Week 9, Thing 23: Copyright

I have mixed feelings about this entry. On the one hand, I'm really sad to see this experience end. I enjoyed learning new things and having a sounding board to discuss my findings. It was frustrating feeling like I was writing for no one but just the fact that I could express my thoughts on technology without having to look at my husband's blank face or try and waylay our always-on-the-go CFF coach gave me confidence and an outlet for my successes and frustrations. On the other hand, I'm finally done and it feels like I've been doing it forever! I started this while visiting my sister, relieved to be in her air conditioning, I'm ending it with a heating pad on my freezing feat. Now I can work on my iWeb page and cope with the holidays.

Copyright and Creative Commons was a very interesting "thing". I went into this assignment convinced that copyright always belongs to the author otherwise the publishers will take advantage of the situation and feather their nests at the expense of the poor, creative geniuses. Lawrence Lessig's article "Against Perpetual Copyright" presented a very different point of view and I felt differently afterward. As librarians, we are supposed to be the closest thing to experts on copyright in our schools but even though I'm very familiar to the "dos and don'ts", the theories behind it aren't thought of very often.

I appreciated learning about Creative Commons. So much of librarianship is about collaboration and CC is exactly that. It's good to know we don't have to keep reinventing the wheel.

Week 9, Thing 22, eBooks & Audio eBooks

When I was a young girl, I loved everything Little Women. There was a series on PBS and I hated when I had to miss it. In my dreams, I wished that I could watch the show whenever I wanted to, not just the Thursday night it was on. I also wished that a copy of the book would just fall out of the bottom of the TV set. That was 35 years ago. Now, you can watch shows whenever you want with VCRs and DVRs and with a lot of the cool eBook sites, you can can get a copy of Little Women. If only I could have come up with a plan to provide the world with the luxuries I desired. Then I could well afford the iPod or MP3 player I want to download some audio eBooks so I can listen to them in my car or a Kindle to read some classics away from the computer. Although, I can't imagine reading a classic on anything but paper.

For those of us who love books and have trouble finding some of the older, out of print classics, some of these sites fulfill many needs.

Week 9, Thing 21, Podcasts

This one was a bugger. I know about podcasts, I even did one once for a class I took. They're a great teaching tool. In one of my earlier posts I wrote about an incredible learning support teacher we have that had her students create podcasts on each of the three branches of government. That wasn't my problem. My problem was finding some really good ones. If the links for the directories weren't dead, the indexes didn't allow searching. Another problem was that some podcasts can be very long and difficult to listen to if you don't have an iPod or MP3 player. Maybe that's why I have a poor attitude. I want to listen to some podcasts, but I can't justify the expense of the aforementioned technology and I'm just being a brat. Seriously, the best way for me to listen to a lot of the things I'd like to is to download it and plug a player into a dock and listen in the car. Ironically, that would keep me alert and awake while driving but put me right to sleep in front of a computer. (I have the same problem with webinars. It's pretty pathetic.)

On to the positive! I did find a pretty decent podcast directory, PodcastDirectory.com. It categorized things pretty well and I was able to find some good, quick, podcasts. My favorites are ones from Connected Life. They're really interesting and cover a lot of cool tech news without being too complicated. There are two segments on computer gaming that I know my son will love so finally I will have found something in this class that he will think is cool. I added their RSS feed to my Google Reader so I can keep up with the fun stuff.

Hopefully, I will get around to the podcast on The World is Flat. That's what I'd really like to listen to. Unfortunately, there are just too many time constraints at this time.

Week 9, Thing 20: You Tube

I never really checked out a lot of stuff on You Tube. My biggest impression of it was as a wasteland for bizarre video clips and inane posts from teens who filmed themselves fighting or punking someone. I was pleasantly surprised. There's some pretty cool stuff on there, especially for someone with my semi-twisted sense of humor.

I really enjoyed the recommended videos. My favorite was "March of the Librarians", although it's truly bizarre how so many librarians look so similar.

I found this video of a career movie from 1946 or 1947 on choosing the profession of Librarian. It is crazy fun. The wildest part is seeing all the things that had to be done by hand and how long it took. Some things are still the same though. There's a student who asks for a book but can't remember the author or title but does remember the subject and that it's blue. Who among us hasn't had that happen?



For a while, we could only view videos from TeacherTube. An Apple trainer showed us this one entitled "When I become a Teacher". I love it.



I couldn't remember the name of it while composing this blog and was having a hard time with my search, especially on youtube. Just putting in the search term teacher resulted in some very raunchy videos. (Not that I watched them, the titles were enough for me.)

