Author: kathleen

There have been rumors going around in our district that the superintendent wants us to stand when we are teaching.

My principal even had the grace to tell me I should be doing so while he was in the room checking in the temperature. He took a phone away from a student who had it in his hand when i was giving instructions on how to do an assignment.

Now the district issued me a laptop and them promptly asked for it back — and there are times when it is a great tool. It always me to be closer to my students while showing them how to do something new.

However of it is complicated, I need to use Camtasia to record it and then I need a more solid setup to properly capture my voice.

Or if I am demonstrating XNA, I really need multiple screens and my projector.

In other word, you have to use the proper tools to do a good job.

Sent from my Windows Phone

I was being observed today, and as per the new superintendent’s request, was standing at my cart with my district issued laptop and giving instruction. I usually sit down after giving the day’s task, but didn’t. Found that I was a major distraction to students. I definitely need to sit down and distance myself if they are going to get work done.

But, they each did the DOL, I recorded it, and had interaction with each student in the class.

There were two issues that were making me say “blech” when it came to my new #Surface.

Wordament wouldn’t install and I couldn’t blog from Word. Both are fixed.

It took some yime on chat support but I needed to do a Refresh and then find a real network. Now I can play Wordament to my heart’s content…. Which isn’t much.

I checked for un update tonight and now my Office 2013 apps no longer say PreRelease and I can blog from word,

Broke down and bought a Surface.  Pretty cool, haven't had time to do with it much except to find out that my favorite Windows 8 games don't work with it (Solitaire and Mahgong) Can't seem to get Wordament to download.

Also can't seem to get Word to blog with Typepad, but then the website works fine — I'm using that now.

Most amusing part?  I didn't buy a keyboard, and right now I'm using the keyboard from my Mini-Mac,a little Apple USB keyboard.  Since it has ports, just need to plug a mouse in and I'm set.

I took a second, located the Mouse USB plug and moved it over to the keyboard.  Yep, works fine.

I have some technical issues I am resolving in chat.

Wordament wont install and the Word Preview app isn't blogging correctly. Their support chat is great.

Something of a badge of honor – the ability to work all night long. In hindsight
it was not always so smart. At least not when trying to meet a school deadline.
It showed little more than poor planning in most cases.

via blog.acthompson.net

I pulled a few all nighters when I was in college, but most of the time I was and am one of those people who get things done well in advance.  When we did an all nighter it was to get access when no one else was in the lab.  Like the drum-printer thing.

The last time I tried pulling an all nighter was for a charity coding event, and it wasn't a good idea.  I'd love to do the event, but only if we did it with reasonable hours.

I’ve ended up remoting into my older computers twice today because I couldn’t get websites to work with Internet Explorer 10.

ATT website – was thinking of preordering the Nokio 920 but with our issues with Fedex (long story), I think I’d rather go to the store around the corner from school and pick up a new phone at lunch.

Flexible spending account website had trouble uploading a receipt.

Fun!

According to the internet searches I’ve done, Visual Studio 2012 doesn’t do XNA, so I have to have both Visual Studio 2010 and 2012 on my machine? Not a huge issue with 500 gb of hard drive but still.

Or I could just stay with Visual Studio 2010.

Hoping that gets fixed soon.

So these error messages bother me. Not sure if they should or not.

I have been doing my last few blog posts with Word 2013, by going to the Windows 8 Start thing, picking Word 2013, picking the blog template and filling out the template.

I have one account set up so far. This one, and it’s pretty smooth and slick to blog with.

I need to take a moment and get the others set up.

Setting them up took moments.

I was able to plug in my external drive, assign it to drive letter M:, fire up my LAMP server and get to the Moodle site stored on the drive and do some work on it, so that’s all pretty cool.

So I’m making progress.