Category: Blog

One of the reasons I do extra gigs (teach middle school girls, curriculum, etc), is so that I can have some extra money to buy guilt free toys.

Like my phone. (A Fuze)

Like my new wireless all in one printer — yeah, it’s cool, I can scan to any computer in the house.  I need to figure out if there is a way to scan to the Home Server. 

And my latest acquisition is an HP Pavilion Slimline.  It’s eventually going to go upstairs to my office, but I need to take at least 5 trash bags of stuff out of there before I can usually use it comfortably.

I’m also planning to upgrade the memory on all my other computers.  My “gym” pc has 1 meg of memory and locks up all the time, so I’m upgrading it to 4 gig, and taking it’s meg hopefully to the other HP computer upstairs.

I’m going to toss an Emachines computer that is several years old.

I’m happiest with two cheap computers sharing a keyboard and mouse, rather than one big fancy one.

And I hate Emachines ever since they sold the maintenance on my Gateway Tablet to a company that promptly went out of business.

Apparently,
Erin Gruwell just gave a presentation at NECC and I’m sorry, but I’m not a fan. Now, I didn’t read the book and have only seen the movie.  However, my takeaway from the movie was that to be a passionate teacher, you have to sacrifice your personal life, your movie and even your husband.

I’m not willing to go there.

In fact, I went into teaching because I wanted to have a personal life.  I had a job that was literally 24/7 support, and I gave it.  I stayed overnight at the office during closing of the financial books (about 5 days, but yeah, I did get two extra days off as a result and that was my choice BEFORE I got married.  I fielded calls from about midnight until 6:00 am, not quite every night and then worked a full 7:00 – 4:00 day.  I was losing my husband because of that schedule and the level of dedication it took.

I want my Monday nights to train my dogs, most of the weekends from August until March to trial them, and time to be with my husband.  I don’t want to give up most of my income and put it into my classroom, though some days it feels that I do. And I don’t want to take a part time job to pay for field trips.

I think you can be a passionate teacher and only work at it 8 hours a day.  I even manage to do that most of the time and pull off the teacher tech job but there are days I do end up staying late. 

In fact, my students DO say I am passionate about my subject — and of course they don’t get me — but that’s okay.

I think you are a better teacher if you have outside interest — my coteacher this summer coaches volleyball and plays it herself and has seen she was in grade school.  I think that’s a good thing.  I have friends who raise their own children, have a part time job they are really into, or are working on an advanced degree — been there and done that.

I honestly think that the teacher in the movie would have had more to offer her kids if she had had a personal life, as she would be more well-rounded.  And I really think it was sad that she drove her husband away.

Like I said, I have only seen the movie.

I asked my summer school co-teacher and she felt the same way about the movie.

I’ve been having trouble with this computer ever since the tech at Systemwide Testing set up their wireless and their printer. Wouldn’t shut down and half the time wouldn’t recognized the USB ports.  Hate that.

So I did a restore from my WHS server — sometime around May, I’d cleaned up the computer and did a manual backup, so used that one for the restore.  Man, is it lovely.  Copy drivers off the server to a thumb drive, boot with the restore disk, and two hours later your computer is restored.   I’ve restored three computers now that way.

Also did a backup right before I did the restore in case there were files I need (and there might well be).

I did run into one snag, which was very worrisome — I got the Blue Screen every time I tried to load the PC Restore disk that comes from HP.  So I went out to the internet and downloaded the Restore Disk from Microsoft.  It’s a dual boot and the 512 memory version also gave me the blue screen at the same point.  The more than 512 memory version worked fine and I’m all restored and happy.

I really like this idea and plan to incorporate it next with my laptop – digital photoframe project that I’ve blogged about before.  I love Screencast and letting parents know where their students work can be accessed really takes it a step further.

Quoted from http://www.techsmith.com/community/education/inspired/Digital_Hallway/:

A “Digital Hallway” Project Education Community – TechSmith, the world leader in Screen Capture and Screen Recording Software.

But what if the tradition of work-in-the-hallway went digital – into an online space where students could easily display their work, teachers could evaluate it, and parents would come to view and comment?

A couple of months ago, I mentioned that a customized Zune would make a great gift (for me at least).  Well, I picked up a 4 gig pick Zune and was going to get it together for a gift in May, but since it was the end of the year and I had my usual dozen projects ….

First mistake was not turning it on when I got it. 

I got it engraved yesterday, went to power it up and customize the interior and it wouldn’t power up.  Yikes, tried the wall, tried different cables, computers, etc.

So I registered on the Zune site to find out that it was out of warranty!  Yikes, well, I bought it at Buy.com so I filled out the paperwork, and low and behold a few hours later got an email that the warranty was extended.  It took a few more hours, but just in time to get it over to Office Depot to ship, it updated and I was able to put in the request for service.  Printed out the label, wrapped it up, and sent it off to Larado to get fixed.

Hopefully it will get back in time — we’ll see.  But so far, great customer service.

A couple of my computers are driving me nuts — mostly memory problems.  I broke down and bought a new one at Fry’s yesterday and I really like it.  It’s a HP Compaq, 4 gig of memory, 500 hard drive and 64-bit operating system.  It’s NICE!

That’s the problem with the old computers.  Memory.

