Author Archives: Dee

About Dee

I am a working wife, geek, and mother of two with opinions about just about everything which I plan to share here.

And So It Begins

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner yesterday – we have decided Robin has to make dressing next year (we are in quest of the perfect dressing/stuffing).
This evening Dale and I go to the airport to pick up his sister who is donating a kidney to him. She just called to tell him she is at the airport in Lafayette waiting to board.

She and her son have never flown so they are just excited about the trip right now. I took care of some more last minute things today and cleaned most of the day. I have nearly caught up on laundry, picked up the dry cleaning, got a spare tire for my son so he doesn’t end up stuck on the side of the road, and put together my reading/writing bag. I am packed for the most part and I’m sure I will forget something but the kids will be coming to visit so they can bring stuff.

I have my latte to keep me awake on the trip to the airport. I detest this drive and I especially hate going to the airport. I hate parking, I hate trying to get from the car to where you can pick up your person, and I hate trying to find the car after all that. We have parked and ridden the shuttle before but with this being the end of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend we will be lucky to find a place to park period.

We are all grouchy and snappy with each other and I can tell we are stressed. We are ready to begin.

My Daughter And I Do Not Have Communication Problems!

We are sitting 12 feet away from each other – she is on the pc and I am on the mac.  My husband is sitting between us in the recliner watching tv.

Chat transcript from Skype:

She: rawrrrr i is BORED mom.
can we watch the other movie??

Me: ask dad – I have to go mash taters and get out the turkey

She:  kk, need any help?

Me:  oops how are you going to ask him he doesn’t have a computer?

Husband: Just shaking his head and rolling his eyes as we explain

Skype!

skypeicon.jpg The synapses connected for a minute this evening and I realized that if I get a webcam for our pc then we can talk to the kids via Skype. My daughter downloaded it and called me. Even though she couldn’t speak since there is currently no microphone hooked up, she was able to see me on her screen. She made the view full screen and I could see myself across the room on the pc screen. It was a little weird but it worked wonderfully. She is so excited that she will be able to video chat with us. I know it will help if the kids can actually “lay eyes” on their dad and it will help us if we can actually “lay eyes” on them! Now we will have to try even harder to find places that have internet access over there!

Addendum: went to wally world this morning and got a webcam.  It all works well from one end of our house to the other so we will try when we are in Dallas.  I am pretty confident that Skype will work – I’m just concerned about access.  More on this later.

A Little Santa Break

My kids always want to know what I want for Christmas – I’m totally telling them this:

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Quote from the back cover:

Champagne punch anyone?
Watch for fun, stress-reducing ideas sprinkled throughout the book, such as the best lotions for busily blogging hands, refreshing recipes, and great ideas for cocktails

That’s what I’m talking about!

Thankful Beyond Words

I can’t even write about it without getting weepy and maybe I can blog about it later but today the folks I work with did a really nice thing for us and it will help us as we head for transplant land this weekend.  People do not always realize how they become the face and hands of Jesus,  I don’t handle receiving very well.  I want to be the one who does the giving and being on the other end is humbling and confusing for me.

I am ready for this to happen and for everyone to be fine and me be back at work hopefully being a better person for it.

Another Journaling Application

I will be the first to admit that while I am great at trying new things, I am not great at following through. I have the best intentions but this and that happen and next thing I know, I have forgotten that shiny new goal.

This school year I was determined to be more organized and I think I have improved some but there is definitely room for more. I have tried several applications this year as I tried to get in the spirit of GTD and most of them just seem more complicated than I need for what I do.

I am trying a new one starting today. It is free and simple and I’m loving that. It is called Tagebuch. It is from MyOwnApp and is a very plain diary program. You add a new entry and it adds the date and time so you can do multiple entries in a day. You can tag your entries and search them. There are a few formatting choices and you can export your notes as a PDF but for the most part it just gets out of the way and lets you write notes. So far the only feature I would like to see is a way to see a list of tags I create but I can live without it.

I will be giving it a workout this next month because I plan to use it at the hospital. I have learned to take notes on everything that happens and while I like online apps, I know I won’t always have access. This will give me a way to take notes while it keeps track of the date and time for me.

As you can see the interface is very clean and basic – write a new entry, delete an entry, tag an entry, and search for an entry.

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I think I already love this.

Resources For Storytelling – Digital or Non

Cross posted at PHS Computer Project Lab
I started out searching for how writing is taught so that in the future I might be a better commenter. I found some wonderful resources and I’m going to share them here before they disappear into bookmark oblivion.