I enjoyed this exercise and will probably view and use more videos in the future.

Week 8, Thing 19: Library Thing

I really like Library Thing. I've always wanted to have a list or a reference of all my books. When I was in middle school/early high school, I had a card file of all my books. The were in alphabetical order according to title. Sometimes, I even had a little summary. (There really is no other profession for me.) I can only imagine how excited I would have been if Library Thing would have been around back then!

I signed up for Library Thing a while ago and added a couple of books. I put a few more on this summer when we looked at the Web 2.0 Award sites. My only complaint is that I can't pull up an author, choose a number of titles and batch process the selection all at once. As a reader who tends to collect books by certain authors, that capability would be enormously convenient.

Here's a question though, do you only put in the books that make you look good or do you put in all your books, even if they're not exactly award winners? Case in point - when I first started looking at other people's blogs, some have this really cool widget, shelfari, where books are placed on a virtual shelf for all to see. Great, except as I looked a couple of people's "bookshelves", they were reading "important" books and I was reading to escape. I don't think I'll be a literary snob when it comes to Library Thing because the purpose is to list my books, pure and simple.

There a few of my students who would enjoy Library Thing and I'm definitely going to put a link on our library web page.

I'm going to put both the Library Thing and the Shelfari widgets on my blog because what I own and what I read can be very different.

Week 8, Thing 18

I signed up for Zoho writer, created a blog post and had no trouble sending it! Pretty slick. I thought this would be a very good tool to use since it wasn't blocked at school and the edit area of blogspot.com was for a while. My plan was to work on my blog during my lunch break and even if I was blocked from sending what I wrote, at least it would be a lot easier than cutting and pasting and in the best format as well. As it turns out, blogspot edit has been unblocked, but it's still a nice site to go to. I'm usually at a computer that's either my own or has access to a server where I can save my documents. It's nice knowing that if I'm in a situation where I'm not, Zoho writer will allow me to type and save whatever I need.

Our CFF coach has a Google Docs account set up for our CFF team. One is for teachers to go in and schedule projects so our students don't get overwhelmed with iMovies, Keynotes, and podcasts all due around the same time. It also frees up equipment and lets our coach know where she might be needed. We just started it this year but since it's desperately needed, I'm sure it will work.

One of the blogs I read mentioned how well it should work for students who have trouble with compatibility issues between their home word processing programs and ours at school. I don't know how many times I've had kids try to get their flash drives to open up their assignment on our Macs, then my library PCs, and nothing works. If they could use Zoho or Google Docs, it might go a lot better.

Week 7, Thing 17 PA Curriculum Connection

The PA Curriculum Connection wiki is pretty nice and there are some good links. I particularly liked the Dewey Browse site, and a cool article on whiteboards. It would be great if more could be added. I couldn't figure out the invite key. I'm sure it was somewhere, but I just could not get it. Oh well, I wasn't sure what I would have added at this point.

I also had a little trouble with getting some of the links to work but I just copy and pasted them in the address bar instead.

Week 7, Thing 16a: Sandbox Wki

There were a lot of great ideas in the California 2.0 Curriculum Connections Wiki. There are a few I'm going to use and several I'm going to share with my teachers. Some of my favorites include creating avatars to represent a characters from a book; creating cloud bundles in del.icio.us for faster, more effective, searching; creating an online book club; and using a wiki for our CFF teachers to post project ideas, what has worked and not worked, basically to provide a forum for discussion of technology in the classroom.

Our CFF coach has already created a wiki for our teachers as well as ones for various technology camps we held over the summer. At this point, they provide teachers with links and training materials but I know she'd love the idea of a more interactive wiki. One full of ideas, encouragement, and a sharing of resources. As it is, we rarely have time to meet for trainings, let alone informal share time. It would be an incredible collaborative effort.

As we near the end of our discussion of wikis, I want to share another useful outcome of wiki use. One of our teachers observed an interesting benefit of wikis in the classroom. Last year, we had some very bright, very chatty seniors. They were great kids and livened up any classroom discussion but some students couldn't get a word in edgewise. When one of their teachers had them working with wikis, she found that some of the quieter students really had an opportunity to shine because they found their "voice" could be heard online. The amazing thing is, it didn't stop there. A few of these quieter students started to become more vocal in class once their confidence grew.

