Teach42

Well, most things are working rather well, but appearantly the trackback piece isn’t yet. I guess I don’t quite get it yet. I thought you added the trackback url to your post (on pmachine, there’s a field for it when you put in a new entry) and then it let the original owner know that you had responded to something he/she wrote. Well, I tried but it didn’t seem to work. Oh well. The flickr piece is working nicely. There’s picture a picture of my VR4 on there as well as my summer home (school). Flickr’s site isn’t particularly user friendly in my mind, at least the help files leave something to be desired. However, like Alan November said, when in doubt steal it from someone else. So, I went to the November Learning blog and stole the code that Steve Burt put in there to get the photos up there. Just changed the user ID to my own and voila! It works. So thanks Steve, much appreciate the help! Anyway, I love being able to update the blog instantly with photos or text, via phone, palm, laptop, desktop or email. I could get used to this.

I should be doing dishes right now or making dinner, but instead I just want to work more on the blog! Trying to learn how to quote properly and do trackbacks. Since I just read Will’s entry about being frustrated, his entry gets to be my guinea pig.

On a side note, one of the teachers shook her head when I told her that I read all of my students’ work online in their Weblogs. She said she just couldn’t do that, and I totally understand. But what I also understand is that our kids are going to be doing more and more of their reading and writing and responding online, no matter what we want. They are doing it right now in fact. I keep thinking about that principal a few months ago who talked about “preparing kids for their futures, not our past.” So true. And so difficult when we seem so unenthusiastic about doing what we need to keep up with the technology. Teachers, especially, need to be lifelong learners and be willing to adapt to changes that can make teaching better, no matter how uncomfortable they are. Otherwise we do a disservice to our kids.

I can definitely empathize with him. So far, a few people that I’ve shared my enthusiasm with about blogs and wikis have all been extremely skeptical and pessimistic. And I understand that. It’s new technology and there seems to be this pervasive fear of putting our students ‘out there’ on the internet. And yet, it’s being done across the country. It’s the reality that our children are going to be growing up in. Right now my biggest frustration isn’t convincing people to give our student’s a chance, it’s hearing having the same arguments again and again and again. Is it possible that some stranger could read a student’s blog entry and comment, “That’s stupid. You’re an idiot.” Of course it’s possible! But is that a reason to hold back?

Ok, I’m going to pause right here. I don’t have the time or stamina to follow through on this to the extent that I’d like to. Consequently, I’m going to put this on hold and then come back to it. This would probably be a great time to figure out how to save an entry without actually publishing it, but I’m not in the mood to figure it out just now.

Well, I’m back! Did you miss me? (Yes, I know nobody’s reading this yet, but it makes me feel better to pretend I have an audience) Anyway, since heading back from the Building Learning Communities conference in Boston, I’ve been itching to do more writing, and so far the only outlet I’ve had has been making a few comments on Will’s site. Since the conference, I began using bloglines to keep track of the blogs I want to read regularly. I must admit that I feel foolish for not using it more before. It’s so much easier to keep track of all the sites that I’d like to follow. I visit it several times per day now. In fact, while typing this very entry I went back and organized them all into categories. I’m sure I’ll need to reorganize them again as the list grows, but it’s a start. I’ve also opened up a furl account. Used it a few times, but haven’t found it extremely useful yet. However, you can’t do everything at once.

At the workplace, I’m almost ready to get the website going live from our in house webserver. The nice thing is that our main site will be served up via apache, and our secondary site will be a combination of Apache and Manila. Frontier will be running in the background, which will give our school access to in house blogging for the first time. I truly think it’ll make a huge difference in terms of creating a living precense on the web. Oh yeah, I also set up MediaWiki on there as well. Works great, just haven’t figured out what I’m going to do with it. Of course, what I mean is that I’m not sure how our teachers/students will use it yet. It’s very exciting stuff.

I must admit, I’ve been dying to do more writing, and I have so much built up inside that I want to put into words that I’m having difficulty deciding what to write now and what to set aside for another entry. In particular, I’ve read so many blog entries that I want to respond to, but first I need to learn how to do it. I keep reminding myself, one step at a time. Rome wasn’t built in a day.