Category Archives: Blogging

Just Checking In For A Moment!

I have been off the grid since my last post. It has been a very busy week and this weekend is going to fly by! We hosted the District UIL met at our school this weekend and while my part is small, it was fun with lots of payback. I coach Computer Applications (my first year) and my student took fifth place which I think is wonderful considering this was her first year to compete. My own kids attend school in the next district – a weird think I know but we are a small area geographically but have three school districts. My daughter placed second in Computer Applications and My son placed third in Extemp (I hope I have that right or I will never hear the end of it!)

A friend is at WordCamp Dallas 2008 this weekend and I hope learns some great stuff to share. I would love to have gone but too many conflicts this weekend! I will have to be content with searching for posts to read to live vicariously!

We have joined a small group bible study and we meet on Tuesday nights so that is one night we are busy, and then we are trying to attend two different churches right now which is confusing but we are trying to work out some things. One place has incredible teaching. the other has definite issues but we went there for years and many of the people there are like extended family. We have gotten involved with a small Sunday night praise service and tomorrow morning there will be a youth led service and then in the evening we will continue that theme but I AM TO GIVE THE MESSAGE. I have been struggling with this all week. I would have preferred a skit but they are doing one with the kids in the morning.

I’m relying on Luke 15 and the parable of the Prodigal Son but I’m concentrating on the eldest son. I would really like it to have meaning and bear fruit and I don’t want it to be about me. If you are a praying person I would ask for your prayers for this service that I would disappear and the Word would do whatever God needs it to do in this place and at this time.

There will be very little rest this weekend so I’m going to crash and burn early. I still need to do some more writing and tweaking. This is the first and maybe the last time I will ever do this – it is such a huge responsibility. I can’t imagine what it would be like to do this week after week. I AM looking forward to the kids’ skit. They will be goofy and cute and forget stuff but isn’t the way it always is?

For now world, goodnight! I will try to get some more tutorials up in the next few weeks.

QuarterLife

I watched Quarterlife on television tonight. I had already seen it on MySpace and the Debut episode was the same as what had already been online. I think I liked it better when it was just online. I could put on my ear buds and work on a blog post while I watched a show online told front he point of view of a blogger.

It really is just a soap opera – same old story, different venue. Young people, angst with blogging thrown in. Yada yada yada. I had hoped for a little more. I’ll watch a few more times and give it a fighting chance

The narrator/blogger claims at first to be honest and driven to blog about what moves her which is really just her self-justification for telling her friends secrets online. She is not as open about herself and at the point in the plot where she makes the decision to put herself out there something happens that makes that piece of film end up in the trash bin.

I have often wanted to blog about something that happened during my day and couldn’t because it might hurt someone or cause problems at my job. I have for some time thought about starting a blog somewhere and being completely anonymous and telling stories that usually only get told in my head. I would disguise names and places.

Do you think it would be freeing? I think so. The things that happen in my life that are interesting or funny or sad, are usually things I can’t tell about here because most of the VERY SMALL group of people who read this blog would know immediately who I was writing about.

I don’t know that I will actually start a new blog but I will enjoy thinking about the personalities. I may try to write the debut post just to see if I can write something worthy of ‘blogging around”.

Three Words

This post has two purposes. I am trying out a plugin that lets me finally embed youtube videos here. I also want to share this video as a great idea for a class project. It could be themed according to any subject and filmed in pieces at different times and then put together later.

Three Words
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO0jovLVPA8&feature=related

If you do a YouTube search on Three Words you will find many versions and each as some very creative and powerful segments.

thanks to Mark Ghosh for the embedify plugin that allowed me to finally embed the video!!

Arrival In Austin

We have arrived in Austin after a deluge near Sulphur Springs. We made a potty and Starbucks stop and ate supper at Freebird’s.