Week 7, Thing 16 Wikis

I liked this assignment because it helped me become a little more at ease with wikis. I'm more comfortable with a blog than a wiki because it's similar to standard writing - someone writes, I read it, if I like it, I can choose to respond if I care to. A wiki sets that standard on it's ear and many people can get into the act so it's the loss of control that probably freaks me out.

That being said, wikis are an awesome tool for school. One of our science teachers teaches almost exclusively with wikis, with incredible results. When asking one of her students about how he liked doing assignments on the wiki, he told me he really liked it but, "you actually have to read the stuff, I can't fake it like I used to." Edutopia has an online article about her entitled "Wiki Woman". She posts in her blog "Hurricanemaine", this year, she decided not to pass out a textbook and is using the web and her class wiki for all her teaching and learning.

As for me, I plan to get it in gear and make use of the wiki space I created last year and set it up for students to post book reviews and series title lists. Collaboration and the ability to edit postings are some the best things about wikis.

My favorite wikis from this assignment are Library Success: a best practices wiki, - they have a really cool page called "Library 2.0 in 15 minutes" and the teacherlibrarianwiki,because I love anything to do with Joyce Valenza

Week 6 Thing 15: Library 2.0

The articles on Library 2.0 were very thought provoking. Their viewpoint concerned public libraries where the experience can be very different from school libraries. For those of us who are ready, willing, and excited to be embracing new technologies, Library 2.0 sounds great and is a great thing to give our patrons. My family members and friends are no strangers to computers and work with them on a daily basis. When I visited my sister and her husband, there were once a total of four computers in the living room and the TV was on, causing our father to shake his head and walk out in frustration. Yet, if they went to their library and found too many Library 2.0 type services instead of a straight "search and find a book" environment, I'm not sure how they would react. They might embrace it, or they might be on the phone to me to see what kind of library nonsense was going on and did I know how to use it. I know my dad would walk out in frustration and wait for me to come home. That's what he did when they put OPACs in. (Although I think he did figure it out himself, he's pretty adaptable.) The point of this is that not all patrons will embrace Library 2.0 so it's probably something to ease into. If a library has a budget like the one my town, it won't even matter. They're just lucky to have books.

In the schools, it's a bit different. My students could teach me as much about Web 2.0 applications as I could teach them about library skills. Therefore, I have to keep up to keep my students engaged. I have a large group of students who love to read and keep my circulation numbers up. I also know I have to compete with so many different technologies - computer games, texting, TV, video games, etc. I have to show them that the library, the information in it and accessed from it is relevant to them. I have del.icio.us sites and I finally have a web page. I plan to develop a wiki so that students can write reviews of books I also hope to have students create a del.icio.us site of the best reference sites to share with others in the school. As a CFF school, we have access to so much technology, it's becoming second nature to us. The most important thing is not to loose the message in the medium.

The irony of Library 2.0 being easier to implement in a school setting is that schools use filtering systems and many of the Web 2.0 aps don't always get through. We have a two tiered system now that allows teachers access to YouTube, flickr, and blogs but I don't know how many of them get through on the students' computers. We have a forward thinking administration that usually opens things up for us but it's not always the case in many districts.

Web 2.0 applications are getting more and more common, so it is inevitable that they are filtering into the library setting. Library 2.0 is here and it's up to us to make sure it impacts our library in the best and most productive ways possible. It would be foolish to use applications just to flaunt them but instead, we need to implement them wisely to enhance our programs and better serve our patrons.

Week 6 Thing 14: Technorati

OK, so I was prepared to be a little overwhelmed by this assignment. Technorati is a little overwhelming but once I got the hang of it, I really enjoyed putting in some cool search terms, or tags, and finding some interesting blogs. It was incredibly easy to put them onto my Google Reader site too. (Side note - I switched from Bloglines because I get interrupted too often and with Bloglines you have to save unread blogs or they disappear, with GR, they don't go away until you mark them as read.) I probably have too many to keep up with now, but I'll give it a try because the ones I've selected have some really great information on them. I liked all the different ways blogs can be found too - Top 100, most popular, different topics, top searches. It's a blogging dream. There's probably someone who reads it all and blogs about blogging.
As far as tagging goes, it's pretty much what we as librarians have been doing all along, we just call it cataloging. Back in the days when I did my cataloging "by hand", my main concern was "if I want my students to find this book, what are the best subject headings to use?" Then, I would get frustrated when Sears wouldn't have the exact term I wanted. That's a great thing about tagging - you put in whatever will make you remember the photo/site/blog. The biggest drawback with tagging is the beauty of cataloging - authority control. Even with my Delicious site I've used a couple different tags and it drives me nuts when I see that I have 7 sites under blog and 14 under blogs.
As far as claiming my blog and creating tags for it, I'm not ready for that yet. When I'm ready to blog about more than this class, that will be the time to do it but I'm glad I know how to get read. It's hard to write when you think no one is reading. Some of our CFF teachers are putting together a tech blog for the other CFF teachers and I'll be able to get that out there for others. I think the most intimidating thing is the HTML code but I will not let it beat me! They have a very good Technorati blog directory page.

