Category Archives: Personal

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.

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.

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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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.

roadclosed07
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.

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.

Homemade Bread Season

The weather is finally starting to cool here and that always makes me start thinking about vegetable soup and homemade bread. Someone asked me to share my bread recipe and I’m going to in this post.

The bread that I make is called sour dough but it isn’t a true sour dough. It is made with a starter and I will share that recipe first.

You begin with 2 pkg. of yeast and dissolve it in 1/2 cup of warm water. Next you “feed it with a cup of warm water, 2/3 cup sugar, and 3 tablespoons of instant potato flakes.

Cover and let mixture sit out on the counter all day, then refrigerate for three days. A plastic butter container works fine for this. In three days you will take the starter from the refrigerator and remove a cup (just throw it away this first time). After you have removed a cup of the mixture you will feed it again and this is how you will feed your starter from now on.

1 cup warm water

3/4 cup sugar

2 tablespoons instant potato flakes

Let the starter sit out all day again and then place back in the refrigerator. The starter has to be fed every three to five days whether you make bread or not. If you do not wish to make bread, repeat the above procedure. If you wish to make bread follow the instructions below.

Remove starter from the refrigerator and feed it and let it sit out for about 8 hours. If you have a healthy working starter, at the end of the day it should look bubbly on the top and fill the house with a yeasty smell.

Now you will remove a cup of starter and pour it into a large mixing bowl. Put the rest of the starter back in the refrigerator.

To make the bread you will add the following to the mixing bowl containing the starter:

1/4 cup sugar

1/2 cup oil

1 1/2 cups warm water

1 1/2 tsp. salt

6 cups of flour (bread flour works best but you can also use some whole wheat)
I usually add 4 cups of flour and using a wooden spoon mix the batter well till you can hold the spoon sideways and the batter kind of stretches as it drips off the spoon. This “stretchy” look happens when you have mixed the dough enough to release the gluten. You can then fold in the remaining 2 cups of flour. Cover the mixing bowl loosely with a dish towel and let rise in a warm place overnight. In the morning punch the dough down and turn it out onto a floured surface. knead it a few times and divide it into three. Knead each loaf and place into three greased loaf pans. Cover with a towel and allow to rise again for 4-6 hours in a warm place.

Bake at 350 degrees for 25 to 30 minutes.

The key is having a good warm place for the dough to rise. The level of humidity seems to have some affect as well.

The also makes wonderful rolls – just divide into nine mini-loaves, knead each and place in an 8″ X 8″ square dish and continue as you would if it were in loaf pans.

This bread makes the absolute best toast and smells soooo good!

Making Childhood Dreams Come True

Watch this video of a lecture by Randy Pausch. Be prepared. Get a snack and a drink – it’s about an hour and a half long but it is worth your time!

Pausch received his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Brown University and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He has been a co-founder of CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator, and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow. He has done sabbaticals at Walt Disney Imagineering and Electronic Arts (EA), and consulted with Google on user interface design. Pausch is the author or co-author of five books and over 70 articles, and the founder of the Alice software project.

Battle with cancer

Pausch has been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and was told in August 2007 to expect a remaining three to six months of good health.

Pausch delivered his “Last Public Lecture”, entitled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”, at CMU on September 18, 2007. This talk was modeled after an ongoing series of lectures where top academics are asked to think deeply about what matters to them, and then give a hypothetical “final talk”, i.e., “what wisdom would you try to impart to the world if you knew it was your last chance?” Before speaking, Pausch received a long standing ovation from a large crowd of over 400 colleagues and students. When he motioned them to sit down, saying “make me earn it”, some in the audience shouted back “you did!”

Wikipedia

You can also go to his homepage and get a PDF transcript and more information
Dr. Gabriel Robins has a website with more links and a wonderful Halloween picture of the Pausch family.

That gives you the who and what but not the why. I completely forgot about the cancer as I watched and listened and even took notes. There is so much in this video and I will tell a few of the ones that remember best.

How about going out for football and showing up at practice and finding you will be playing with no football? If you know me at all you know I know nothing about sports. There are 22 men on a football field at one time. Only one has the ball. This coach was teaching what the other 21 should be doing. Fundamentals…

Sometimes you run into brick walls when you are trying to make your dreams come true. “Brick walls exist for a reason – they give us a chance to show how badly we want something – they stop the other people”

“Sometimes brick walls are flesh”

“most of what we learn, we learn indirectly (or by “head fake”)”

“If you are going to do anything that is pioneering you are going to get arrows in the back – put up with it”

(he got an award that consisted of a vest that had arrows sticking out of the back)

He advises that we learn to recognize the moments that change our lives, don’t bail – the best of the gold is at the bottom of barrels of crap, and don’t complain – just work harder. Jackie Robinson’s contract said that he would not complain even when fans spit on him.

