Monthly Archives: October 2007

Hallelujah Halloween

Our church had Hallelujah Night and celebrated with games, music, bounce houses, hotdogs, and a bike drawing. It must have been a great turn out – I didn’t get to look up much to see. I painted faces for two hours. I don’t mean I painted a face and then a few minutes later I painted another one. I mean that as soon as I finished one there was another little face hopping up in the chair for – two – hours. I am tired, cold and will be curling up in blankets with a book in a few moments but I had a great time!

Most fun – a little princess who wanted different colored polka-dots on her arms and giggled every time I painted another one.

Sweetest – a little girl who wanted a flower on her cheek and when I was done went down the line showing everyone waiting and telling them I was really good and then she would run back and ask me where I learned art.

Cutest – a baby in a bumble bee costume who scrunched up his face and laughed every time I touched him with the paintbrush. We were trying for a heart but…

Strangest – an older fellow who said his girlfriend dared him to get lips painted on his cheek. OK there are just too many things wrong there.

Several kids would ask how much it cost and I got to tell them nothing – it’s free. I could paint their face and give them candy. I’m not good at evangelism but if I can share the gospel by painting a face and offering free candy – I’m all over that!

Playing Catch Up And Some Links On Internet Safety And Ethics

There had too many things to blog about this weekend so I’m just going to try to combine it all into one mish-mash of what’s been going on in my little corner of planet earth.
First – we have a date for my husband’s kidney transplant. November the 27th if he and his sister are both free of infections, colds and flu we should be doing the big swap. It will be our Thanksgiving this year – ironic isn’t it? Dale has already made jokes about being the turkey that will be carved and yes he has a sick sense of humor. It’s probably the thing that has kept our marriage going strong all these years – we are both a little twisted.

I worked the tab room at my son’s school’s debate meet. It was kind of sad to realize that this is the last year I will have him in debate. I am in my usual Scarlett O’Hara mode where all that is concerned – I’ll think about that tomorrow.

My daughter wants to go to Texas A&M Commerce next Saturday for a College Open House thing. She is now thinking about going into education. Her dream is to be a photographer and I am encouraging her to do that but I’m also happy that she is looking at something that will let her make a living while she is building on the photography.

There was so much to read and blog about this weekend and I will try to share the best of it here. Because there is so much I won’t get in depth or I would have to leave a lot out.

Although Blog Action Day is over this article Plastic Ocean just made me crazy so I had to post the link and tell a little about it!

A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility…and worse.

sea-turtle-deformed.jpg

This picture of a sea turtle with a plastic band around it’s shell almost made me cry. I’m not an animal nut but I believe in being a good steward of the planet including pets and this is just sickening. The article is five pages long and the news is not good. The ocean is full of tiny plastic particles that are entering the food chain and will eventually find their way into us.

Moore says. “You could take your serum to a lab now, and they’d find at least 100 industrial chemicals that weren’t around in 1950.” The fact that these toxins don’t cause violent and immediate reactions does not mean they’re benign: Scientists are just beginning to research the long-term ways in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with our own biochemistry.

What this means to our kids and their kids genetically is unknown but it doesn’t take a scientist to figure out the news probably isn’t good. I just hope that scientists will start focusing on ways to improve the situation.

One thing I took away from the article that I did not know is that cans that contain foods have a plastic layer on the inside or that there are really only two types that are actually recycled – soda bottles and milk jugs and there is no way to make them into the same items without causing more problems so they generally end up recycled into things that go nowhere near your mouth. Glass, paper, and metal are much better bets for recycling without adding to the pollution.

There is a large number of resource links for cyberethics at the Virginia Center for Technical Education. There are links to websites on plagiarism, internet safety, copyright and more. One site lists the ten rules of “netiquette” of which my personal favorite was “adhere to the same standards of behavior online that you follow in real life” Here! here!

TotallyWired is a great source of information on online safety. One recent article explained how gangs are using social networking sites like MySpace. Another on Cyberbullying gives a balanced view of some of the problems with these sites – online harrassment can often be blocked – it’s in offline reality where the conversations spill over into the real world that often have real consequences.

once you make something digital it’s very hard to prevent it from being copied, forwarded or misused in some way if someone has it out for you, and that most teens are still shocked that certain photos or communications that were meant to be private turn up in incidents of harassment or bullying. According to the report, “one in 6 teens (15%) told us someone had forwarded or posted communication they assumed was private.”

Bullying has been around since big cavemen picked on little cavemen. People don’t change – the tools do.

