December 1, 2005
Okay, I did turn in a content report today, but that wasn’t the highlight. Today was PANDA DAY! My niece and my two sisters had tickets to see baby butterstick, and there has been much happiness all around.
Fighting with Page Titles
November 30, 2005
Had a ReadWriteThink status update today, and one of the problems that came up was the title bars. When the site was originally designed, the designer went with very basic info. Lesson plan titles, for instance, were titled “ReadWriteThink: Lesson Plan.” That’s a problem when you look at Google results, and that’s all you see to identify the lesson. There’s no way to tell them apart. Turns out that it’s also a problem with our WebTrends data. It’s a pain to figure out which lesson plans and resources get the most hits.
Now I’ve poked around, and the pages all say something like this:
ReadWriteThink: Lesson Plan: [title of the lesson plan from the database].
I changed the lessons, calendar entries, and student materials. The problem is that the title fields include HTML markup, so the titles for the pages look funny when italics is involved.
I found a javascript that seemed to strip out the HTML. Maybe that will solve the problem. Can’t know till the NCTE copy of Google spiders tonight.
Honesty and Clarity in Advertising and the Media (Inbox Ideas)
November 29, 2005
The Ideas section for this week’s Inbox celebrates the winner of the 2005 NCTE Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language: The Daily Show :)
How could I NOT take advantage of the opportunity to talk about The Daily Show officially? The official title of the column is “Honesty and Clarity in Advertising and the Media,” and it includes 4 articles and a ReadWriteThink lesson plan link.
Spent time today working on the design for the Book Cover interactive. After pulling dozens of books off the shelves in the office, we finally sketched out the templates for the various parts of the cover (front, flaps, back, spine). We’re thinking it will launch in January.
Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction |
lesson plans |
NCTE Inbox |
ReadWriteThink
11/28 Journal
November 28, 2005
Spent much of today untangling notes and trying to uncover my desk, which seems to be a wreck. I’ve sort of lost my place on everything. Then of course, there was a chunk of time for Inbox. And mostly I am tired.
11/27 Journal
November 27, 2005
I made it home, but I gave up on the audio posts. Something happened with the last one I tried, from the Ohio/Indiana border. Besides I just drove straight through from there. I got home around 11 and unloaded the car into the kitchen. Once you have it all in the house, you can take your time unpacking it.
I’ve spent most of today trying to get my holiday shopping done. I think I have all but one family member taken care of. Plus I’ll need to get a few purchases that can’t be made online.
I found the recipe for Monster Cookies, which I’m thinking of making for the Cookie Exchange at work (and certainly to carry home to Virginia).
Tomorrow I’ll have to go back to work. I haven’t untangled any of the various notes and things that I packed. I don’t even know what I need to find. I fear that I’ll end up in the office with nothing that I need. I didn’t get much work on anything done last week. I feel like such a failure. :(
Mineral Wells
November 26, 2005
NOTE: Image appears to be lost. Trying to find a replacement (5/13/10)