Be watching for the two head fakes about this speech – he will explain at the end. After the video – go to Alice.org and download the software. It will walk you through and give you an idea of his his work. Anyone who wants to get girls more interested in programming…..

He is definitely someone worth knowing.

Big Bang Quotes

Heard on my new favorite show “Big Bang Theory” As Sheldon stomps out because Penny blew his head up in Halo:

Penny – “Wait Sheldon – you forgot something”
Sheldon – “What?”
Penny – “This plasma grenade – Oh look – it’s raining you!”
Sheldon – “Just wait til you need tech support!”

Sheldon – “OK this bowl of cereal has now lost all it’s molecular integrity. I now have a bowl of shredded wheat paste”

I love this show….

Hallelujah Halloween

Our church had Hallelujah Night and celebrated with games, music, bounce houses, hotdogs, and a bike drawing. It must have been a great turn out – I didn’t get to look up much to see. I painted faces for two hours. I don’t mean I painted a face and then a few minutes later I painted another one. I mean that as soon as I finished one there was another little face hopping up in the chair for – two – hours. I am tired, cold and will be curling up in blankets with a book in a few moments but I had a great time!

Most fun – a little princess who wanted different colored polka-dots on her arms and giggled every time I painted another one.

Sweetest – a little girl who wanted a flower on her cheek and when I was done went down the line showing everyone waiting and telling them I was really good and then she would run back and ask me where I learned art.

Cutest – a baby in a bumble bee costume who scrunched up his face and laughed every time I touched him with the paintbrush. We were trying for a heart but…

Strangest – an older fellow who said his girlfriend dared him to get lips painted on his cheek. OK there are just too many things wrong there.

Several kids would ask how much it cost and I got to tell them nothing – it’s free. I could paint their face and give them candy. I’m not good at evangelism but if I can share the gospel by painting a face and offering free candy – I’m all over that!

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 Fireside Chat and More

Today was just a day but wow – exhausting, frustrating, exciting, enlightening. I was busy all day because grades were due to be exported and it was taken a little more seriously than the three weeks progress reports so there were a few problems to be ironed out underlining the value of that first export. Troubleshooting that should have been done happened today when we were under the gun.

The day that seemed to not end did and I came home and ate supper while I signed in to Elluminate for the K12 Online Conference Fireside Chat with David Warlick. This was my first experience with Elluminate which is a fee based meeting software package that donates the space to the K12 Online Conference. There are multiple windows. On the far left is a window that contains first a picture of an old-fashioned microphone, To speak you click on the picture and then click again when you are done. There is a hand icon that you can click to virtually raise your hand. There are emoticons and as people enter the session the list of names grows and automatically adjusts to remain in alphabetical order. There is a running tally of how many people are in the session. When things got going there were 105 people from all over. Mostly from the U.S. but some from other parts of the globe as well including Sudan, Seoul, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Scotland Click the thumbnail to see a screenshot.

firesidechat1

There was a white board and video and as the session went on, questions were asked on the white board as a rapid, unending discussion by the attendees. I went crazy trying to concentrate on what David was saying as well as keeping up with the “stream of consciousness” instant messaging. I managed to speak a bit when we were divided into separate rooms at the beginning and I was able to text once or twice but by the time I could type a question the conversation would have changed. There was serious energy. These folks are jumping in the deep end of the pool and splashing for all they are worth. They are calling out to the rest of us to tell us to come on in – the water is fine. Some of us are dipping a toe in and shivering, some are paddling around with nose plugs and life preservers. Some of us are sitting it out and some are underwater with flippers and scuba gear.
firesidechat2

There was a 14 year old student in the session and the possibility of adding a student strand next year was mentioned.

My favorite quote was ” become the guide on the side not the sage on the stage”.

I watched the keynote by David Warlick this morning and I’ll blog about it later. I want to let it marinate a bit but it was awesome. It is well worth the time – if you right-click and save link as you will have a copy of it to view whenever you have time. – which is the beauty of an online conference!