Category: Blog

Just finished the first week. 

I wrote the curriculum for this camp last winter.  So far, we’re doing well.  Each day we’ve gotten a slighter larger group of girls and a slightly different group.

Many of the girls have already gone through all the Alice tutorials – I LOVE them because the tutorials won’t let you skip ahead or make a mistake.  You have to read them exactly.

I’ve got one girl is who making her own worlds already.   She has been sneaking her thumb drive home and working on Alice at home.  THIS is a good thing.

I’ve been able to get the girls to write a journal entry each day using Kompozer.  We’ve also been able to take their pictures and put that in their journal website.

I’m having a good time and it’s only 4 weeks – 4 days a week – and 2 hours a day.

I’ve heard lots of stories from other teachers, and maybe these are the best and brightest, but even so, they are reading and writing and most of the time treat each other with respect.  I have a few potty mouths and a few who act out, but not bad.

There is a huge dent in my ATT Tilt to the point that there is a section of the Touch Screen which is not working.  Has been driving me nuts, as to make a phone call, I have to use the screen keyboard or the sliding keyboard.

I have been paying insurance on my phone forever, and finally looked and damaged touch screens are covered and so I called and they are supposed to be sending me a replacement.

Right now I am setting up my old 8525 so I can use it until the new phone arrives. 

I was thinking about a 3G iphone, but I remembered that I hated iTunes and Apple in time to avoid making that mistake 🙂

They tell me I’ll be getting a Fuze, so it’s a pretty good deal and I have been paying insurance forever (over 4 years) without a claim.

How come my middle school girls can:

• Play music
• Play with monster trucks (I need to check out that website at home, looks fun)
• Do Meez (whatever that is)

AND I CAN’T TWITTER and GET GOOD STUFF ON EDUCATION. (and help find the occasional lost dog)

Oh and can’t use any of the short url sites.

<snarl>

Alfred brought something up on twitter, here’s the tweet:

I’m one of those teachers who needed tenure a few years ago, and had it as close as you can get to having tenure in Texas.  I caught my principal in a lie, accidently, at a faculty meeting.  I am not sure anyone noticed except her — it took me a while for it to dawn on me.  Plus I’m pretty sure she didn’t like overweight, white woman who were "dog people", as she ran one out of the middle school a few years before she got to me, and tried it on another one.  Yes, they were both acquittances.  We "dog people" stick together.

If you do an internet search on her name, you’ll see an interview with the Dallas Morning News where she explained how she got rid of teachers:  made them teach a subject they were not comfortable with and made them float.  Well, she put me in a portable as far from campus as she could and gave me the worst kids in the building.  She didn’t KNOW I was comfortable teaching math so that backfired on her.  The other thing she did was take me away from computers, but I had my own plus my own internet access through my phone.

The fun part is that I came out of the situation smelling like a rose — I managed to get the majority of those "bad kids" to pass algebra, do better on the bench marks than they had ever had and managed to get them to pass the TAKS.  Quite a few of those kids graduated and they weren’t expected to graduate.

She has gone on, but she has made me very gun shy of administration and I don’t trust new principals.  Sadly I’m at a school where principals don’t stay long — they usually get promoted though she ended up retiring.

Here are my notes from today.

I was very worried that we wouldn’t have any girls.  I was VERY happy to get 5 girls and those 5 girls seem that they are pretty good with computers.  They brought us a 6th girl towards the end of the "class period".

Most of them like the shirts and all of them seem to like our bags and what Sheila put in them.  They commented most on the blank CDs.

We started with introductions and took pictures and videos of the introductions.

We started the girls in Alice and most of them at least saw the "Defending Naptime" tutorial. They have all gone through the first tutorial.

Ms. Wilson has still pictures on her camera, I have videos and pictures on mine.

I finally broke down and bought one and set it up.  Yes, I have a severe internet addiction and the school network has been driving me nuts.  Plus with the traveling I’m doing this summer, I definitely want to quit tethering and go straight to the internet.  I’ve been thinking about it for quite some time and with the money I get from being teacher tech, the discount I get through the school district and the fact that it reduces my main bill considerably, it’s time.

I like it.  I’ve set it up on both computers I plan to use it on, and I can still VPN into the school network and do what I need to do with it.

One cool aspect is the micro card slot, which I happen to have an extra 8 gig card laying around will allow me to do some interesting things with it.

I’m going to be interested to see how well it works up at my agility class site and at the different agility venues.

Besides, I have thirty days to change my mind.

I am scheduled to attend a workshop from July 14-16.  I can leave Dallas as early July 8, but have to be home on the 20th.  I have been thinking of driving, and stopping at my mother’s in Brandon, Mississippi, on the way and the way back. I am thinking of staying at the Embassy Suites in Alexandria and making that my base the days before the trip.  I am thinking of taking the train to either Philadelphia and or New York.  I also want to see the sights in Washington D.C.

I know I want to see the Smithsonian Museum that has the Faberge Eggs and the Museum that has the Spirt of St. Louis.  I’m open to suggestions for everything else.

Any ideas?

I have had quite a bit of experience with Alice lately.

Last winter I wrote curriculum for a Middle School Girl’s Camp.  Over the last two weeks I’ve been training teachers how to use Alice and how to use my curriculum.  They seem to like it and think it is going to work — I’ll get to find out next week, I’m doing one of the camps from 8:30 – 10:30 each day. 

I just finished writing curriculum for 6 weeks of a one semester curriculum for an 8th grade elective class.  I created a bunch of movies of each of the topics I think that the six weeks should cover.  I’ve had problems though, the first set I made showed the video but not audio.  The second had audio and not video.  I finally figured out that I needed to put the movies in "pack and go mode" and I needed to take them out of live mesh.  Not sure which fixed it all but even managed to make a menu for the CD with Camtasia Menu Maker.  I need to learn more about it, but it works nicely.  I really think the Live Mesh was causing the problem, but not sure why.

I’ll let you know later in the week how the camp goes.  Training, both the ones lead by me and the ones led by the district both went well.

While Typepad has an excellent method of writing blog posts on line, I like to use an offline tool.  My favorites are Live Writer — my netbook is set up to use it, and Adobe Contribute.

I purchased most of the Abode CS3 products with my STEM award several years ago, and have enough licenses to have it on most of my personal computers, and I have CS4 on my district laptop — the computer I’m using to blog with now.

I was a bit disappointed in CS4 Contribute as some of the features that worked with CS3 wasn’t working.  I finally remembered I had problems installing part of it, so I reinstalled CS4 Contribute last night and the tools that were missing are back.

In particular, the Internet Explorer shortcuts to blog about a web site were missing are back now.

Quoted from http://www.isteconnects.org/2009/06/04/what-does-internet-blocking-suggest-to-students/:

What Does Internet Blocking Suggest to Students? | ISTE’s NECC09 Blog

Filtering and blocking only serve to produce distrust among our students. Filtering and blocking suggest one thing: you are not to be trusted.

I really agree with this article.  I’ve ALWAYS resented the blocking that our district has applied as it doesn’t work well enough.  I was in the library the other day and several students were playing games.  I don’t understand why Twitter is blocked but these games are not.

Besides the kids are really good at using proxy sites.

I do believe that the library probably should have blocking software as the librians are not watching the students, but the classroom computers should not be blocked.

I perfectly good at keeping my students busy enough that they don’t have time to get into trouble on the internet.