Category: Blog

People often think that teachers have an easy schedule.  In fact, my own husband thought that until he witnessed my first year of teaching. 

A lot of assumptions are made.  First, the day.  I get almost 30 minutes for lunch — I have to wait for the students to leave and be back as they return, so that cuts into that lunch time.  Second, unlike my previous office job, I can’t take an extra minute or two, or even be late.  If I am not in the room, no learning goes on.  Sometimes they will have a security person sit in my room while I take care of something for an administrator (like fix a printer), but I really am not supposed to leave. 

Bathroom breaks are hard too — we are supposed to maintain order in the halls, so we really can’t go then.  And we really aren’t supposed to go during class time.  There really isn’t any one to relieve us.  Oh, we do duck out, but there is a bit of risk. 

What about turning in attendance, paperwork, etc.?  I don’t like sending a kid, because they are supposed to be working "bell to bell"  And I do try to make that happen.  Again, I get fussed at everytime I leave for something like that and an adminstrator comes by the room.

So in addition to this post, I’m also going to blog about this summer, so you’ll realize that getting a part time job really isn’t an option.

I’m lucky as I have the senority and the experience to do some district jobs — writing curriculum and finals, which will pay a little of $4000.  Not bad, but not a lot either.

So I had one day off this week — first thing in the morning, I went by my doctor’s office to get blood work done.  Not something I can really do during the school year, as there just isnt enough time — our official hours are 8:00 – 4:00. 

I also did two hours of work on our curriculum.

I love this article as it supports my feelings about computers. I believe strongly that when you have a computer in the classroom, you have to have a teacher who is skilled in classroom management.  I believe that you have to give the students more work than they can possibly do, but it has to be work that they can complete and be successful at.

I really do feel that the one laptop per child program will fail unless there are adults to monitor and direct.

Quoted from http://www.slate.com/id/2192798:

Why giving poor kids computers doesn’t improve scholastic performance. – By Ray Fisman – Slate Magazine

Why giving poor kids laptops doesn’t improve their scholastic performance.

 

I’m going to be the teacher tech next year, which means I get an period to work on it.   During our FAC (Faculty Advisory Committee) meeting I made a statement about doing the job, which resulted in another teacher telling me I should get students to help me.  Well, I’m not wild about that, but between the principal and myself, we’ve come up with a neat way of handling it:

Here’s what I sent to him:

I propose that we set up 4th period as an Independent CS Study class.   This would be my "teacher tech" period.  That would give the students assisting technology credit.  We would be flexible as to when we take lunch, based on the needs of the job.

Instead of a formal lesson plan, submitted each week, I would submit a weekly report each Friday, which would be a summary of what each student and what I did that week.  We would also present formally once a month to an administrator, preferably Dr. Crawford at least once each semester (using the model that I worked under at TI).  We would also have a portfolio which must be up to date at the end of each six weeks.  I would like another formal presentation at the end of each semester.

Each student would be responsible for certain duties:  for example, one student might be in charge of the athletic portion of our website.  That student would post each sport’s schedules, do tech support for the athletic director and any of the coaches as needed. 

In addition to the tech and website responsibilities each student would have a personal project that they would be working on.  These projects might take one or two class periods, several weeks, or maybe an entire semester.  I expect each student to initiate these projects.

As a result, the students in exchange for working for the school, the student would receive technology credit, a portfolio, and recommendations from both myself and Dr. Crawford for future employers.

The more I think about it, the more I think it is a really cool idea.

Yes, I am still working on this.  I have written a program that works quite well for me, but runs outside of Outlook.  However, it wants your user id, etc. and doing Outlook stuff outside of Outlook isn’t that bright.

 

I’ve decided it has to be an Outlook Addin but I’ve run into lots of stumbling blocks. I’ve been reading how to do what I want to do, but not only is the learning curve steep, but the tools don’t work. I’ve downloaded VSTO for Visual 2005, and I get part of what i want.  Then in my reading I’m told I need a COM shim, and I have to download that tool and it doesn’t install correctly.  Then I get to a part where I want to add onto my form, and the form region templates don’t work.

 

It finally dawned on me that Visual Studio 2008 was being referenced a lot and since I have the Academic MSDN, I decided to go ahead and install it on my programming machine and give it a try.  So far, it’s working better.

 

Though I do wish the installers would work!

Several weeks ago I posted my summer schedule.  Here is the revision:

I believe I am working on the Curriculum Guide for 2nd semester for Computer Science I (Visual Basic).  Confirmed but schedule not available.

I know I am working on the district finals (ACP’s).  First meeting scheduled.

I am doing 21 hours of staff development with the district and probably teach 7 of them.  Confirmed and scheduled, right now in June.

I am going to CSTA Annual Conference on June 28 in San Antonio.

I’m going to a Microsoft sponsored workshop on Alice and Computational Media in July. 

Also going to First Bytes, for two days in Austin at University of Texas.

I will take a one week AP Workshop in August.

My dean sent me an email about a STEM workshop on June 10 thru June 12 (thankfully June 12th is a half day).  I figured that meant she wanted me to go, so I’m registered.

I’ve been giving this a lot of thought and at the moment, this is what I think I need:

 

• It should be a Today PlugIn.
• Store TDD (but make it optional since it is not an issue for everyone)
• Store number of days, with a default of 3 – use a Combo box
• Store information on the open task so it can be marked completed
• When the user clicks on the plug give the option to chose day or use given date, or ignore.
  • When selected the current open task is marked complete (but stays so that it can be tracked or deleted manually — though this could be an option.)
  • A new task is created based on TDD and number of days, which ever results in smallest day.  However, TDD may be ignored.