Week 6 Thing 13 Del.icio.us!

I love del.icio.us! I first found out about it in early 2007. We had just found out we were to be one of the first Classrooms for the Future schools to get up and running. My coach was counting on me help her with great web sites and I wanted to create an iWeb site for the CFF teachers to go to find them. I was going just a little nuts trying to keep track of all the sites I found considering I was on one of four different computers at any given time - two at home, (my laptop or the kid's computer) and two at school (one in my office, one at the circulation desk). Add to that configuration a Mac installed in my workroom for the iWeb project and I was at my wits' end. My system of consolidating websites consisted of scraps of paper and emails to myself with "cool sites" in the subject line.

Then came a SLJ article in January 2007, that would change everything. In the "All together now" column, Donna DesRoches wrote about social bookmarking and how it could work in classrooms and libraries. I started my first del.icio.us site that day. I showed to our CFF coach and with all that was happening with trainings, etc., we scrapped the iWeb project and concentrated on building a del.icio.us site that all the CFF teachers could access. Both she and I contribute to it and the teachers can if they want to. Not only do our teachers use it, but they have their students access it too.

I have three del.icio.us sites now, one for CFF, one for my library sites, and one for my sites. It's such a great way to share sites with others and doesn't take that much time or effort. I was lucky enough to do the inservice for our librarians last week and was very excited to show them del.icio.us. With their teaching schedules and, in the case of the elementary librarians, their traveling schedules, they don't have time to easily create and maintain a website. When showing them del.icio.us, I stressed how easy it is to create a site for their teachers. They already have great sites bookmarked and they come across more sites all the time. All they have to do is install the "post to del.icio.us" link on their toolbar, tag the sites, and send out a notice to their teachers about the great resources they've gathered for them. They look like heroines when all they did was surf the net.

My del.icio.us sites:
del.icio.us/debsherry
del.icio.us/debsherrylib
del.icio.us/debsherrymine

Week 5 Thing 12 Rollyo

Rollyo is very cool. I was ready to be totally confused, (don't know why) but it was quite fun to learn and I can't wait to send the link for the World of Warcraft Rollyo to my brother-in-law. (Even though he's an IT guy who doesn't "believe" in Web 2.0)

I created my Rollyo of favorite recipe sites because more than once I've searched site after site for the "perfect" recipe but no more. I'm anxious to see if I'll be able to create a Rollyo on our school campus of some of our subscription sites that read our IP address. I'll return to this post to give an update after school starts.

Here's my recipe Rollyo!

Select...My RecipesSearch The Web

Week 5 Thing 11 Web 2.0 Awards

What an awesome list of cool sites. It took me a while to post because I was spending a lot of time exploring. There were a few sites I was familiar with, some from my own experience, some from this class. There were quite a few I don't know that I'd ever use but a least I'll know where to find them if some one's need should arrive. I can't wait to share IM Cooked, iFoods, and Recipe Key with my FCS department. Our new department head loves when I find her cool tools on the web. I have a couple English teachers that will really go for One Sentence.
My favorite is StumbeUpon. A couple of students hooked me up with StumbleUpon last spring and I really enjoyed it but it disappeared from my toolbar when our iMacs were re-imaged.
StumbleUpon is a cool tool that helps you "stumble upon" some really interesting sites that you might never come across. The key is to upload StumbleUpon's toolbar to either IE or Firefox (it's not for Safari). Once you've uploaded, you're asked what types of subjects you are interested in. I immediately chose books and library resources plus some others. If you haven't already signed up, sign up then, and start stumbling. Once you click the SU button, a website pertaining to one of your chosen topics pops up. You either click on "like it" or "don't like it". If you like it, it will be saved and will go on to the next. If you only want to look at one certain subject at a time, you can do that too. I love this site when I want to find something fresh and interesting for my teachers or students but I'm not sure exactly what I want.
I also checked out Ning. I had a hard time with this part of the assignment because I did a search for "library", looked at everything that came up and got really overwhelmed. I would find a decent looking ning and then realize that no one had posted in six months, or there where only five members. I was about to give up when I decided to read other blogs to see what kind of results were out there. Luckily, I clicked on There from Here and read about TeacherLibrarian Ning. I visited and I even joined, which I swore I wasn't going to do, but it just looked too interesting. So a big thanks to Jane!
I also played Travel IQ and loved it so much, I put it on my library's new web page.