We got to the Omni and there was a mistake so they didn’t have a double occupancy room and they ended up putting us in a suite. suite This room is a smoking room so there is a bit of a smell (the ex-smoker said a bit sarcastically) but it has two full bedrooms, three baths, two walk-in closets, a spa tub, a kitchen, two balconies, a bar, and three tv’s. We had to use our room key just to get on the right elevator. Not too shabby for a couple of country girls. They are supposed to move us tomorrow but we wouldn’t complain if they just left us alone.
view from 17th floorWe took a walk down on Sixth Street just to see what it’s like on Fat Tuesday. We found Mardi Gras beads, tons of people, a group of drummers in a circle playing in the street, music pouring out of the doorways and children dressed like grown-ups. There were grown-ups acting like children, a street artist using spray paint to create fantasy spacescapes, an Irish pub where a man was playing and singing country music, police on foot, horseback, and bicycle and an atmosphere of friendly fun. I don’t know if that atmosphere remained later in the night because we headed back up to our hotel to rest up for our first morning at the conference.

sixth streetAddendum – First day was fun – I learned a lot and as soon as I get notes typed I will start adding them to the blog so keep checking back!!

TCEA 2008

tcea08.jpgNext week I am planning on attending TCEA 2008 in Austin. Dale is doing well and I will be a cell phone call away. I am looking forward to learning some new things and meeting some folks that I have till now known only through blogging.

I plan, as I did last year, to blog my notes. If you do not blog and are going to be attending this year from PISD, I would love to have you as a “guest blogger”! Just let me know if you are interested and we can arrange for your notes/reflections on the conference to appear as a guest post by you to share with the rest of the district.

If you are a blogger I have a few tips for you. Take good notes making sure you have the session name, presenter name, and school district if applicable. Check out HitchHikr – a site that will aggregate posts that are tagged for specific conferences. There is no tag yet so you might want to check back – it will be something like TCEA08. If you tag our post with the HitchHikr tag it will make it easier for people who didn’t attend the same sessions to find your notes. As conference attendees start posting and tagging, the posts will show up on the HitchHikr site and there will be an RSS link so you can subscribe if you like and read other posts. This is a great way for all of us to get the most out of the conference and share the information with folks in the district who couldn’t attend.

There is a great post at Lunch Over IP on tips for conference blogging with links to other articles if you are interested in reading more about this. They have even created a PDF booklet you can download. There are two versions and I have included one here.

conferenceblogging_zuckerman-giussani_A4_color_booklet.pdf

Stop by Lunch Over IP blog and leave a thank you comment if you find this useful. I’m excited about the conference and can’t wait to tell you all about it!

Also posted at My school blog – PHS Computer Project Lab

Teachers Make Technology Work For Them

I love Google Earth – to me it has this magic carpet feel to it. I can visit anywhere on earth in moments and often when I get there I will find that someone has taken photos of interesting sites there or I can add overlays that tell me everything there is to know about the area. I’m a Google fan anyway.

Right now a friend of mine and I are making some slides for a praise service using Google docs. I type or copy and paste lyrics onto slides and then “share” with him (which sends him an email with a click-able link to the presentation) which he then adds a background to and maybe tweaks the text a bit. When he is through he shares it back with me. We can work on it at different times, in different places and even add collaborators if we want. The slides can be downloaded and used in Powerpoint, Keynote, OpenOffice Impress, and even SlideShare.

I have not been so in love with Twitter. Twitter is an application that lets you constantly add a few words about what you are doing at the moment. I see how it might have it’s uses (sort of) for people who have a shared interest but mine would bore people to tears. Maybe I could make it a paid subscription for insomniacs? I signed up for a free account trying to see if I could “get it”. I have even subscribed via RSS to several of my favorite education/technology/blogger “tweets”

This morning I read how several teachers are using it and was once again reminded of how creative and resourceful teachers are.

