Author: kathleen

We’ve been having extremely bad weather in Dallas.  It was actually snowing when I went to school yesterday.

Up north, it would have been a no-brainer.  Have school.  Unfortunately, just about every other district in the area shut down for the day, we didn’t.

Here’s why we don’t.  We know that there is a large number of parents who are going to have to go into work.  Let’s face it, in bad weather, it’s the lowest paid workers who have to go to work.  That means their children, if we don’t have school, are not being supervised and are not getting lunch.  Not a huge problem for my population, though I would argue that most of the 9th grades and some of the 10 graders need the supervision.

So we had school.

However, our local ABC affliate, Channel 8, WFAA, decided to announce that we did NOT have school.  Quite a few teachers, parents, and students, including myself, heard that.  Many of us went back to bed.  I started to, but my dogs wouldn’t let me.  They wanted to be fed.  So I sat down after feeding them and ate my own breakfast.  Whoops!  DISD spokeswoman came on, blasted Channel 8, and told us we would have school.

I made it there, and before official school time, but not as early as I would have liked.  I also didn’t like the added stress from leaving 20 minutes late, but I did get here.

We did have school.  I gave some “free” answers to some assignments as a reward to my students that were here.  I also took a group of another teacher’s students, who didn’t make it here, and put them on computers and had them do “Texas Web Tutor”. 

All in all, it was a good day.  No thanks to Channel 8, which I am no longer a watcher of their local programs, especially their news.  That also means Goodbye to Good Morning America, since it was during their time, that the misannouncement was made.

My biggest problem with Channel 8?  They haven’t sufficiently apologized.  In fact, they are obviously holding the position that we should NOT have had school yesterday.

Well, back to the facts — there are students in the district that would not have had supervision and would not have fed yesterday.  The majority of our cafeteria workers were here.  Everyone that was here, pitched in and made the day good for the students.  It was the right decision.  And sadly, it might not count as an attendance day and we still might have to use our inclement weather day — meaning that I didn’t really get paid for yesterday.  All because Channel 8 decided to make their own announcements up.

When I got home and things got calmed down, I decided to research the issue on the internet.  I actually went out to the Websense site and found their site look up tool.

If anyone else runs into it, it’s at http://www.websense.com/global/en/SupportAndKB/SiteLookup/

I looked up my site (you have to do the registration thing), and sure enough, it’s listed as “Personal Web Sites”.  I went in, and requested that the relist it as Educational.

Nothing has happened, but it was Friday night.  However, they do claim 24/7 support.

I looked it up on Saturday, and again requested it.  The database claims to have been updated on Saturday, but still it shows as a Personal Website.

I also looked it up today, and again requested it to be moved.  Still hasn’t happened.  One thing I do not like, is that you do not get any type of acknowledged besides the accepted webpage.

One thing I’m planning to do today, is to change Metatags, and information on the first page so it looks more like an educational site.  Hopefully that will help.

Let me know if you have any ideas.

I hate Websense.

Right now if your organization uses Websense you cannot read this. This whole domain is classified as Membership and Clubs. That is not my main concern though.

It’s my other domain kweaver.net which is the problem. And frankly the whole thing has been upsetting.

First kweaver.net is a domain I use for teaching. I have a really cool set of php pages that hit a MySQL database. It tells my students their assignments, their grades, and their status with me. What they have turned in, what I have graded and what they need to do to fix programs to get a higher grade.

Nothing in our acceptable use policy says I caanot do this. All it says is that they have the right to the code since I did it in their employ and have worked on the code when it was broken in class.

So here was what happened.

Came in Friday morning and all was fine first period. I took a quite look at 2nd periods assignment from the website. Kids came in and they tried to login to find out the assignment and they got the websense message. Nervous laughter. they told me and I checked and found sure enough Websense blocked “personal website”.

I emailed the person I last talked to about this issue and since I did not hear from him by the end of the class period, called Network Services and talked with the supervisor in charge. He told me to fill out a form and email it and I did. When I left at the end of the day the email had been read but the site was still blocked.

Give All the Teachers a Big Raise | Alfred Thompson | Microsoft 10

I think that the biggest problem with education is that all teachers with the same experience get paid the same.

Teachers should get paid according to how much they attract students and by how much they affect school rankings.

That tends to shut people like in the foot, since CS teachers don’t tend to affect student performance as much.

But that IS how the real world works.