couple of older laptops. I haven’t gone through my desk yet and may not even remember some smaller items. The laptop cart door was pried open and so were my desk drawers.

It seems like whoever did this didn’t have anything out for me personally. All my pictures and some wooden things I had painted and had sitting on my computer were all just set aside. Nothing was actually torn up except what was needed to gain access. I am thankful for that.

What hurts is that money that could have been used to upgrade out-of-date equipment will now have to go towards replacing what was stolen. My dreams for this lab are for the benefit of all our students and staff. I wish for cutting edge technology that will help our students get ready for the outside world, allow them to express their creativity, and furnish tools that instructors can use to enhance lessons. I am so sad that this happened. In the big picture it may not seem like much but in my little picture, my second home was broken into and things entrusted to my care to help others use were taken with no thought of how others might be affected.

If this stuff were to show up on my front porch in the middle of the night I would not look any further and I would know that the person or persons who took it realized that in the long run they were hurting every student at the school and felt bad about it. I know it isn’t realistic to hope for that but I will pray about it.

In the meantime I am slowly realizing that now I have lost many of my email addresses and documents I have saved that pertained to the lab and other aspects of my job. I also lost four years worth of stuff that I can’t begin to remember never mind replace. I will probably keep anything important on a laptop that goes with me from now on and I may ask Santa for an external hard drive that I could back up everything to and store somewhere safe. I also have learned that I should password protect anything and everything. I will clean out files on a more regular basis so I can remember what I have, and I will not let this make me not trust people.

Do We Guide Them Or Just Hope For The Best?

Students on the internet mean students will get off task sometimes. I live with two high school students. They belong to me. One of the hardest parenting responsibilities with teenagers deals with how much to let go and how much to hold on. Once your child gets that drivers license you realize how little control you have over their time and how it is spent. Once they walk out the door and get into that car – they drive off to 1. the place they told you they were going, 2. for the length of time they old you they would be there, and 3. for the purpose they told you they were going (and of course they go no where else). You also trust that all those driving lessons and talks about safety on the road will be taken to heart. I know my child would not get distracted tuning in the radio or finding the perfect song on his mp3 player while he was driving and I know he would not get frustrated with the slow driver in front of him and hotrod to get around them. Okay – you can stop laughing now. My point is you have to trust them because you have no other choice. They are moving away from you as a parent and making their own choices which hopefully will be ones they can live with in the long run. This prepares them for living their own lives. We as parents have already given them the skills they need (we hope) and now we just guide when they will let us and pray that we haven’t left out that one important thing that we should have taught but didn’t.

The same thing goes for our students and technology. If we don’t teach them – what choices will they make and who will then be responsible?

Vicki Davis puts in succinctly:

” Zero tolerance for mistakes is limiting our growth

I also think that the legal system in America will hold back our schools from giving such liberty to students. We will bleed on the cutting edge, however, we’ve create a zero tolerance for allowing mistakes to happen. Kids should be informed up front of expectations and consequences. Their behavior should be monitored vigilantly. When they do not meet expectations, they should experience consequences. Thus, we create net citizens who realize that their actions on the Internet have consequences.

The Trapeze Artist Metaphor

If our students don’t understand that there are consequences to their blog postings, it would be like a trapeze artist who trained with nets until he was 18. Every time he fell, he landed in the soft net. When he turned 19 and went to a circus, no one told him that there was no net. So, he was unafraid of the consequences of falling. And when he fell, it did permanent damage. He knew how to use the tools but did not understand consequences of making mistakes.

Conclusion

We need to teach effectively. We also need to create good New Net Citizens.”

