On Slacking

I cannot believe that my last entry was on 2/9. Where on earth does the time go?

Vacation was quick and technologically unproductive. I explored and used some of the tools we've played with but I have avoided Adobe due to plain old fashioned fear. Our last class in which Faye "introduced" Dreamweaver may as well have been in Greek for all I took away. I know eventually I'll return and give it a shot (probably tonight) but right now it's a big cloud following me around. If Dreamweaver were all I had to deal with it would not be so intimidating. It's just that I feel like I'm jamming one more thing onto an already overflowing plate.

To add to my unproductivity there was a catastrophe on Monday of vacation week. I was happily on my way to Boston, enjoying the sea air on the Cross Sound Ferry when my beautiful, beloved MacBook literally hit the deck. It was in my bag at the time and the noise was chilling. I couldn't even bring my self to look at it (head-in-sand school of thought). When I reached Boston I finally took a peak and it wasn't good. My stomach lurched. The lower right corner (if you're looking at the keyboard) is badly crunched and the disk drive is unusable. My stomach still turns if I really think about it. When I got the courage to turn it on everything seemed in order (miraculously) but I was still worried. Finally went to the Apple Store in Boston and consulted one of the "geniuses". Seems I was lucky. Everything seems okay so far but I do need to get an external disk drive. And that crunched corner still depresses me. Could this be an excuse to update???

Don't even ask about my Marratech/Dr. Weston disaster! That's for another day.

Sweet Dreams and Then Some

Had a great day today in spite of the fact that I woke up at 7:14 and am supposed to be in school at 7:30. The first 45 seconds or so were surreal. First convinced myself that it was Friday (don't know what that was about) then went into full blown panic. Finally calmed down, called school and got my so called act together. I sleep REALLY soundly and this happened once before years ago and resulted in the school secretary banging on my door with my neighbor who she got because she didn't want to be alone when she discovered the body. Oh well, guess it beats insomnia.

Technologically speaking I've been a bit more alert. Been working on our EEVC project which still has me a little flummoxed. Just not absolutely sure what the final product should look like. It's an interesting way to work. It keeps morphing in my mind. Can't wait to see what we finally come up with.

My students are hard at work on their tech projects. I was having a hard time explaining to them what they were supposed to be doing and then two things happened. First I realized the idea was to let them figure something out on their own which it turns out they were more than happy to do. Second in researching digital storytelling I read somewhere that with kids it's best to let them work with the images first and then work on the narrative. Bingo. I was concentrating too much on the writing (being a literacy teacher) and that is of course the least interesting part for them. However once they have chosen and played with some images the words flow. The pace has definitely picked up.

I've delicioused, skyped, stumbled, marrateched, smartboarded and now blogged. It's been a fairly productive week and it's only Monday. I loved the mini-p's last week. Colette's Picaboo ideas are inspiring. I'm going to give them a shot with some of my "reluctant" writers. Ditto Rita's youTube. How great are middle schoolers? They're so inventive.

Looking forward to our work with Dr. Weston. I love thinking about things like that. Does make me wish that I was at the beginning of my career though. I believe education is in for a sea change and I can't wait!!

Here's a cool thing I did. Try it. Go to Wordle and enter your delicious user name. The result is very informative.

Still Learning After All These Years

Boy! these weeks go by quickly. Meeting in Marratech last week was interesting but I do feel a week behind now for some reason. I think I need to work harder on relying on cyber meeting. I'm just not comfortable yet with emailing and quicktopics and google docs etc to communicate. I'm so used to face to face collaboration that it has been difficult to get used to other methods. I had a really hard time with my mini saga and wanted someone next to me showing me how to do it. Emailing tech mentors is helpful but I feel lie I need something more immediate. Maybe I'm just not "working the system" correctly. Any suggestions?

Other than that things are going swimmingly. I downloaded Skype and emailed a friend in London to do likewise. I'm going to try it out as soon as he let's me now he's on. Can't wait. I've also been exploring a lot of digital storytelling sites. i'd really like to do this with my students but I'm having a hard time getting it off the ground. Looking for a site that starts with the simplest steps. the search continues.

I took a weekend crash course on SmartBoard. It was great but it's one more thing to explore. All these technologies are so complex (maybe not the right word) that I could spend all my time on any one. Sometimes I feel like I'm just skimming the surface on them and it's not enough. Not satisfying. I need to learn to be content with skimming and returning when i need them. I guess that's the time to go into depth. It's hard though. It's not my usual learning style.

Oh well. I did one of those "25 Things" lists that's been making the rounds on Facebook. One of mine was "I've learned that change is a good thing". Maybe using the past tense was not quite accurate.