Langwitches have started a Teachable Moments Shoutout Twitter account that you can that you can subscribe to and if you have a Twitter account you can join in. You can help other teachers with teachable moment ideas or get help yourself. If you are not familiar with Twitter, this does not mean a huge lesson plan with rubrics and worksheets – these are short messages. You can even subscribe via cell phone and get “tweets” as text messages. If you are curious you can find out more on the Twitter FAQ page or the Twitter Lingo/Help page.

This Shoutout idea was inspired by Tom Barrett and his use of Google Earth and Twitter. Tom got his Twitter network people to participate in his students’ Google Earth lesson. The students had to find these people based on a few clues on Twitter.

I asked my network to challenge the children to find them in Google Earth, to search and discover their location from a few scraps of info via Twitter. Well the challenges rolled in and in a couple of hours we had 25 different people to track down.

Some of the Tweets were longitude and latitude. Others were addresses or well-known geographical sites. As the students found the locations the sent back messages via twitter to let them know they had been found. The students got experience searching and using the different layers and even the three-D buildings feature. Because they had a real purpose the focus of the class became finding real people in real places and the technology became the tool instead of the lesson.

When I was in elementary school I had a Japanese PenPal. That was our Web 2.0.

New Years Goals for 2008 And Dale’s Lab Update

First for those of you that have been keeping up – Dale’s labs continue to be good. His white count was a little high which can be an indication of infection but it could also be a false reading so they will recheck and we will watch for fever. He has no other signs and everything else looked good except his cholesterol so they will start him back on his cholesterol medicine. They are finally listening to him about the stomach pain and trying him on a different medicine. The cellcept has been a problem for him all along and even with a daily pepcid he has had almost constant problems. It turns out that there is a newer alternative with less side effects. The hospital automatically puts you on the cellcept right now because they have a contract. When that contract runs out they will most likely switch to the Myfortic. The pharmacy has it ordered and unfortunately won’t have it till Monday afternoon so he will have to hang in there for the weekend. Myfortic basically does the same thing but is coated so it won’t be so hard on your tummy.

__________________

I’m thinking a lot about goals for the new year. I realize I may be a little late as most people try to make resolutions on the actual first of the year but things have been a bit busy here and I have never really been able to keep a resolution. After reading a few posts that talked about setting goals instead of making resolutions I decided that was the better path to take. I can work towards a goal and even if I don’t reach it I can at least see some progress so here goes.

I resolved last year to become more organized and therefore more productive. I read books and articles on GTD and bought file folders and tried setting up contexts in files on my computer. I just couldn’t seem to fit what I do into they system or for that matter take the time to get it set up and then keep up with it. I think that GTD sold books (it did to me) and ads and entire communities have grown up around the principles, organizers, templates and software but it just seems too labor intensive without the labor saving outcome for me.
I find myself spending more time trying to figure out how to be more productive than it takes me to actually be uh…productive. The best things for me seem to be:

  1. a large spiral notebook I keep on my desk near my phone and every morning I start with the days date. I copy anything unfinished from the previous day to the new day’s list and then check email and add anything appropriate to my list. I add to the list throughout the day and cross things off as they are completed. I store old notebooks so I can refer back to them if I need to.
  2. a small notebook I can carry in my pocket to write things down when I am away from my desk. (I have started being intentional about putting the dates in them as well so I can refer back) If it is important it can be transferred to the big spiral or a 4×6 card when I get back to my desk.
  3. my 4×6 card file. I have a small coupon keeper for portablility, a wooden box for permanent storage, and a small wooden easel for working cards. I created a template in Word that creates two cards on a page so I can copy and paste or type whatever I want on the cards. I keep a stack of cardstock in my drawer to print these homemade cards on and I also have a supply of colored cards to hand write on when I need to.