Week 5 Thing 10 Play!

The Image generators are way cool! The one I pasted here is one I'm going to put on my new web page for all things pertaining to Freshmen Orientation. I found it on Dummiez Book Cover Maker while I was checking out Comic Strip Generator.
I love learning all these really neat new things. I had no idea all this cool stuff was out there. If it didn't look like ordinary clip art I guess I just figured people knew how to create things from scratch or had a program they bought that would do it for them. Now I know how to create my own "clip art" for my web page and blog. I was hoping to be able to figure out how create things and paste them into word but I just couldn't make it work.
I will definitely share this with my fellow teachers!

Week 4 Thing 8 & 9 RSS

This was an easy week. Thanks to our awesome CFF coach, I set up bloglines account last spring. Some of the blogs I've kept up with are for fun but most have been really helpful. My biggest challenge was keeping the blogs I wanted to follow off the "blocked" list since many blogs seemed to get blocked by our former filtering system. My next challenge was reading everything. It's great to have all the posts come to one place but I still had to have the time to read them and once i got backed up, all was lost. While checking out some of the education and librarian blogs for this exercise, I came a across a blogger who kept up with about 100 new posts a day. I don't know how they did it since I was on information overload after a while.
I have a couple of favorite library blogs that I've gotten some great information and ideas from. My favorite for terrific sites is Library Internet Index. I love, love, love Tip Line by Jim Gates for so much tech information. While checking out new sites for this assignment, I came across a couple I added to bloglines. (I also created a Google Reader site to see how that works differently than bloglines.) I liked Blue Skunk Blog, Infodoodads, and Never Ending Search blog by Joyce Valenza on School Library Journal.  I'm looking forward to keeping up with theirs blogs.  I may revisit some of the ones I started out with and do some scaling back to keep things a little more manageable.  It's better to have a few really great feeds and be able to keep on top of things than get lost from information overload.

Week 3 Thing 7

Technology. It's very appropriate that writing about technology is our assignment for thing 7 since I just finished up three days at our school's tech camp and was inundated with technology! I finally made some headway on a library web page, practiced on our school's new Moodle page, learned some wiki tricks and shared some info on flickr with my colleagues. One of the best things I found out was that our filter has been loosened up on the teacher computers so that we can get to so many more things! It was so frustrating in past years to find really great links at home, only to have them blocked at school.
Enough rambling - What I love about technology. My colleagues and I are blessed to teach in a technology rich school district. Our senior high is a Classroom for the Future school and we have really taken advantage of the program. Some believe the technology really benefits the academic students and gets them ready for college but the real thrill is seeing what a difference technology brings to the average and struggling students.
Technology can really level the playing field for so many of our students. Quite a few of them feel more comfortable with a computer keyboard that pen and paper and it shows. They don't feel as intimidated because they've grown up with computers and video games and feel at ease with technology. When they feel comfortable with the medium, it seems a lot easier to get the message across. We have an incredible learning support teacher who taught her students podcasting and then gave them step-by-step instructions for a podcasting assignment on the three branches of government. She assigned each of her three groups one branch and let them go. Students who could barely read were gathering information, writing it down, and reading into the computer! Their finished products were better than some done by our "regular" education students. Their hard work earned one student from each group a trip to Harrisburg to the CFF Student Capitol Day. It was an incredible experience for them and one they would not have otherwise gotten. Their next unit was a bit of a let down until I found my friend a link to a Google Earth Lewis and Clark historical map
As the parent of a learning support student, I don't usually answer the phone and hear "Your son's a genius!" from the teacher on the other end. Yet his science teacher and our CFF coach had been trying all day to figure out how a particular program would "read" to the students and were having no luck. As the teacher continued to struggle, he heard noises coming from my son's computer and realized he had gotten it to work. My son has also helped his LS English teacher with Google Earth and was able to show off a really nice Keynote presentation to the whole family at Thanksgiving last year. There aren't too many opportunities for my boy to shine academically but having access to technology at school has given him more of a chance.

