In the News: Framing Internet Use in Elementary School

February 2, 2006 by

I wish that I’d saved the RSS feed description on BBC NEWS | UK | Education | Net abuse ‘starts in primaries’. The article is about kids plagiarizing and what not. Misusing online resources. Bullying. Problems with “e-safety” (please. e-safety?)

The feed description on Bloglines suggested that the Net was the actor and the students were the object of the sentence. Something like “Net abuses elementary and secondary students.” Probably someone’s error that has been corrected, but I found it interesting to blame the Internet as if it were a responsible participant.

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ReadWriteThink: Dystopia and The Matrix lesson plan

February 1, 2006 by

Late to work again. I seem to be stuck in my own dystopia while I work on the dystopia lesson plan. Fortunately, I finally finished the lesson so maybe the dystoppia will end. Decoding The Matrix: Exploring Dystopian Characteristics through Film is now live. That makes 33 lessons and a nice content report turned in today.

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Daily Work: Lesson Plans, Meetings, and the SOTU

January 31, 2006 by

Continued work on the dystopia lesson plan, which uses The Matrix to explore the characteristics of dystopian society in various texts. Unfortunately, I found that part of one text was borrowed from elsewhere, so I had to redo some of the work :(

Had another team meeting and discussed what we need to do to make the network files work better for us. Watched the State of the Union address, but didn’t really think it was all that amazing. Nothing new or catchy really.

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For Mac: Tweaking iTunes

January 31, 2006 by

MacDevCenter.com — Tweaking iTunes—some basic information on how to take control of iTunes, in case it ever gets out of line.

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ReadWriteThink: March Calendar and Other To-Do Items

January 30, 2006 by

Apparently watching Wonderland before going to bed last night was a really bad idea. I couldn’t go to sleep for thoughts of someone breaking in and crashing my head in with a tire iron. Not good. As if I don’t have enough insane thoughts in my head.

I finished editing the March entries on the ReadWriteThink calendar. I moved our files from the old fileserver to the new server and set up some preliminary permissions. We’ll do testing and change things as needed.

Worked through a pile of little to-dos: updated the 100s chart with the latest lessons. We’re up to 32 now. I turn in a content report on the 1st, and I hope to get some more completed before then. I fixed some errors in printouts for the Story Map Interactive, and updated the list of Inbox topics to date, which I mainly use internally to figure out what I wrote in the past. Did some work on a dystopia lesson plan this evening. That and laundry.

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Depression: NPR’s "The Hardest Work You Will Ever Do"

January 30, 2006 by

Heard “The Hardest Work You Will Ever Do” this morning while getting ready for work. It’s one of the This I Believe essays on NPR. It has some really good description of what depression feels like. The part where she talks about how it felt to have other people doing things, that’s how i feel. Course I have no one doing things for me. But anyway, I think that’s the best description. I know that I do hide a lot, even when I ask or pay people to do things for me. It feels wrong, and I feel stupid and foolish for not being able to do better. I don’t have problems like the author of this essay; but it really is a close description. So close, that I really don’t want to listen to it again, but I want to keep the URL handy.

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ReadWriteThink: Political Cartoons and Raymond Carver Lessons

January 29, 2006 by

I finished and posted the lesson on Hopper and Carver: Outside In: Finding A Character’s Heart Through Art. It has a whole series of interactives, because of the way that the tools work. I had to create one for each painting. Otherwise, students would be printing out tons of irrelevant stuff when they worked.

I also finished my political cartoons lesson plan: Analyzing the Stylistic Choices of Political Cartoonists. It uses the same Comic Vocabulary Interactive. I also created a little interactive just for this lesson, Analyzing a Political Cartoon: “Settin’ on a Rail,” which walks through some of the analysis of an historical cartoon to help students understand the process.

Other than getting those lesson plans finished, I didn’t really get much else done. Watched Wonderland on TiVo, a somewhat disturbing movie.

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Daily Work: Writing, Cleaning, Sleeping

January 28, 2006 by

Watched Empire Falls while I continued work on the Hopper and Carver lesson plan. On breaks, I cleaned the kitchen a bit. There’s something so wrong with my life that I can’t get my kitchen clean. I have to work in stages and I still don’t seem to make any progress. At least I did get the dishwasher loaded and run.

I think I may be getting sick. I have this odd dry and scratchy throat that I can’t really figure out. I woke this morning with the problem. It felt like it was so dry that the parts of it were sticking together, and it’s still not right. I’ve tried everything I can think of. It’s not exactly sore, but it’s clearly not right. It feels like my throat constricted or something and all the part were stuck to each other when I swallowed. Maybe it’s swollen? Now I am feeling sort of dizzy and lost. bleh.

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January 27, 2006 by

Sharon, Lisa, and I had lunch at the Courier. I had the usual—the Famous Courier Reuben. mmm. When we got back, I dug out the Cartman Bop Bag that I bought for the office at Christmas and blew it up. Every office needs a bop bag for days when things go wrong.

After work, I went to Target and the grocery store. Worked on interactives for the lesson plan that pairs Hopper and Carver this evening.

Got a phone call from mom. She’s gotten another poodle, a white, little boy puppy that she has named Baden (after Lord Baden-Powell, since her white girl poodle is Daisi, after Juliette Low). The phone call was freakly. She left a message that I couldn’t interpret and I thought that something was wrong. Turned out that it was just that she took Daisi to the groomer’s and one of the people working there had a puppy that she was looking for a good home for. My mom cannot resist poodles.

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January 26, 2006 by

My MCI contact got the server up and running about 10 minutes after I went to bed last night. I called him today, and he walked me through what he does when this happens. Maybe next time, I can fix this problem myself. I hope so.

Called and postponed the appointment with the hand surgeon. My doctor said that I could last week, but I wanted to wait till the last minute. My hands seem reasonably okay. I’m always afraid that I’m going to have a relapse. I moved the appointment several weeks down, to the 20th. If my hands are still okay, I’ll just go ahead and cancel it.

On some sound bite this morning, I heard some government person (Gonzales?) say that something was “inconsistent with the facts.” Guess saying that it was a lie was too clear and direct.

We had a lot of coming and going in the office today. Sharon was home with sick kids, but everyone else seemed to be in the building, and at some point in our office.

I did finish the Comic Vocabulary Interactive and posted the related lesson plan, The Comic Book Show and Tell. It’s a 9-12 lesson plan that focuses on descriptive writing by having students write comic scripts that another student uses to create illustrations. Students quickly see that if they fail to include enough details in their scripts, the illustrator will not have the information necessary to create the comic. There are PDFs of the vocabulary from the interactive, so the lesson can be completed even if the teacher does not have computers in the classroom.

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