I use Mail.app for email and a plugin lets me tag posts with keywords. I also have a mail folder just named “done” so I can drag things that are completed into the folder and get them out of my inbox. My goal is to find ways to get everything ELSE out of my inbox. I am not entirely happy with Mail.app and not sure if it would be worth the trouble to make a switch or for that matter what I would switch to.
It was progress for me to get to this point so the resolution from last year hasn’t been a total bust. The things I still need to work on are organization of files on my computer and a system for deleting things that I no longer need instead of letting them pile up and clutter up and become a nagging problem. The same problem exists for my desk drawers and my closet. I really want to simplify and so those are the areas I have set as goals for the next year. There are a lot of keepsakes and pictures that I want to go through and distribute to other family members and get them off my mind and out of my home.

Dale and I stayed at a small apartment in Dallas for a month and I had the bare minimum as far as clothing, makeup, books, and kitchen tools. The only place I ever really missed something was in the kitchen. In every other area it was actually very freeing which was an important lesson. The problem for me now is finding the time and figuring out what to let go of and what to do with it so it will not be wasted. I managed in the week we were home during the holiday to clean out several junk drawers and baskets of paperwork.

My first goal is to continue to whittle down the piles, both in real life and virtually. This year has been more stressful than normal and unfinished tasks and clutter add to stress which adds to health problems which starts a cycle I want to break.
My second goal is something I have already started on. My brother was recently diagnosed with diabetes and while we were still in Dallas I checked mine a few times with Dales meter just to see since my brother is about ten years younger than me. My sugar was kind of high both times so I went to the doctor last week and she gave me my own glucometer and I will be checking for the next two weeks. So far it has been ok and it may have just been stress and not eating or exercising. It was a wake-up call though so I have been eating better and trying to squeeze some exercise in too. I had already made a lot of adjustments in my diet because Dale has to check his sugar right now and occasionally give himself insulin so I was just eating what he was eating.

I have discovered that you can get a “skinny” Cinnamon Dulce Latte at Starbucks so I think I can survive. I’m not sure what I’ll do about chocolate though. I have already been taking my lunch this year instead of buying cafeteria food and it has saved me money. Now it will help me make better choices as to what I eat. This may not be an organizational goal but I know if I work on a healthier lifestyle I will feel better and that will make me more productive.

I “gifted” myself with a good Wolfgang Puck saucepan with steamer insert (via ebay) and every trip to the doctor in Dallas means a stop at the Wholefoods Market. I’m switching us over to whole grains and brown rice and we are eating a lot more fruits and vegetables. I stopped drinking anything carbonated at the beginning of the school year and haven’t missed it at all. We have started taking re-usable bags with us and another goal for this year is to take those bags to more stores and to encourage those stores to start selling their own. Our local Krogers already does this and by using these bags you can cut down on clutter (all those thousands of plastic bags!) as well as be nice to the earth.

These are a few of my goals for the year – what are you working on?

A Little Santa Break

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

bloggingmoxie.jpg

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!

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.

tagebuch.jpg

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.

writertee.jpg

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

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.

Playing Catch Up And Some Links On Internet Safety And Ethics

There had too many things to blog about this weekend so I’m just going to try to combine it all into one mish-mash of what’s been going on in my little corner of planet earth.
First – we have a date for my husband’s kidney transplant. November the 27th if he and his sister are both free of infections, colds and flu we should be doing the big swap. It will be our Thanksgiving this year – ironic isn’t it? Dale has already made jokes about being the turkey that will be carved and yes he has a sick sense of humor. It’s probably the thing that has kept our marriage going strong all these years – we are both a little twisted.

I worked the tab room at my son’s school’s debate meet. It was kind of sad to realize that this is the last year I will have him in debate. I am in my usual Scarlett O’Hara mode where all that is concerned – I’ll think about that tomorrow.

My daughter wants to go to Texas A&M Commerce next Saturday for a College Open House thing. She is now thinking about going into education. Her dream is to be a photographer and I am encouraging her to do that but I’m also happy that she is looking at something that will let her make a living while she is building on the photography.

