First the good things. I finished my University of Phoenix classes – woohoo! Now, I can get certified to do what I have been doing for the past 3 years.

Chloe celebrated her first birthday. I was going to list all the items she has either eaten or destroyed in the last year, but the list was way too long. She does have a tendency for electrical cords, though.

School is going great and I have been teaching almost every day. I miss the kids so much and it’s a true treat when I can be in a teacher’s classroom interacting with the kids again.

Our ADK sorority is up and running. We had our first official meeting this afternoon. it’s going to be so much fun to interact with female teachers in a social setting. Plus, we eat well ) My friend Debra did a fabulous job for her first time in her presidents role.

The Web Wizards have been accepted to present at the South Carolina Technology conference in November. I look forward to working with Kim again. We will be presenting on Digital Photos and Web 2.0 tools. It should be a lot of fun! Kim and I work well together and tend to see things in the same way. What a joy to have a friend like that.

Okay, now the not so good. Chloe is in the hospital. We had her spayed and her stomach fixed 2 weeks ago. Great Danes have a tendency to bloat (a fatal incident where their stomachs twist) so we had both surgeries done at the same time. Jeff took her to get her 49 staples out on Monday and a few hours after he got home, she started pouring blood out of her stomach. Bad news is that her body is rejecting all the stitches. Plus, she has a staph infection, rod bacteria, a urinary tract infection, and is just plain not doing well. Bless her heart. She’s such a baby and now she has to stay at the hospital by herself. Dr. Schaller is wonderful and has been keeping us up to date several times a day. Hopefully, the doctor can clear the multiple infections and stop the bleeding and the sweetie can come home soon.

We are having terrible technical problems at the secondary schools. The poor teachers. Some days they can print and other days they can’t even see any icons on their screens. Most of them have been fabulous and VERY patient. But, I know they are getting frustrated beyond belief. I hope there is a solution soon!

We are now officially an NC Wise county. While there are many drawbacks to the program, there are some great aspects to it. It’s just not as teacher friendly as Easy Grade Pro and some folks are having problems adjusting. But, change is hard on everyone.

Since tonight is the first night in a few weeks that I have been finished with school work before 11 pm, I think I might try to get to bed early.

Hopefully, now that my classes are finished I can start blogging again.

Until next time ~ Danita

Flickr

Lots of great sessions and I have meet many people. Even seen some of the “big guys” in IT.  I’ve even learned how to Twitter!

The conference is huge. I am just now figuring out the floor schematic. You enter from the street, but are on the 4th floor. Took me awhile to get that one straight in my head.

Probably the most interesting session I attended was one that I almost didn’t attend. It was a Birds of a Feather on Open Source and Web 2.0 with Steve Hargadon. Great questions and answers. The room was full which was a surprise to the organizers, but better for us so that we could all share in the knowledge.

Hopefully, Edublogs will be up and running smoothly tomorrow and I can live blog instead of live wiki It’s been a long couple of three days. Surviving on less than 6 hours sleep is tough for me – I need my beauty sleep!

Until next time (which I hope is tomorrow!) ~ Danita

Flickr NECC2007

My mom and step-dad are coming down Saturday to spend 10 days with us. I’m very excited. It’s tough not being able to see my mom as often as I like. I think we are going to the beach for a couple of days. Now, that will be fun. But, then again, I’ll be right in the middle of my classes – what was I thinking??

Had an eye opening moment on Friday. One of our 8th graders, she’s 13 years old, is pregnant. Thirteen. I wonder if she has any idea what lies ahead of her. The struggles and hard times. This time, I have to ask, what was she thinking?

Be thinking of me tomorrow as I learn how to study again after being out of school for over 10 years.

Until next time ~ Danita

Flickr: School Books

Ode to a Wiki or My Wiki Web Wart
by Cynthia McFadden

My wiki is ugly
is has very few charms
such as whistles and bells
or attention alarms.