The first is from the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory and is called 6+ 1 Trait Writing.

The 6+1 Trait Writing framework is a powerful way to learn and use a common language to refer to characteristics of writing as well as create a common vision of what ‘good’ writing looks like. Teachers and students can use the 6+1 Trait model to pinpoint areas of strength and weakness as they continue to focus on improved writing.

There are lesson plans, assessment, prompts and more. There is more on this at The Writing Fix and at eMints which has a huge list of links that even include classroom posters you can print out.

The next treasure is The Scribe Initiative which is a wiki of the San Antonio School system dedicated to digital storytelling. There is an incredible wealth of resources here including links to open source software for editing audio, tutorials for using MovieMaker and PhotoStory, sources for images and sounds and much more. If you want to take your student’s writing digital this is a great place to start.

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“How do I know what I think until I see what I say? ”
E. M. Forster

Time Is Relative

My dad liked to fix things. He tinkered. He also went through phases. He worked in a paint factory full time but for years he also clock2.jpgrepaired lawnmowers and boat motors. The nature of growing up in a lake town means that there is a steady trail of folks trying to upgrade boats and motors so it kept him busy and his reputation grew. He also did something that we called “scrounging”. He could find junk, fix it, and sell it for two and three times what he paid for it. It kept us fishing and water skiing as I grew up. It also provided me with a bicycle, a record player (for those of you who are not from my time – think of an iPod for dinosaurs), a sewing machine which I used for years, and many other things that we probably could not have afforded if not for his ability to create value from none.

One of his phases was clocks. For awhile there were multiple chiming clocks in our house and the hour and the half hour was a bizarre but not unpleasant combination of chimes and bells. You would think it would interrupt your sleep but it was one of those things that once you got used to it it was comforting.

My mother was always amazed that he could “tinker” with the tiny clock works because his hands were as big as baseball mitts! I know this was not just a family exaggeration because I brought a date home one time and as we pulled out of the driveway he said that was the biggest hand he had ever shaken. We got home from our date on time.

Today Dale finally hung a clock that was repaired years ago by my dad. When he passed on I got to pick from several and chose this one. Today Dale hung it in the living room and got it working again. The clock is a 1925 Junghans chiming wall clock. It’s mahogany and about 28 inches tall. The first chime took me back to living at home and hearing all the clocks and seeing my dad at the kitchen table at night with clock pieces spread out around him.

It still needs some work but now that Dale is interested it will end up spread out on my kitchen table and it will be keeping time again.

Opening Office 2007 Files and Open Office files

7-large.jpgWe have no computers running Vista at school, but a few students have it on home computers. I learned I can open documents created on Vista machines with Pages on my Mac.

Just yesterday I downloaded the latest OpenOffice and burned it to a cd for a student to install on their home computer. The student created a presentation and brought it to school on her jump drive. It wouldn’t open with PowerPoint on a PC or Mac and I finally had to just open it in OpenOffice on my Mac and let the teacher view and grade it on my machine. I’m not sure it was because it was a new version of OpenOffice or if it was because the student had not saved it as a PowerPoint when she created it. I will download and install it on my PC to check it out.

It is always a challenge to deal with the issues that crop up as the public sometimes moves on to new technology before the school can completely catch up. Newer printers can only be hooked to the computer via usb and older computers like Windows 98 machines may have usb ports but they don’t seem to be able to use them. Unfortunately, printers tend to give out before computers do so this is getting to be more of an issue.

I also read a “just for fun” tip on A New Mac Tip Everyday. This is how to change your login screen background. If you are like me you don’t see that screen too often but you might want to put a picture as a background even there. Here is how:

1. Make a copy of the background you want and rename it to “DefaultDesktop.jpg”.

2. Go to /System/Library/CoreServices and find the file DefaultDesktop.jpg.
3. Store the file somewhere on your hard drive in case you want to go back to the original default background.
4. Place your new background called “DefaultDesktop.jpg” in the folder /System/Library/CoreServices.
This won’t actually affect your productivity but then if you use a Mac to work you are already productive!

New Bloggers!

We have some students who are blogging and I have started visiting their blogs to leave comments and encourage them. This is so exciting to see! I know that this is not a new thing in some districts but for us it is brand new and I feel like I have had a tiny bit of influence here. I don’t teach these students – I’m not even on the same campus. I was one of the first bloggers in our district and I have been an advocate so I feel a little like a proud mama or at least great aunt. I hope they find a new way to express themselves, a new way to communicate with each other, and new ways to find the common ground that connects us to each other as members of the human race. Then again, maybe all that will happen is their grammar and spelling will improve because they realize other people are reading what they write. I’m betting on the former.

