Blog

I’m still working on these, but it’s going well.

Last year we instituted an in-house staff development where in-house people presented training before school. I lead several last year — one on behavior (because the principal was leading and he wanted someone else to do it), and one on technology.

The technology one drove me nuts, because I’d prepare something, people would show and claim they new the subject and sign in.

This year I changed the technology strand drastically.  Instead of 6 weeks of a topic, now I do mini-ones.  I also make them shorter, starting at 8:15 and ended at 8:40-8:45, but of course you’re welcome to stay and continue playing or come back later in the day for extra help.

Today was the most successful.  I advertised last Friday late — next time I’ll do a second advertisement then, I’ve already done the advertisement this week.  I had 5 show up.  They were all engaged, and two were not technology teachers.  Also gave me time to "sell" the server.  Something just instituted. 

Next week I’m doing Flckr and have invited people to bring an digital camera with a USB cable.  Since it’s election day I thought I would go a little fun, and people do use Flckr for educational purposes.  It is probably blocked by the district but I’ll see if I can’t get something done in the meantime.

Some actually approached me and asked me for an Excel session, so what I think I’ll do is overview how I use Excel (not much), and give them the links to the tutorials I make my kids use.

Just finished watching “Without a Trace” — love the WHDVR — and the “moral” sure applies to teaching.

The old boss was talking to the new boss and said he’d been given advice by his old boss.  The part that applies to teaching is “don’t take the job home”. The new boss said “How was that working for you”, and the response was “Doen’t do much for my sleep, but it gets the job done”.

Man that sounds like the story of my life, especially THIS year.

But bringing it home, does get the job done.But then I don’t get much sleep.

Quoted from http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2008/10/23/announcing-small-basic-from-microsoft-devlabs.aspx:

Computer Science Teacher – Thoughts and Information from Alfred Thompson : Announcing Small Basic From Microsoft DevLabs

Small Basic is a new development tool for beginners

  I love this, I can see building a course with both it & Raptor. Probably at the middle school level. Too bad I can’t stand those kids. Love my high school babies put prefer -a "real" language for them.

Hopefully this won’t get me noticed, BUT…

I haven’t purchased an issue of the Dallas Morning News, and restrict myself to reading their feeds as much as possible so as not to give them advertising revenue since they helped cause the Davidian Incident.

Davidian — Waco incident where the Waco News and the Dallas Morning News got a bunch of members of a cult killed.

Here’s the latest reason I despise them ….

The published a RIF list from Dallas ISD.  First, the person who sent it to them should now move to the head of the list.  Second, they should never had published it.  I went through the list and immediately knew how was RIFed out of my building, and quite a few others.  As my husband put it, they should have waited until the "next of kin" had been notified.

But at least I wasn’t on it and I didn’t see any CS certifications, BUT there were a lot that were only described as teacher.

And please, teachers, unions, etc, please don’t do anything more to upset the students. They are really suffering from this.

I’ve had three kids working with me on the campus technology stuff.  I’ve been dragging them all over the building, having them watch stuff and do in front of me.

Today, I had three rooms that I didn’t think were getting internet access.  All three needed to be troubleshot (spell check is nice, I couldn’t and the kids couldn’t figure out the right work). 

Since I’m getting out of crisis mode, I took a leap of faith, pulled out my old district laptop, handed it to a kid and said make sure you have the internet working in this room, I don’t care where.

Also, the way the kid makes noise, I didn’t care where he was, as long as he wasn’t in my earshot.

So he claimed he had it working, so I gave him the list of rooms, second kid volunteered to go to, and I’m getting he did the work.

First room, she said it was already working.  Second room, they claimed that the Network connections was disabled and all they had to do was enable it.  Third room, they called teacher was typing in https:// instead of http:// and they claim the internet is working in all three rooms.

In the meantime, I got a bunch of other stuff done while the other kid was in the room and quiet. 

Man was it nice!  Hope it continues.  That was my original plan.

I’ve been operating in crisis mode all year, it’s week 7, and it is no fun. 

It’s made me go downhill physically and mentally, so I am stopping now, and taking control of the situation.

First thing, is that I got up this morning and got ahead on all of my classes so far except 1, my Technical Support class, and I’m going back to that now, and getting ahead on that.

Second, I’m going to establish some firm goals on what I am going to try to accomplish both short and long term.

Next, I’m going to try to isolate Campus Technology work to 4th period and before school.

The good news, is that we’ve only got 3 more days until the RIF day: October 15th.

I’ve been with Dallas ISD for 18 years.  I tried to hire on as an emergency certified teacher right before they had a RIF at the beginning of the school year.  I went on to get certified traditionally through Texas Woman’s University.  By the way, I’m certified in both CS and Math because I want the job stability of teaching math.  Plus back in the old days, I actually taught a class called Computer Math.  Still have a couple of copies of the textbook.

I think we had another RIF at the beginning of the school year a few years after I hired, but I don’t know for sure.

But the main reason I went into teaching was to avoid layoffs. I went through a bunch of RIFs at all three of the corporations I worked at before teaching.  Never fun.

I’ve been through other fun times — superintendent who misspent money and went to jail for it.  P-Card scandal.  Contractors stealing from us.  It’s been fun.

So the latest?  Last year the district over spent by $64 million dollars and if they don’t stop it, the over spending will hit $84 million.

The problem?  They over hired by over 1000 employees.  That’s 5% of the district employees.

Here’s what I’ve been told so far:

Our school is two teachers short according to student head count.  So we’re in good shape.  Superintendent wants to RIF according to school and department.

However, the "union" wants them to rank the teachers and RIF according to rank.  Meaning that all Algebra I teachers would be ranked, etc.  I probably wouldn’t be RIFed, as I would be in the top 3 CS teachers (number two by seniority, not sure how the TAG teacher would be ranked with the two senior general high school teachers, which is why I’m ranking us together).  The good news, is that we still had an opening at the TAG school last I heard. 

TEA is threatening to step in and they haven’t said how they would do the RIF.

Frankly, I think someone should be going to jail, this has certainly had more repercussions than buying tacky bedroom furniture did.

And I think if I do get RIFed, I’ll go quietly and figure out how to teach CS online — which I’ve done before.

The worst part, is that they knew about this problem back in May, and it would have been much less painful for everyone if they had dealt with it then.

One of my duties as teacher tech is to be of technical assistance through the fingerprinting process. 

The state legislature finally decided that we had too many convicted felons working as teachers, especially they want to get rid of the sex offenders.  At least that’s what I hope.

So we all have to be fingerprinted.

Fun process.  First, everyone has to make sure their SBEC profile is correct.  Have had teachers who have had the wrong birthdate on the teaching certificate FOREVER, use 4 different permutations of their name, and quite a few who have never changed their names on the certificates to match their driver’s license.

We’re supposed to get emails tomorrow, though we got the schedule today.  I’m predicting that our district email system is going to blow a gasket.  Hopefully I’m wrong.

Last, twenty four hours before the actual event, we’re supposed to print something called a FastPass.

Oh, and during the event, I’m supposed to make sure that the fingerprinters have internet access etc.  So tomorrow I’m going to drag my tech support class downstairs with my laptops and check that.  (All of two students so far).

Oh, and everyone keeps jumping the gun on the Fastpass and freaking out.  My main job on this is walk people through the process and make them keep breathing.