Blogging For The Environment

Bloggers Unite - Blog Action Day Today is Blog Action Day, and thousands of bloggers will be posting about the environment. I’ve been thinking about the past, present and future. My grandmother grew up in a family of 14 in Scotland and moved to Canada at a fairly young age. she raised her family with a war and a depression. She had an entirely different perspective on the world than I do. I remember these things that she used to do. She saved scraps of bar soap and those net bags that onions come in. When she got enough slivers of soap she would make a little bag out of the netting and sew it up with the soap inside. That was a pot scrubber.She baked and when she made pies, there would be some pie dough left that was trimmed from around the pan. She would either roll that into strips and brush with cinnamon and sugar or she would roll it with currants (sort of like raisins) and make little tarts.

My grandmother knit. I still have a copy of the original sock pattern that was the official pattern from the red cross to knit socks for soldiers. I managed to knit one sock and lost patience. She knit many socks and sweaters. She would take scraps of left over yarn and knit strips about two inches wide. She would just keep adding on new pieces of yarn so she would end up with a long multicolored strip of knitting. She then sewed this into a tube which was stuffed with cotton and then coiled and sewn together to make a pad for a wooden chair

Nothing was wasted, you made things, made do, re-made, patched. Now we work hard away from home so we can afford things to throw away. Recycling doesn’t always have to be about re-manufacturing. I think we need to have more conversations with our grandparents.

I was better about recycling when I was a stay-at-home mom. I had more time and less money! I made a lot of my own baby food. I discovered that you could cook vegetables and then line a cookie sheet with waxed paper and drop “plops” on it and freeze them. You can then put the “plops” in a freezer bag and take out what you need. We had a vegetable garden and I sewed a lot when the kids were little. I made playdough, and I used a roll cardboard that was a “second” being discarded by a factory in the area to cover the kitchen table for the kids to finger paint.

Now we have paper towels, disposable everything, even automobiles are manufactured to have a shelf life. My grandmother was greener than I am.

I’m going to make an effort to do better. We already added insulation in the attic to help on the electric bill and I am slowing replacing light bulbs with the CFL bulbs. We bought cloth grocery bags to try to cut down on the plastic bag waste. We replaced old faucets that dripped and we have plans to replace some appliances with newer, more energy efficient models but that will happen as we can afford it.

I’m going to use some of the hints from the Green Geek and make adjustments on my computer as far as turning off the screensaver and other energy saving computer tips! I’m also going to research ways to save water since our water bills have gotten outrageous, and that even though we buy bottled to drink and cook with because the taste of the water locally is so bad at certain times of the year.

Overheard In A Teacher Chat!

I am amazed, amused, and awed!

  • “I got my truck stuck in a Blog
  • He looks naked without a Starbucks cup next to him.
  • What system is Halo on?
  • Halo who?
  • does the audio sound like…chipmunks to anyone else?
  • the minds of our school board members are boundaries
  • their boundaries are in their minds
  • …..and in our firewalls
  • I think we are sometimes our own limiting boundaries!
  • I can’t search google images or right click!!!
  • The IT department often are boundaries
  • I think his point today about needing to create and define new boundaries given the “loss of boundaries” was an important statement
  • my boundaries are clear and blocked
  • Ignorance is a boundary… must educate more teachers!
  • networks are our information
  • traditional school has focused on information, but david is right, the focus on OVERWHELMING quantities of info is new
  • remind me to thank my district IT guys tomorrow…despite our differences in vision, they are nowhere near as obstructionist as what I am reading here…
  • We discussed the value of YouTube for education at school today.
  • I can act individually with information but its nowhere near the experience if I work with that same information in a network of people.
  • Policy’s simply need to be more accomodating. Things don’t move in 5 year plans anymore.
  • we just rewrote our tech plan around ideas instead of tasks
  • who will decide the content?
  • they can’t make decisions ahead of the changes
  • Kids may not all be more information literate but they are actively engaged in social networking. That’s why I think David said we need to provide the traction and learning to help them learn to teach themselves.
  • intellectual capital will be the value
  • that point David is addressing is the ATTENTION ECONOMY
  • relearn, unlearn & Learn
  • Our IS department was pointing out that their own jobs are now 24/7
  • Educators can’t be afraid to right/click
  • creativity almost entirely defies traditional measurement methods
  • Hard to assess W 2.0 using AD 1950 multiple choice
  • we can each recognize creativity, but we can’t put that in a bar chart in the same way we can with test scores
  • opportunities to fail and learn
  • How do we emphasize balance video games with real world experiences?
  • I think a big part of having a learning engine in the classroom is writing hyperlinked texts
  • effectively writing hyperlinked texts is a measurable outcome of the learning engine classroom
  • digital doppler
  • I’m a proponent of gaming, but balance is so important
  • Something wrong with my kids, they don’t like gaming
  • I’m TOTALLY unbalanced, but I love it (though I need to exercise more than my mouse-finger)
  • they have treadmills with computers built in to the front now.
  • We had some success with getting them to participate in gym class by using DDR.
  • Wii rocks!
  • i think “digital discipline” is a good term in this context. we all need it. balance fits in there too.
  • DDR is a blast
  • I think we all strive to have some “grounding” with the flexibility to fly a bit (or more)!
  • Heard a discussion on ReadingTeacher this week where they said balanced doesn’t mean equal time for everything (as in balanced literacy).
  • if you ban it, kids never learn to balance their lives. We have to let them fail. That’s where lessons are learned
  • how do we bring down the walled garden at school?
  • I think the best advice is to throw out the textbooks
  • I still see way too many teachers thinking integration is focusing on the technoogy instead of the content…
  • I’m launching a year-long classroom blogging unit (major overhaul from last year) – key elements: they claim their blogs on Technorati, they link to at least one blogger from the real world that they admire, they blog about what THEY’re interested in (within limits), and their goal is to grow readership network and extend self-directed learning.
  • if only we had time to learn with the kids – partners
  • I’m finishing a degree in assistive technology, and I signed up for a lab class this semester that has no lab… its all lecture
  • it’s because librarians don’t get enough partnership with teachers!!
  • so the teacher becomes the affective filter
  • The teacher is the model – not the information giver
  • I’m finding that it’s really tough to move students beyond the “consume and remix” stage in information processing. They love the creative aspect of playing with the tools, but to many the tools are more important than the message. I’d like students to take the time to “digest” the info and build it into an existing framework, or better yet, make a case for revamping the framework – then creatively communicate the learning.”

