tengrrl’s thoughts & news on teaching writing, literacy, and literature
December 3, 2005
Wow. Tonight was the NCTE Holiday Party, an excellent opportunity for people watching. Naturally, I won one of the bottles of wine in the raffle. Why can’t I ever win things that I can actually use? The whole event is a bit awkward, since people brought dates and I don’t really have anyone to take. I hate those moments when everyone else is out dancing and I’m sitting alone and stupid at the table. Oh, and drinking water. Can anyone be more stupid and lame?
December 2, 2005
Finished editing and published the January Calendar for ReadWriteThink.
Unfortunately, I found that the javascript for the titles isn’t really working. It’s great on the pages, but not for the spiders. They’re grabbing the javascript code for the title, rather than the resulting text. Changed everything back so that the italics codes show up. At least that’s still readable. Not sure how to get around this problem. I’m going to let it stil till next week, when we have a phone call with the MarcoPolo folks who handle the WebTrends data. Maybe they’ll have an idea.
Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction |
lesson plans |
ReadWriteThink
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.
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.
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
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.
November 26, 2005
NOTE: Image appears to be lost. Trying to find a replacement (5/13/10)