Books and Tips For Windows and Word

I love Amazon’s used books. I got a box of paperbacks for Dale today. He has decided he wants to go back and start reading all of Sue Grafton‘s books in order. He has read A through F and I got an entire box in the mail today – G through N. For those of you who do not read mysteries Sue Grafton’s books have titles like “M is for Murder” and “I is for Innocence”. The main character is a girl private detective named Kinsey Milhone. These books should last him through the transplant process.

I got a copy of PowerPoint For Teachers by Ellen Finkelstein and Pavel Samsonov which looks pretty good. It walks you through creation of presentations to use in the classroom and I hope to learn some new techniques that I can post here. I am making a little collection of things to read and learn and blog about during Dale’s hospitalization and this will be part of that.

Part of my job is supporting teachers in their use of technology and I forget sometimes that while I get excited about Web 2.0 tools and blogging and wikis and skype, I forget that most people just want to know little tricks that make their job easier. Today I showed one person keyboard shortcuts – Windows/E for opening Windows Explorer and Windows/L for locking their computer and being able to log back in and have all their programs still open. Another person just wanted the steps for creating a folder on their desktop and instructions on how to save documents directly to it. Two people were made happy by something that took me just a few moments.

To make a new folder by the way – you right click on a blank space whether it be on your desktop or within another folder. Choose new and then choose folder. Rename your folder and then when you create a document you want to save in that folder click on File/Save As and using the drop down box navigate to the folder you just created. Voila!
I also learned you can link text boxes in Word. A class project entails some students creating a magazine type article that I mentioned in the previous post. While the Word column function doesn’t do exactly what they need another way to go is putting everything in text boxes and then “linking” them so that text will flow from one to the next if there is more text that will fit in the box.

1. Hover the mouse pointer over the border of the first text box. The pointer shape changes to the Move shape (looks like a plus sign with arrows at the ends of the lines)

2. Right click and choose Create Text Box Link

3. The mouse pointer will change to a “pitcher” shape.

4. Click in the box you wish to link to – the text will now “pour” from the first text box into the second.

5. You can link more than one text box but you must always link forward – you cannot link backwards.

This is still not an ideal answer but it gives you a some control and another option.

I love technology but I like making people happy too! New books, happy people – it was a good day!

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Microsoft Word Column Limits

A class was trying to do a project today and the idea was to use Word in three column format to create a magazine style article. The problem was that they needed to be able to insert a picture and the teacher wanted that picture to be able to span several columns and have the text wrap around it but still stay in column format. Microsoft Office 2000 and 2003 were being used. I tried to figure out a way to make it work and created a text box to use as the container for the picture. On my MacBook it worked like a charm. Unfortunately the text wrapping part didn’t work so well when I tried it on the PC.
Microsoft Word worked better on my MacBook than on the PC? That is just weird.

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K12 Online Conference Dean Shareski Presentation

I am slowly getting to more presentations from the conference and today I watched “Design Matters”. I have been thinking about this for awhile. Whether it be our classrooms, offices, textbooks, powerpoints – everything deserves our attention because as human beings we respond on a level that isn’t even always conscious to our first exposure to something.

My lab is straight rows of computers all facing the front. From the standpoint of me sitting at the back and being able to see if there is a problem it’s great. From the standpoint of an instructor being at the front with access to the data projector it works well.

Unfortunately it’s ugly. I hate it. I look at it from the perspective of someone wanting to learn and I have difficulty concentrating in there. Of course it was put together about nine years ago (I think). It has the obligatory chalk boards at the front with florescent lighting. The students bring their backpacks and have them between the rows so it is difficult to get to them if they need help. They bump the back of machines as they move down the row and loosen connections (and occasionally swap the mouse and keyboard for fun) I realize that there was no way we could foresee where we would be now and even less possible to imagine where we will be in twenty or thirty years.
I’d like to see some images of computer labs at other schools, particularly ones where thought was given to designing for aesthetics as well as purpose. In my mind I keep going back to a center oriented layout. I imagine centers for multimedia, centers just for wordprocessing, an area with something like study carrels where students who are easily distracted or just have a need to concentrate can work independently. I’d like adjustable lighting that can be dimmed as low as needed.