We have the gift of an opportunity to reach far into the future as well as making the present much more pleasant. The concept of blogging doesn’t work if it doesn’t happen in the context of a community. If I was the only one who ever read this (and sometimes I think I am) then there wouldn’t be much of a point to it. I could keep a journal on my computer using any wordprocessor and add to it whenever I take a notion. To me the point of blogging is to network with others, to have an ongoing learning learning experience by reading, writing, commenting, and receiving feedback. It means that we become inspired by reading others thoughts and as we process what we read, we filter it through our own experience and viewpoint and write the results of that process. If we leave no room for mistakes then we leave no room for learning.

Timely Information

Vicki Davis has an article about Myspace on her blog – good stuff to know.

“Amazingly, THERE IS A WAY to remove things from Google cache. And with the National Association for College Admissions’s recent article on Myspace in College Admission, this will be a great thing for you to teach students to do after they clean up or delete their myspace accounts.”

Vicki has also been blogging the NECC 2006 conference and has tons of great information. I have enjoyed wandering through her notes and links. The same process during SXSW in Austin is what hooked me on blogging to begin with. I read everything I could find that was being blogged at that conference and discovered some of my favorite bloggers and web designers. At that time I was in the process of becoming a beginner at Cascading Style Sheets and while I am still definitely a beginner at least I know where to go for resources when I have time. Vicki is a great resource on blogging in education. Blogging is a great way to share conference notes with the folks back home who were unable to go. I hope that next year we will have some teachers blogging from TCEA!

All The News

They really need to make this guy a regular columnist:

What about Isreal?

To the Editor:

We went to war to make Iraq a democracy, but we ignore Israels lack of democracy. Israel has no Constitution or Bill of Rights. There is no private real estate in Israel. You may only lease land from the government. Gentiles are banned from burial in Jewish cemeteries and there are no jury trials. Christian missionaries are banned from Israel and it is a crime to try to convent a Jew. Jews are forbidden to marry Gentiles in Israel. It was odd of God to choose the Jews.

Roy Bunch

I know a couple of Christian missionaries living in Israel which makes this even more amusing. My only question would be is the headline from Roy or the paper? “It was odd of God to choose the Jews”? I wonder if Roy has discussed this with Him….

Word Hanging Indent

Students working on term papers in the lab have to cite their sources. Often this requires using a hanging indent which seems to give everyone trouble. It isn’t hard to do but it also isn’t easy to find if you don’t know it’s there. The easiest way I have found is to go ahead and type your sources with no indent. Double space between each source. When you have them all typed, highlight the entire section and go to format/paragraph on the menu bar. A new menu will pop up.

Click the drop down arrow next to the word “special” and choose “hanging”. Your entire section should now be formatted with hanging indents for the first line of each section. See? Easy to do – not exactly intuitive to find.

Blogging is like Shopping

Reading blogs online seems a lot like shopping for clothes. Guys may not get this but ladies will. Sometimes you can shop and shop and see things that are sort of what you are looking for but not quite. You see things in other store windows and continue to roam around finding almost but not the perfect outfit. Then there are those times when you walk in and there are multiple items that would be perfect and they are “gasp” all on sale for half price! That’s the feeling I got this morning. I have been searching the internet for resources to put together the quintessential presentation on blogging in education. I want to wow everyone, generate enthusiasm, and have them walking out the door talking excitedly about the plans they have for blogging with their students, already making mental lists of uses that will take them far beyond the starting point I give them!

Presenting to groups is not my strong point. I am better at one-on-one instruction, so I plan to have very clear material and step-by-step instructions as well as some wonderful examples to show to try to make up for that.

This morning I read a post that really shows what the end product can be. Konrad Glogowski has a post about his eighth grade students blogging that shows how an instructor can use blogs to share what they are doing and how students can be blogging as a unique learning and research experience. Read the post to see why I am excited.

The teacher describes how his students are researching separate topics and learning from each other’s research and how it relates to their own. Other students reading and commenting on each other’s blogs created debates and caused each student to build on his own topic.

Instead of students simply responding to a teacher-directed topic they have moved on to become researchers and are motivating each other to continue the learning process. To me this is exactly what we want to see happen. This is my ultimate goal.