Week 3 Thing 6

Lots of learning this week! I've always wondered what all the fuss was about fickr. I'd read about it but due to our Nazi filter at school, I had to remember to get on at home. Without any guidance, all it looked like to me was just another online photo site. Was I wrong! There are so many cool tools. I love the trading card program and can't wait to tell my teachers about it. I know my learning support teachers will love it. I just returned to school for a tech camp and found that flickr is accessible! I can't wait to share it. I don't know if the students can access it because I was told the teachers computers have more web access than the kids but that might be OK. I did come across a few pictures that wouldn't be at all appropriate as well as a link to "girls of flicker" among the third party sites. That's just 1% of the site though. As far as non-educational uses go, I had fun playing Flictionary and Palette Generator is really cool for scrapbooking or decorating.
I really love this class for so many reasons. The main reason is that with so much going on at work and with life, I don't always get/take the time to follow up on everything I read about. I'm an intelligent woman but terms like "mashup" would throw me because I didn't have the time to figure out what it meant. This class is helping me to realize that all I need to do is take the time, sit down, and actively learn and I'll have no problem. With what I learned this morning at tech camp and a little peace and quiet, I was able to create hyper-links in my text!

Mary A. Philson

P1000688
Originally uploaded by megsmom11

This is one of Punxsutawney's Phantastic Phils. We have them all over town and I as I was looking through flickr for a cool picture to represent Punxsy, I kept seeing them. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the one I wanted, which is my favorite, so I joined flickr and uploaded my sister's shot of my daughter and nephew and me. (At first I thought it was my sister in the shot and was a little worried that she'd be annoyed that such a bad picture of her would be on the web. Sadly, I realized it was me. :( )
The Phantastic Phils represent Punxsy and the business or organization that sponsored them. This one is Mary A. Philson and stands next to the Mary A. Wilson Elementary School. I love it because it is made up of book covers from childrens books! The satchel beside her usually has paperbacks that visiting children can take with them after visiting. She was sponsored by Jeanne Curtis, an elementary librarian for at least 30 years. She's now at our middle school but her heart will always be in the elementary schools.
If you're ever in Punxsy, you can't miss our Phils but I'm not sure if Mary A. is back at her post yet. The weather has been a bit rough on her so she's out for a few repairs but she'll be back - good as new.

Challenges?

In deference to Lifelong learning habit #3, is a problem really a challenge if the fault lies with poor attention to detail? I have spent the better part of the past week tearing my hair out, trying to figure out why no one else seemed to have any problem getting their avatar in the right place and the right size. What was wrong with me? I was dogged in my pursuit of the answer. I Googled directions, I searched Yahoo! endlessly, to no avail. I'm very stubborn and felt proud of the fact that I was turning my "problem" into a challenge. I went to my school and worked with my tech guys, who were even more clueless. Finally, in talking with them and showing them what I was trying to accomplish, it happened, I stumbled upon the solution! I was so excited, so proud of myself. Until 29 minutes ago. That's when, while trying to locate something else, I came upon some very clear and concise directions fot putting an avatar exactly where it needed to go.
In the end, I not only learned how to place an avatar in my blog, I also learned, and had to admit, some truths about myself. I create quite a few of my own learning (and life) problems/challenges and this exercise illustrated this very well. I try to do too many things at one time which causes me to stress out and try to do things too quickly or at a high stress level. That's when directions, etc. get overlooked and effective learning is lost. I need to slow down, breathe, and enjoy the learning process and experience. If I can get a handle on that, I would please not only myself but my husband, family, friends, school nurse, woman who gives me massages when I can no longer move my shoulder... As I said, it's a truth I haven't wanted to admit.

Trying again

OK, I'm losing it. I thought I did everything right. I saved, I really did. Then I went off to find my Yahoo! avatar and after a painful conversation with my six-year-old in which she informed me it didn't look like me because it "didn't have a big belly", we found the plus-size avatars and she was appeased. I'm still trying to figure out how to get it to the blog but when I cam back to the page, the first entry wasn't here, I didn't do it right.
I feel like one of my students, which is great because we all need to be in there place from time to time in order to teach effectively. I brought that up in my first post, which is lost forever to wilds of cyberspace.
I'm also going to have to figure out if there's a way to get some spell check going.

First time out

OK, this is really a bit scary. Does this thing have spell check. It's OK, I can do this. I tell my students and kids that all the time. I think we forget how scary learning can be in a public setting. This will not only help me with learning all the cool tech stuff that seems to come naturally to my students, but will put me in their place for a little while.