Unorganized, haphazard
without HTML,
I’m embarrassed to reveal
it’s illogical as heck.

It’s all my fault,
I did not attend
offered workshops
designed to amend.

The warts and scabs
are unorganized whim.
When it’s time to manage,
I’m out on a limb.

So why do I continue
to post potpourri
for my kids to sort
so ineffectively?

When the hour is late,
and homework’s not done
students stumble to the wiki wart
where the info’s par none.

Oh, Ugly Web Wiki,
you deserve better than me,
but until I have time
you’re all you can be.

Sigh …..

Until next time ~ Danita

Flickr: Wiki Wiki

Maybe, I’m wanting something that YackPack can’t offer. I’d like for people to leave messages on the wikspace. I’ve tried embedding and linking. All I can do now is link and you will be taken to the YackPack group.

Anyone know what the heck I’m doing wrong??

Until next time ~ Danita

I wasn’t too worried about the number of people, but I was excited about the countries from which they came. Croatia, Cameroon, Jordan, and 22 others. Too cool! Now, if my widgets don’t reappear, I have get to start all over again

Being a former Geography teacher, I was hoping to communicate with some of the other lands and possibly switch photos. Alas, not at this time ….

Until next time ~

Danita

Flickr: World Map

Do I care that these people have others who believe in them and want to donate to their campaigns? No. What bothers me is that we are in an educational crisis in this country. Think what $100 million dollars could do for our educational system. Think how many $150 laptops we could purchase. If you’re not a math person, that comes out to 666,667 computers. Each state would receive 13,333 laptops. Sounding more enticing? Not nearly enough, but it is a start.

In my small county in North Carolina, we are begging for more money to build a desperately needed middle school and do renovations on one of the high schools. There are two middle schools in our county that are housing over 1000 students each in buildings meant for 700. The high school is over 50 years old and frankly, falling apart.

NCLB? Please. Great idea, but to borrow a phrase from the 1990’s, “Where’s the Money?”. I haven’t even started on my soapbox of the lack of funding for the technology we need to be competitive in the world.

One hundred million dollars and we are just beginning the campaign. Is it just me or is anyone else at least a tad bit upset?

Until next time~

Danita

Flickr Air Force One over Mt. Rushmore

Kim made some great points, but I’m only going to share the one that hit home to me the most.

“This is dumb” is highly contagious. As a student, it’s pretty hard to get excited about a lesson when your classmates are proclaiming that it’s stupid. Teachers have to continue to maintain a positive attitude. The truth is that negative comments about the learning don’t bother the apathetic teacher; they bother the best teachers, the teachers who get it right in the classroom every day. The apathetic teacher is often oblivious to the needs of the students and couldn’t care less about the learning.

How many times have you heard “This is dumb” in your classroom? Even the best teachers will have a few that you just can’t please. If you teach middle school, this saying can be heard about 35 times a day. You have to remove yourself and realize that the kids are just being kids. There used to be a commercial that said “Don’t let them see you sweat”. No truer words could be spoken to middle school teachers. But, it is difficult not to take the negative comments to heart.

Frustrations. How do you deal with negative teachers? Some are negative 180 days a year, but some seem to get a bit low a few days a year. How do you keep the kids excited and involved when they are getting tired and spring is right around the corner?

I know, I know, keep them active and you won’t experience these problems. Well, that’s somewhat true and somewhat not. Yes, I 100% agree that you have to keep them moving or else you’ll have problems on your hands. But, we all get frustrated and down every now and then. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be human. What strategies do you use to reel your kids back in?

Now, that I have reduced myself to a mere human, I’m off to catch up on some of the sleep I’ve lost this week due to the conference.

Until next time ~ Danita

Flickr: Sleepy

One the teachers asked me to help him with the difference between blogs and wikis. He had attended both of my workshops, but ‘just couldn’t get it’ – his words, not mine. Well, the conversation from that point went from bad to worse. When I tried to give him another explanation, the other teachers started talking about wikis and blogs and how they weren’t impressed. Keep in mind, at this point it’s 4 against 1 in the web 2.0 debate. The more I tried to share the importance, the more they shot me down. I was so disappointed by the time we left.

