Have a Good Life

Take that Chris!!! Apparently you have to be a genius to understand what I write. Chris made some good comments about how this could just be randomly generated. I did the Flesch-Kincaid for the first page in Word, and I got some different results. Apparently, I write to the grade that I teach...interesting. Some people might say I act the grade I teach also.

I make no assumptions that anyone reads this blog, so now that people are actually reading it, and commenting even, you also get to hear my reflective posts.

The problem I ran into today was explaining that they need to fill out three source cards, but there was only one for the internet in the packet that I gave them. It is very frustrating that this happened. So, I had to make more.

There are times as a teacher when you realize that it is a lot easier to change how you do things instead of dealing with the incessant confusion by your students when what you are asking them to do makes perfect sense to you. This happens a lot with me, which is probably a testament to my inability to be clear and organized...as this post is clearly an example of that!!!

So my good friend Chris asked a question in the comments yesterday about the web quest, so I thought I would answer it. The really amazing thing is he had a perfect teaser to get me to answer it. He used a program he is working on called Jing. It is wicked awesome. It is a screen capturing program that you can use to capture video or pictures and then explain whatever you want. The only problem is that while Chris left the comment at about 7 pm, I didn't see it until 10:30 last night. As it turns out, I was so excited about how to use this program, that I couldn't go to sleep. I just thought about how I could use it. For example, more than half my students were on a field trip yesterday, so they missed my explanation about what to do to start this web quest. Now, I can put a link to the Jing screencast on my website, explaining what to do, and they can watch it before they start working. This will also be good for explaining things that are complicated when I need to show something, but don't want to be stuck at my computer. I can see how this program can be very useful in education.

My students started research for their web quest today, and I have to say that I am very excited about it. I wish that I could have done more for it, but I am okay with starting small. One thing that I have noticed is that while some of them know and understand how to get around on the web, they are not necessarily computer literate. Many of them don't understand what a title of a page is as opposed to the title of a site. Some don't know what the web address is. It is interesting how much I need to teach internet literacy to them as well as the other material I must teach. This is not a complaint, by the way, just an interesting observation.

I recently blogged about my new website for my students. Well, I don't think I said that I used Apple's iWeb to make it. It was a fantastically easy program to use, and the site looks pretty good. It was definitely worth it because it makes a better site faster than I could using Dreamweaver. Well, the problem that occurs is that if you screw up your computer and it starts speaking Russian and you have to reinstall the OS, and you don't save a file called domain.sites in an obscure folder, you lose everything. Yeah, that happened to me. So, I have all the files, but because I don't have the original domain.sites file, I can no longer open that website in iWeb. I cannot believe how much that stinks. What a pain! I can still use Dreamweaver to edit the site, but it is still a major bummer.

In trying to free up some space on my hard drive, I deleted some language packs thinking that I would not need them anymore. I don't know how this happened, but my OS's language is slowly morphing into Spanish and Russian. While the latter is actually pretty cool, it is overwhelmingly difficult to try and determine what the Russian words actually mean. Some are pretty easy, but others are down right impossible. This picture is pretty easy, and it is sometimes clever the words they use to describe things. I guess "Frameworks" is not translatable.

So a couple years ago, I bought a domain name and made a website. The website is actually pretty stinkin' cool, but it takes a lot of work to keep it up to date. Well, in reality, it probably doesn't take that much, since I did all the original coding all that time ago. I really enjoy making and editing the website. It is a hobby that I will hopefully be able to further enjoy as I get better at it and have more time. I use the website mainly as a launching point for my school stuff. I just updated it to have a calendar complete with assignments for my students I am breaking a lot of web design rules by doing it this way, and if my web design teacher ever found out, he would probably throw a fit. jethrojones.com <- Go here and then click the FHMS link and it will take you to the web page that I recently blogged about. Then click on that first page to get to the calendar, and you can see what I am doing for the next couple weeks, kind of.