No. I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth.
It’s just that we move to SINGAPORE on Monday.
If you saw our home, you would not guess that it needs to be empty by Monday morning. Thankfully, our family and friends have turned out in force this week to help us. We truly could not do it without them. Thanks to them, we may even get to sleep a bit Saturday and Sunday nights – the last times I moved I pulled a few 48 hour days.
Things are happening. In the past two weeks we have acquired…
- new water heater
- new roof
- new driveway (which can’t be driven on until after we leave)
- new flooring on first floor
- new furnace
- central air
After 5 years of renters, there are so many little things that need doing. Most of the renters were really good renters, but a 19 year old house is ready for upkeep. Now that the house looks so great, is anyone looking to rent a 3 bedroom, 3 bath house in White Bear Township? Call Metro Home Maintenance and ask about renting in White Bear Township.
It has been such a mad rush (and still is) that we will have some reckoning to pay later in terms of catching us up mentally with where we will be physically. Thank you for reading. I hope you’ll continue to visit this blog after it is being authored in Singapore.
Blogged with Flock
I am greatly enjoying a blog written for children. It is titled Here and There Japan. The author is Annie Donwerth Chickamatsu. She is writing from Tokyo.
Each post focuses on one aspect of daily life. Reading it is almost a meditative experience because it forces me to slow down and focus on a basic detail of life. Recent topics have included a view from a train platform, summer is here, department store carts. Each post includes at least one well-crafted photograph. It is a wonderfully accessible look at a different culture. I hope many people find her blog and read it regularly. She would especially like to reach children, so please pass on this news.
Blogged with Flock
My new school is in the midst of professional development focus on reading instruction. As a result, I’ve been more aware of articles on this topic. I’m reading more of them, and finding edublogger who are writing about that.
Konrad Glogowski publishes one of my favorite edublogs, Zone of Proximal Development. I consistenly enjoy it because he pushes my thinking, helps me see the bigger picture and shows me how to move forward. He often references the researchers who are my gurus, and he shows me how he is implementing their ideas.
His recent post, Progressive Discourse, brilliantly lays out the metamorphic change that blogging brought to his classroom this year. This is one post that I know I’ll be rereading. I’m eagerly waiting for him to write more.
Blogged with Flock
Interesting to me that so many of my favorite edubloggers switched to the Flock web browser at the same time that I did. I’m glad to see such an innovative brower being so well received.
I made Flock default browser a week or two ago, but still found myself returning to Firefox to refer to the Forecast Fox extension. (I live in Minnesota and we have lots of weather here, and it can change hourly some days.) Imagine my delight to find an extensions menu in Flock. It lead me to a link for more extensions, and there I found all sorts of useful extensions, including a Flocked version of Forecast Fox.
So if you were considering using Flock but didn’t want to give up your Firefox extensions, you may not have to do so. There is even an extension that converts Firefox extensions for use with Flock.
Blogged with Flock
I did. I fell in love with Malaysia when I had the good fortune to live there. Most of my time was spent in Kuala Lumpur, but there are other places around the country that I also hold dear.
When I knew I would be leaving, I went into a sort of mourning. To ease my sadness, I conceived of the idea of making my own photo alphabet book of Malaysia. I began a list of personal icons of Malaysia. While waiting in lines or riding in taxis, I’d take it out and work on it, pondering important questions such as, “Should M be Mont’Kiara, Merdeka Square, mosque or macaque?”
Unfortunately, I ran out of time to actually create my book. Now that I was back in the USA, I figured it would never come together. Then one day the team at Wetpaint invited me to be one of their Early Adopters to try out their new wiki platform. (I first mentioned Wetpaint here.) I readily accepted, but had no idea of what type of wiki to create. Then I realized it was the perfect opportunity to finally make my alphabet book. Now, not only will I create my keepsake of my time in KL, but others will have a place to do the same for cities or countries that they hold dear.
Wetpaint will soon have it’s public launching. I’ve been scrambling to add content so that there is something to show in time for the launch. I invite you to come play around at my wiki. I’ve titled it wikiPlaces: The Essence of Your Favorite Places. I’d be delighted if you added a few photos of places that you hold dear. No expectation that you illustrate all 26 letters, just try your hand at it and let us experience a bit of a place through your eyes. I’d appreciate it.
Our summer blog is underway! As I mentioned before, we are using Learnerblogs.org. Thus far, I am liking the multi-user WordPress blogs that James Farmer makes available for students for free. I had never used that platform before, but I am finding it easy to use and powerful.
Even this early on, I am impressed with how well it fits educational purposes. For example, although students need an email address to register, I was able to create all the student accounts using my own email address; many sites won’t let you do that. I appreciate being able to choose whether or not people need to give an email address to be allowed to leave comments — many children don’t have email accounts and this would have prevented them from leaving comments. I love that I can choose to moderate comments before they are posted. And of course, I am able to set up my students as contributors which means their posts go through me before they are visible on the internet. One wish is a way to leave editorial comments for the blogger prior to approving the article for posting. Thus far, I’ve just typed a note in itallics at the top of the draft, but the student may not realize I’ve left them a comment; they may just think I haven’t gotten around to approving it yet.
I like that the posts from all our users appear together on the main page, but that by clicking on the students’ names in the category list on the side of the blog, you pull up a page of just that student’s posts. This combination gives the students the feel of having their own blog, while still giving them the increased visibility that comes with a multi-user blog.
That brings up my biggest worry; since we are no longer in Blogmeister where other students are likely to find us, and since Learnerblogs doesn’t have an index that makes it easy for others to find us, I worry that no one will visit our blog.
If you are interested, please visit our new blog and leave a few comments. The writing will be rougher than our previous blogs because I’m no longer editing with them, but the enthusiasm is high. If you still have students, please feel free to have them visit our blog as well. Please let us know where you are writing from if you leave a comment.
http://ssedro.learnerblogs.org
|
|