I honestly don’t know if I will make it through the school year or not.  The network has been driving us absolutely insane.   Especially me.

 

First, I teach webmastering.  Have the time the internet isn’t up.  Oh, did I mention we don’t have a textbook?  Everything we do, we got off an online site.  Well, that works really really well, when the internet is down.  Or, you have to push the F5 key 5 times to actually get a page.  Not exaggerated, I’ve counted.

 

Second, I teach computer science.  When you do a search on a computer science topic, half the results are blocked because the site is a blog or a forum.  I hate to tell the network engineers this, BUT all the good technical writing is done on forums and blogs.

 

The latest?  A little piece of work called squid that gives us a weird error message when we try to upload a zip file.  I did a searc on it this morning and this time, about 80% of the sites related to the error message were blocked.  So I dropped it in the hands of my server guys, who I’ve overworked on another problem earlier this week.

 

I have been having my students zip up their VB programs, and send me the whole directory, but we can’t do that now.

 

Oh, and does it help network performance.  NOPE!  It’s the worst it’s ever been.

 

9 more days.

So, Pocket Outlook is really easy.  You just add a reference to Microsoft.WindowsMobile and Microsoft.WindowsMobile.PocketOutlook. (Right click on your project, select Add Reference, and make sure you are at the .Net tab and click them.

 

Here’s the code to get things started:

 

Dim polApp As Microsoft.WindowsMobile.PocketOutlook.OutlookSession = New outlook.OutlookSession

 

To go through each task, here is the code:

Dim oItems As outlook.TaskCollection
Dim otask As outlook.Task

 

oItems = polApp.Tasks.Items

 

Dim i As Integer
For i = 0 To oItems.Count – 1
oTask = oItems(i)
If oTask.Subject = "Change Infusion Set" Then
otask.Complete = True
otask.Update()
End If
Next

 

polApp.Dispose() ‘not sure if it is needed

 

Note that you have to save both the Items collection and the item you are looking at. If you don’t save the item you are looking at, you won’t update the item itself.  Weird, but them’s the rules.

 

Finally, the code to set up a task:

 

‘Create a new outlook item
otask = New outlook.Task
otask.Subject = "Change Infusion Set"
otask.Body = "Change Infusion Set"
otask.StartDate = strDate
otask.DueDate = strDate
otask.Complete = False
otask.Categories = "Medical"

 

Dim StrTime As String
If Me.DateTimePicker1.Value <> Nothing Then
If reminder = True Then
Me.lblResults.Text = "In Reminder"
otask.ReminderSet = True
StrTime = Convert.ToString(Me.DateTimePicker1.Value.TimeOfDay)
otask.ReminderTime = Convert.ToDateTime(strDate & " " & StrTime)
otask.Complete = False
Else
otask.ReminderSet = False
End If
End If
‘ Save to Tasks
polApp.Tasks.Items.Add(otask)
‘ lblResults.Text = "Task has been created for " & strDate
End Sub

 

 

I think I got most of what needed at this site: 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cy6azwf7(VS.80).aspx.  Here’s the code:

 

I defined the information for the key in section right after the form is defined:

 

Public Class Form1

Const userRoot As String = "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE"
Const subkey As String = "Software\KWeaver\InfusionSetHelper"
Const keyName As String = userRoot & "\" & subkey

 

To set a key value I used:

Registry.SetValue(keyName, "TDD", txtTDD.Text)

 

To retrieve a key value I used:

 

Me.txtTotal.Text = Registry.GetValue(keyName, "Total", Nothing)
Me.txtTDD.Text = Registry.GetValue(keyName, "TDD", Nothing)

 

To delete a key value I used:

 

Registry.CurrentUser.DeleteSubKey(keyName & "/Total")

 This has SO been making me crazy.

Do we really  believe that students in school should be seen and not heard? Do we really believe that the only means of communication students should have with the world (or their friends) is voice communication in strictly supervised situations? Do we really believe that we are doing students favors by not letting them reach the social aspects of the Internet? Do we really believe that online chat and discussion sites are pure evil?

Source: Computer Science Teacher – Thoughts and Information from Alfred Thompson : Schools As Communication Free Zones

I’m one of the guilty twitters.  I’m at http://twitter.com/kathweaver (I think, I’m new to twitter).  I’ve found Twirl isn’t blocked by the service the district is using.

It’s nice to be able to Twitter Alfred.  He’s such a good resource.  I also like being able to Twitter and update Facebook at the same time.  I would never remember to do both.

However, I don’t have a super lot of time for that.

What IS super frustrating is researching programming projects.  I’ve been working on a large project (see other posts), in front of my students, and seeing that half of the sites I need to read to even do the project is frustrating.  I’d say 1/3 to 1/2 are blocked by our district for various reasons.

XNA projects were even worse.  Over half of the XNA stuff was blocked.

Not only do my kids use the proxies that are out there, but one’s even set up his own.  That fooled me even for a day or two.  The worst part, is that when I find a proxy and tell the district about it, they still don’t block it.

I can however, and do block websites with Lanschool, especially at the beginning of the year, and there is no way around Lanschool.  If a kid COULD find the way, between Dana and I, we’d have it blocked.