So I have ordered a set of 4 gig of memory (two 2-gig sets), which should fit in either of the two old HP Compaqs, I’m definately keeping.  I’m going to try the downstairs computer first — it’s supposed to only take 2 DDR2 sticks, so the memory I ordered should take it from 1 gig to 4 gig.  Then I’ll installed a 64-bit version of Vista, and see if I like it.  It works well until you starting doing multiple things.

My plan is to replace the e-machines I have upstairs here in my office — I hate e-machines/Gateway since they sold my support contract to a company that went out of business.  Plus it’s is maxed out, I’m pretty sure.  It actually works pretty well, so if I am stick with it for a while, that’s okay.  I mostly do onlne banking on it.

Of course, it would be nice to have a machine powerful enough to only have one machine upstairs but one of my purposes for the dual machines is to burn CDs/DVDs and render movies.  I can’t stand waiting around for stuff like that, and having two machines solves that problem.  Grading is easier too, but I can always use dual monitors for that.  I do that at school.

The biggest reason I’m not at NECC is money, Washington DC is too rich for my blood — well, yeah, I’m going in two weeks but a) the trip is on someone else’s dime and b) prices are cheaper then.   Plus I get three days to play.

I have not gone to NECC, and I might next year, depends on the budget, but going to the Games Cruise is my priority.

I’ve been to TCEA twice and was really disappointed.  I’ll say that one of the workshops I paid extra for was really good though I haven’t actually used the idea.  It’s still in the back of my mind, years later though. My biggest problem with TCEA has been the CS to other ratio and the availibility of space to actually sit in a room and get anything out of the presentation.

I understand now they do at least a full day of Computer Science only but haven’t tried.  Also with the reimbursement system my district uses, it still cost me major money if I can get them to pay for it.  It’s also during the school year, so the opportunity to stay home and teach is much more attractive.

I’m going to look into some alternative funding arrangements for NECC next year, maybe try to raise funds via Twitter or something — which is sort of an interesting idea for the Games Cruise now that I think of it.

I’m also glad I didn’t go this year because of the Middle School Girl’s Camp — we still have 3 days with the girls and I really want to spend the time with them. I’m going to show them how to use Windows Movie Maker on Monday.

I will say that the CSIT is the absolute best one day event I’ve every been to.  I went to San Antonio last year and there was only one bad session (I really should have picked the other one).  It was very dull but the rest were very good, and I might have liked it if I were more into Open Source things. Alfred was mean and teased me about not being there earlier.

Someone just asked me for a good source of C#.

I’ve programmed professionally in about 8 programming languages (included assembly), and have taught in 4 different languages, plus was taught lots of programming languages in college. 

So here’s how I learn a new language — which is very similar to the course I took in college.

I pick a project to work on in the new language: when I wanted to learn PHP, I built my classroom website, when I wanted to learn how to do a website in Visual Basic, I did the school website, etc.

So first, pick a project you want to work on and make sure that the language was suited for it.  When I want to do C#, I write a Windows/XBox/Zune game.  There are other things you can do in C# but it’s suited for it.

So I’d use Dan Water’s Book on Zune programming, and the website at http://www.begingameprogramming.com/ to play around until I came up with a game I really wanted to write and go from there.

In other words, I’m pretty practical, and don’t just program for the sake of programming.

I used Camtasia to make a video of what I was doing in CS4 Contribute and sure enough it was a user interface problem (user wasn’t interfacing properly.

Here’s the recording that shows me what was going on:

As you can see – when I clicked on the new entry button I was automatically going to the CS blog.  Here’s why:

So I’ve got it set to automatically post to the diabetes blog and I have to change it to go to this blog.

It is anything like I expected and it’s been a good thing.  We’re half way through the camp experience and I’m really enjoying (and am really going to enjoy the pay afterwards).

First of all, we don’t get the same girls every day.  We’ve had one that has come every single day and we’ve had some that have come most.  At our most active, we had 12 girls.  Yesterday was our smallest at 4.  I don’t get that.  If my mother could have sent my sister and/or I somewhere every Monday – Thursday from 8:30 – 12:30, she’d have done it gladly, and we’re free and we feed them breakfast and lunch.  My mother would have been in ecstasy. Love my mother, but she was good at farming us out. We spent weeks each summer with her parents and went to several Vacation Bible Schools.

We are supported by a group called "Big Thought", they gather the students, take attendance and bring them to us each day.  Well, occasionally they get busy and they send us the girls.  They also pick them up.

I usually show off something cool at the start of class based on a question I got asked the day before.  We are doing Alice and I’ve shown them how to get a character to juggle a ball — based on when a girl asked me how to get the characters to play a sport.  I’ve shown them how to drown the ice skater and make her skate forever, based on a girl wanting to do that in her story.  Also taught them how to record their voices and how to download sounds — I think I need to do that again.

My original curriculum was to have them journal but we’ve dropped that since not seeing the same people every day didn’t make much sense.  I am hoping to do a web page and to have them make a movie, but that’s going to be hard with the rotating schedule.  Alice is hard enough, but we’re doing it.

I love the schedule, I get up early (okay, later would be nice), and I’m done at 10:30.  I have been working at Buckner after but I’m on a break from that, and I have the rest of the day to do whatever I want.