The reasoning behind my disappointment lies in the fact that one of the teachers there is one I hold in very high regard. She is not only the most intelligent person I’ve ever known, but also the best Language Arts/Social Studies teacher I know. I just couldn’t sell her on the idea of student blogs.

I think that having language arts classes write compositions in a blog is a wonderful idea. They could comment on each other’s blogs. Great way to build a montage of writings. But, I’m going to have to come up with a new sales pitch because what I’m doing now isn’t quite working.

She is working on a couple of wikis, though. The first one we did was about the civil rights movement. She had initially typed out several pages of information to hand out to her students. I suggested, why not put it on wiki and let the students add any new information they discover? Well, that worked great and she’s thinking of doing more projects that way. She has a ton of information with some great links. I look forward to her next wiki.

The teacher who couldn’t understand the difference between a wiki and a blog, was adamantly opposed to letting kids have the power to change/add information to something for which he was responsible. I tried to explain that that was the beauty of the wiki. Kid’s take authorship very seriously, and yes, there may be a few bad apples in the bunch that will enter inappropriate or bad information, but the majority won’t. Do you think we should ban all music because some artists produce inappropriate material? Nope, no sell.

The assistant principal that was with us said the point that stunned me more than any other in the conversation. He made the comment that “this wiki and blog stuff is just another phase and will be gone soon.” Oh my, I was speechless. How do you respond? I have to admit, I now have several comebacks, but at the time, I sat there with my jaw on the floor. Hindsight is always 20/20 isn’t it?

The fourth of our ensemble was a parent (we taught her son last year) and works at the school. She didn’t have much to say other than she didn’t understand “blogs and wikis and all that stuff.” But, she said she had read my blog and was impressed that I had taken so much time to share what I have learned with other teachers. Now, that’s a positive step!

I wanted to burst out and explain to these educators that we must change our teaching or our kids are going to be left behind. I daily read many, many blogs on education – the last count was near 200 – and I can see where the web2.0 is taking so many innovative teachers. I think of everything I would do differently in my own classroom if I were still there. Wow! The opportunities for our kids are endless! We just have to open the door and let the dogs out. So to speak. Kids are so much more advanced than we adults.

One of the teachers on Friday night suggested that many people are simplifying their cell phones because they don’t need or know how to use all the extra gadgets. She equated that to the new technologies I’ve been introducing to them. Too much “stuff”. I’m sure that many people are simplifying their cell phones, but I would almost bet a paycheck none of them are under 30. As for the new technologies, I’ve tried to spread out the workshops I’ve done and explained to the teachers they can come to as many or as few as they desire. Wide open to their interest and comfort level.

So, how did the night end? Amicably. We are all friends and know we can disagree and still remain so. Isn’t that the beauty of true friendship? But, hubby sure did get an earful on the way home.

As soon as I could get to my laptop, I emailed my other friend, Kim, who is also a new ITF. She and I share very similar thoughts on web2.0. I can express my frustrations and celebrations with her and she understands. Long story short, she responded to my email and completely agreed with me. She said she had decided to focus on the teachers who were willing to try new ideas. Gotta love her! I think I’ll do the same.

Not all the teachers in my three schools are opposed to the new technology. There are some very good beginning wikis. Judy, Gregg, and Teri are doing an awesome job! If you can, take a minute and check out their wikis. Three completely different uses of wikis, but all really good starts. It amazes me that they all only recently learned about wikis. I can’t wait for their next projects.

So, I appeal to you, whomever you are that might be reading this dissertation, to give me ideas and thoughts to share with the teachers that prefer not to jump onto the bandwagon of the 21st century.

I feel like I’m taking 1 step forward and 2 steps back.

Until next time ~ Danita

Flickr: Step by Step