There was so much to read and blog about this weekend and I will try to share the best of it here. Because there is so much I won’t get in depth or I would have to leave a lot out.

Although Blog Action Day is over this article Plastic Ocean just made me crazy so I had to post the link and tell a little about it!

A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility…and worse.

sea-turtle-deformed.jpg

This picture of a sea turtle with a plastic band around it’s shell almost made me cry. I’m not an animal nut but I believe in being a good steward of the planet including pets and this is just sickening. The article is five pages long and the news is not good. The ocean is full of tiny plastic particles that are entering the food chain and will eventually find their way into us.

Moore says. “You could take your serum to a lab now, and they’d find at least 100 industrial chemicals that weren’t around in 1950.” The fact that these toxins don’t cause violent and immediate reactions does not mean they’re benign: Scientists are just beginning to research the long-term ways in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with our own biochemistry.

What this means to our kids and their kids genetically is unknown but it doesn’t take a scientist to figure out the news probably isn’t good. I just hope that scientists will start focusing on ways to improve the situation.

One thing I took away from the article that I did not know is that cans that contain foods have a plastic layer on the inside or that there are really only two types that are actually recycled – soda bottles and milk jugs and there is no way to make them into the same items without causing more problems so they generally end up recycled into things that go nowhere near your mouth. Glass, paper, and metal are much better bets for recycling without adding to the pollution.

There is a large number of resource links for cyberethics at the Virginia Center for Technical Education. There are links to websites on plagiarism, internet safety, copyright and more. One site lists the ten rules of “netiquette” of which my personal favorite was “adhere to the same standards of behavior online that you follow in real life” Here! here!

TotallyWired is a great source of information on online safety. One recent article explained how gangs are using social networking sites like MySpace. Another on Cyberbullying gives a balanced view of some of the problems with these sites – online harrassment can often be blocked – it’s in offline reality where the conversations spill over into the real world that often have real consequences.

once you make something digital it’s very hard to prevent it from being copied, forwarded or misused in some way if someone has it out for you, and that most teens are still shocked that certain photos or communications that were meant to be private turn up in incidents of harassment or bullying. According to the report, “one in 6 teens (15%) told us someone had forwarded or posted communication they assumed was private.”

Bullying has been around since big cavemen picked on little cavemen. People don’t change – the tools do.

Overheard In A Teacher Chat!

I am amazed, amused, and awed!