WOW!

For more on filtering there is a very thought provoking article on Doug Johnson’s blog.

(posted on my school blog)

K12 Online Fireside Chat and More

Today was just a day but wow – exhausting, frustrating, exciting, enlightening. I was busy all day because grades were due to be exported and it was taken a little more seriously than the three weeks progress reports so there were a few problems to be ironed out underlining the value of that first export. Troubleshooting that should have been done happened today when we were under the gun.

The day that seemed to not end did and I came home and ate supper while I signed in to Elluminate for the K12 Online Conference Fireside Chat with David Warlick. This was my first experience with Elluminate which is a fee based meeting software package that donates the space to the K12 Online Conference. There are multiple windows. On the far left is a window that contains first a picture of an old-fashioned microphone, To speak you click on the picture and then click again when you are done. There is a hand icon that you can click to virtually raise your hand. There are emoticons and as people enter the session the list of names grows and automatically adjusts to remain in alphabetical order. There is a running tally of how many people are in the session. When things got going there were 105 people from all over. Mostly from the U.S. but some from other parts of the globe as well including Sudan, Seoul, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Scotland Click the thumbnail to see a screenshot.

firesidechat1

There was a white board and video and as the session went on, questions were asked on the white board as a rapid, unending discussion by the attendees. I went crazy trying to concentrate on what David was saying as well as keeping up with the “stream of consciousness” instant messaging. I managed to speak a bit when we were divided into separate rooms at the beginning and I was able to text once or twice but by the time I could type a question the conversation would have changed. There was serious energy. These folks are jumping in the deep end of the pool and splashing for all they are worth. They are calling out to the rest of us to tell us to come on in – the water is fine. Some of us are dipping a toe in and shivering, some are paddling around with nose plugs and life preservers. Some of us are sitting it out and some are underwater with flippers and scuba gear.
firesidechat2

There was a 14 year old student in the session and the possibility of adding a student strand next year was mentioned.

My favorite quote was ” become the guide on the side not the sage on the stage”.

I watched the keynote by David Warlick this morning and I’ll blog about it later. I want to let it marinate a bit but it was awesome. It is well worth the time – if you right-click and save link as you will have a copy of it to view whenever you have time. – which is the beauty of an online conference!

K12 Online Conference Connections

One of the things that I have learned about conferences that are related to technology is that bloggers will write about them. The presentations begin conversations that continue throughout the blogosphere and even when the conference or event is not an online conference people who are not present can participate. If you want to have a way to keep up with those conversations on the K12Online conference here is a tip.

Go to technorati and in the search box put k12online. You will see a list of feeds of all the blog articles about the conference. There will also be the little orange RSS button you can click to subscribe. You can then choose from several – blogline and google are two of the choices. Subscribe in the reader of your choice and throughout the conference, blog articles that reference this conference will show up in your feeds.

You can also look here and here – David Warlick has set up a wiki for the conference.  You can also check out the hitchikr site.