We need storage, both lockable for extra cables and equipment and open for backpacks and books. I’d like an area with a white board and a table where a group could sit comfortable and watch a presentation. It would be wonderful if there were a way for a group to have headphones that hooked to the same source for the group to use or a way to close the area off if needed for small groups to to staff development or view and hear media. One of the worst problems in the average lab configuration that I can see is that as more and more of the information on line is multi-faceted. It’s visual, audio and interactive and in a group it is impossible for an individual to see and hear and not bother everyone else around them. I’ll be talking about this subject in future posts – not just about my lab but about design in general.

A Foggy Fun Day

We drove up to Mena today to see the leaves which have changed colors and would have been gorgeous. Unfortunately a system that was supposed to move in tomorrow managed to arrive early and made it a cloudy, misty day.

mistlyleaves07We still got some nice pictures and ate at the Skyline Cafe which was packed for lunch as usual. I had the house omelet which was huge and had everything but the kitchen sink in it! After lunch we walked around town a bit, browsed several antique stores and got lattes at the coffee shop. We had also bought some books at the used book store.
We took some pictures in town and then headed up into the mountains where we took more pictures. I’ll probably post some here after I get them uploaded to Flickr. We would have gotten more pictures if the visibility had been better but we still took quite a few and had a great time. I took several pictures of signs. I want to start building a collection of images to use on the web and so I tried to keep that in mind today.

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We had a slight hitch with the BJs car. We had pulled off for pictures and when Dale went to start the car it wouldn’t do anything. We were a bit nervous as we were at the top and heading down some steep grades, had no cell service. Dale and BJ spent some time consulting the car manual and after a few minutes tried to start it again. something weird with a security thing had happened and evidently when this thing happens you have to wait til a certain light goes out before you start the car. The time they spent looking at the manual was enough time for whatever needed to happen. We still have no idea why it happened but we are grateful it got us home!

Despite the weather and car trouble it was a nice day and we laughed a bunch. We needed something just for fun before we get down to serious transplant time!

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Path To Unknown




rockin’ c ranch

Originally uploaded by Jessiboo

We can’t always see where life will lead us but we can see resting places along the way. I am blessed to have a great group of friends and family who provide that for me. I hope I do the same for them! Thanks for this wonderful picture belongs to my daughter.

Creating A StoryMap Lesson

I love maps. I love pretty colored maps, antique world maps, globes that light up, all of them are just cool eye candy to me. Here is a great project idea for using google maps. “Find a Story… Map a Story… Tell a Story…”

You will find an example of a story map, a rubric, and step by step instructions.

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Notice the little markers. You can hover on them and get a title or click them and get more information:

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There are links to tutorials for CommunityWalk , GoogleMaps and Wayfaring

“In the description area of the marker, write your memory of that location. Hint: It would be helpful to write your memory on a Word document first so that you can check for spelling. Remember- this is a story so your description should be more than “This is the park in my neighborhood“. Tell your readers what happened at the park- this step is the most important part of the project. Without interesting vignettes, the project will just be a about pictures and markers.”

You will want to have pictures of real places on the map to upload for your markers. This could be the actual neighborhood your students live in. You could make maps with markers for the travels of a character in a story or any historically significant area. Students could use a database to map the spread of a disease or they could map their family tree.

Transplant Itinerary

Dale got a letter in the mail yesterday giving him a general timeline. The day before the transplant he and his sister both go to the hospital at 8:00 in the morning for labs, chest x-ray, and EKG. After that his sister is free til she sees the surgeon at 2:00 but Dale will go to the transplant center to see the nephrologist. At 12:30 he will see the transplant surgeon at the Heart and Vascular hospital and then back across the street at the main hospital to turn in consent forms. Dale will have to go to a local dialysis center at 4:00 for one last dialysis (we hope) which takes about 4 hours. Both he and his sister have to be at admitting at 5:30 the next morning. He will need surgery to get a rest!

His sister is scheduled for surgery at 7:30 and he is scheduled for 9:30. From what we understand they do two a day so we are first shift which sounds like a good thing to me. We get the docs when they are fresh and not too tired!

This is getting real.  As long as neither Dale nor his sister catch a bug between now and then it will happen. One of the fellows that Dale knows from the dialysis center drove to Dallas after being called because they had a match.  When the center makes these calls they call the first three possible matched on the list.  By the time this guy got there they had already found someone higher on the list who was a better match.  I can’t imagine gearing yourself up for that and then having to drive back home.  We are lucky we have a living donor for Dale.