  • “I got my truck stuck in a Blog
  • He looks naked without a Starbucks cup next to him.
  • What system is Halo on?
  • Halo who?
  • does the audio sound like…chipmunks to anyone else?
  • the minds of our school board members are boundaries
  • their boundaries are in their minds
  • …..and in our firewalls
  • I think we are sometimes our own limiting boundaries!
  • I can’t search google images or right click!!!
  • The IT department often are boundaries
  • I think his point today about needing to create and define new boundaries given the “loss of boundaries” was an important statement
  • my boundaries are clear and blocked
  • Ignorance is a boundary… must educate more teachers!
  • networks are our information
  • traditional school has focused on information, but david is right, the focus on OVERWHELMING quantities of info is new
  • remind me to thank my district IT guys tomorrow…despite our differences in vision, they are nowhere near as obstructionist as what I am reading here…
  • We discussed the value of YouTube for education at school today.
  • I can act individually with information but its nowhere near the experience if I work with that same information in a network of people.
  • Policy’s simply need to be more accomodating. Things don’t move in 5 year plans anymore.
  • we just rewrote our tech plan around ideas instead of tasks
  • who will decide the content?
  • they can’t make decisions ahead of the changes
  • Kids may not all be more information literate but they are actively engaged in social networking. That’s why I think David said we need to provide the traction and learning to help them learn to teach themselves.
  • intellectual capital will be the value
  • that point David is addressing is the ATTENTION ECONOMY
  • relearn, unlearn & Learn
  • Our IS department was pointing out that their own jobs are now 24/7
  • Educators can’t be afraid to right/click
  • creativity almost entirely defies traditional measurement methods
  • Hard to assess W 2.0 using AD 1950 multiple choice
  • we can each recognize creativity, but we can’t put that in a bar chart in the same way we can with test scores
  • opportunities to fail and learn
  • How do we emphasize balance video games with real world experiences?
  • I think a big part of having a learning engine in the classroom is writing hyperlinked texts
  • effectively writing hyperlinked texts is a measurable outcome of the learning engine classroom
  • digital doppler
  • I’m a proponent of gaming, but balance is so important
  • Something wrong with my kids, they don’t like gaming
  • I’m TOTALLY unbalanced, but I love it (though I need to exercise more than my mouse-finger)
  • they have treadmills with computers built in to the front now.
  • We had some success with getting them to participate in gym class by using DDR.
  • Wii rocks!
  • i think “digital discipline” is a good term in this context. we all need it. balance fits in there too.
  • DDR is a blast
  • I think we all strive to have some “grounding” with the flexibility to fly a bit (or more)!
  • Heard a discussion on ReadingTeacher this week where they said balanced doesn’t mean equal time for everything (as in balanced literacy).
  • if you ban it, kids never learn to balance their lives. We have to let them fail. That’s where lessons are learned
  • how do we bring down the walled garden at school?
  • I think the best advice is to throw out the textbooks
  • I still see way too many teachers thinking integration is focusing on the technoogy instead of the content…
  • I’m launching a year-long classroom blogging unit (major overhaul from last year) – key elements: they claim their blogs on Technorati, they link to at least one blogger from the real world that they admire, they blog about what THEY’re interested in (within limits), and their goal is to grow readership network and extend self-directed learning.
  • if only we had time to learn with the kids – partners
  • I’m finishing a degree in assistive technology, and I signed up for a lab class this semester that has no lab… its all lecture
  • it’s because librarians don’t get enough partnership with teachers!!
  • so the teacher becomes the affective filter
  • The teacher is the model – not the information giver
  • I’m finding that it’s really tough to move students beyond the “consume and remix” stage in information processing. They love the creative aspect of playing with the tools, but to many the tools are more important than the message. I’d like students to take the time to “digest” the info and build it into an existing framework, or better yet, make a case for revamping the framework – then creatively communicate the learning.”

WOW!

For more on filtering there is a very thought provoking article on Doug Johnson’s blog.

(posted on my school blog)

K12 Online Conference Connections

One of the things that I have learned about conferences that are related to technology is that bloggers will write about them. The presentations begin conversations that continue throughout the blogosphere and even when the conference or event is not an online conference people who are not present can participate. If you want to have a way to keep up with those conversations on the K12Online conference here is a tip.

Go to technorati and in the search box put k12online. You will see a list of feeds of all the blog articles about the conference. There will also be the little orange RSS button you can click to subscribe. You can then choose from several – blogline and google are two of the choices. Subscribe in the reader of your choice and throughout the conference, blog articles that reference this conference will show up in your feeds.

You can also look here and here – David Warlick has set up a wiki for the conference.  You can also check out the hitchikr site.

K12 Online Conference!

It will be here any minute!! well pre-conference starts October 8

3 Reasons Meme

Three reasons to participate based on my experience from last year!

1. It is staff development the way I like it – at home, in my jammies, with a cup of decaf latte.

2. No Crowds! No driving! No hotels! No airports! (yes I know – technically that’s four – so sue me)

3. You can go back and review the sessions at anytime (unlike virtual conferences where you have to get everything you can right then because when its over, it’s over)

Ya’ll come!

Animoto Breaks Blog? My Fix…

After I embedded the Animoto video in my previous post, all other posts were slammed up against the left margin. I also couldn’t enter any text after the video and the commenting function was broken.

All I had to do was place center tags before and after the embedded code and it fixed the problems. Hope this helps anyone else that plays with it.