Four More Days

Here is the whole picture from yesterday! Did you guess that it was row houses in San Francisco? I think that they are pretty. Now here is a new picture to guess:








Blossem,

It was nice to hear from you! I am glad that you remembered how to find my blog and how to write me. Did you see the picture at the top of last blog? Can you guess what it is?

I am adding the whole picture to this blog and then putting in a new picture for guessing. I hope you can figure it out.

Today I am trying to finish up all sorts of little things that I need to do before we go. Our house sitters are moving into our guestroom tomorrow. I also watered the plants because it has been so dry still.

Janice

Finally it is cool in Austin

5 Days to go

Can you tell I am playing with fonts, sizes, graphics, etc... to get ready for going to Greece. I want to be comfortable with the program so I don't have to spend HOURS trying to figure things out like I did yesterday.

Here are some questions I have already about what I will experience:
1. Will it be difficult to find Internet connections?
2. Will it be expensive? (If it is expensive I may have difficulty keeping up with reading and writing online)
3. Will there be technology in schools there?
4. Will I find students that speak English?

I know that time will fly when I am in Greece and although a month seems like a long time, all of a sudden it will be time to come back!

This morning I took a walk for exercise and when I got home it was cooler outside than in the house!! What a nice change!

More Later.... Janice

p.s. I am including a part of a picture that I took. I wonder if you can guess what it is! (I chose an easy one to start with. I will be doing this with landmarks in Greece too!)

Preparing for a Trip

6 Days to go

In order to prepare for a trip to Greece there are many things that I have been doing.

First, I had to apply for a Passport. A passport is identification that you need when you travel to a foreign country. It has a picture of me and then everytime I go somewhere I have to get it stamped. Steve and I went to Walgreens to get our photo done at the end of July. Then we went to the post office and filled out forms and mailed them off. In a few weeks we received our passports.

The next big thing that we had to do to prepare to go was to think about our animals and our house. We have a cat and a dog. We didn't want to put them into a kennel for such a long time and so we looked for someone who could live in our house for the month. We were lucky and found someone who can stay here for the whole month and house sit.

Today I called the newspapers and put a hold on newspaper delivery for the month that we will be gone.

I am sure there will be lots of other things that come up and I will try to write about them. Right now I am putting up a picture of Alexi (the dog) and Chester (the cat). They tolerate each other, but this picture shows a rare time when they were sitting on the same pillow!

Blossem,

Thanks for your note. When is your birthday? Remember I will be in Greece for all of October. I don't think that I could go to Chicago. What are you going to do there?

I am not sure if they celebrate Halloween in Greece, but I will find out and let you know. My guess is that they don't and that Halloween is mainly a United States Holiday. What do you think?

Janice

Wikipedia

Wikipedia has been around for a while, but now it seems like I am hearing more and more about it. When reading entries to the Global Schoolnet contest I found that there were several students that used it as their single reference for information. My impression is that most teachers do NOT trust it as a source and I am uncomfortable with it being the ONLY source for any project. Actually, a project should ALWAYS have more than one source-preferrably three so that the information can at least be triangulated.

My husband, the University Professor, is very doubtful that Wikipedia is accurate and trustworthy. He is a specialist in his field and has spent years learning languages and background to help him really understand his topic. There is a huge pressure on professors to publish books and articles and Wikipedia does not count. He would not spend time on it and thinks that anyone who has time to spend on it has too much time.

I don't know of any teachers who use it as a resource. I think I will start using it as a way to look things up to see what I think.

Getting Ready

Today I am going to start a countdown to the trip to Greece. I am doing this partly to force myself to practice writing every day- no matter if it is only a little. I am also going to put in a picture each day. Today it is a picture of the landing of the house that we bought in Austin. We just (almost) finished putting in bamboo flooring. For more pictures of the house go to http://jfriesen.net and click on the link to house pictures. Sorry this does not relate to Greece yet!

Seven days to go.

Texas Malahini: It is hot in Austin

Texas Malahini: It is hot in AustinHi Blossem and Angel! It is good to hear from you. The weather says that Hurricane Rita is heading this way. It is a category 5 storm now and the one that hit New Orleans was category 4 when it landed, so it could be bad!

The Austin City Limits Music Festival is still going to start on Friday, but depending on what happens with the weather it may close up on Saturday.

Angel, I will be leaving for Greece on October 4th. You can read right here to see what I am learning!

Janice

Why Blog?

Why should teachers know about blogging? Should EVERYONE have their own blog? Why?
I think that the most interesting thing about blogging is actually reading other blogs. The difficulty is knowing what blogs to read and also finding the time to actually read them. This is where an AGGREGATOR becomes essential. An aggregator is a program that goes out and keeps track of blogs that you tell it to follow. If you don't have time to look at them for several days it just keeps a summary of what has been posted in each one for those days. When you finally do go to your aggregator you can scan through what has been posted to the blogs and choose to read as little or as much as you have time for.

In the beginning I found one or two blogs that people recommended or were interesting to me and I subscribed to them with Bloglines.com (for free). Then I read them and as time passed other blogs were recommended or linked to from the ones that I was following and so I subscribed to them as well. As you can see above I have subscribed to many blogs this way.

What I am learning now is that after a while it becomes clear that I want to read EVERY word of some of them and there are others that I eventually decide I am not really interested in. I can unsubscribe very easily. For example there was one blog that I thought would be very interesting, but every day there were lots of posts (around 20-50) and they added up so that every time I looked I felt way behind and overwhelmed at the number of them and never read anything. I decided it was better to unsubscribe for now. Some people blog once ever three weeks. Others blog several times a day. After looking them over for a few weeks I have found it is not difficult to decide which ones to keep and scan over, which ones to read carefully and which ones to unsubscribe to.

You can also subscribe to news feeds. Anything that says it has an RSS feed can be collected by an aggregator. This means that if you are interested in Iraq, the weather, the business news in the NYTimes, or any other specific news you can add these to your aggregator and scan the headlines daily. Think of what this could mean for a student who is learning about a current event. That student could set up aggregators for several different online news papers from different parts of the world and keep up with the actual news!

I would challenge anyone who is interested in exploring more to sign up for a bloglines account and to subscribe to Blogboard which is a collection of teacher written blogs. As you scan it you may find some that you really relate to and want to keep reading. There are links in the text to each blog, so you can subscribe to them individually. This would be a good start!

It is hot in Austin

Blossem,

Thanks for writing. I have been helping to set up a booth at the Austin City Limits festival all day. It is really hot outside. Everyone is worried that there will be a hurricane (Rita) and so we will have to take down the tents and quit early.

I meant to spend some time today working on learning about Corinth, Greece where I will be visiting, but I ran out of time.

Janice

Putting in a picture

I am attempting again to put a picture into my blog posting. I know that it is possible to do it by writing html code. I CAN do that, but it is time consuming and takes away from why I am using this blog. Right now I am on "sabbatical" and have time to explore these things. This morning I have spent about 2 hours learning more about using Blogger. My concern is that many good teachers will not use blogging if they need to code in order to make pictures and links show up. It is a foreign concept and something that would take a good amount of professional development for them to learn. There is SO much important learning for teachers to do about things like reading programs, teaching number sense, classroom management, dealing with parents who do not speak English, etc... It is just wrong to take away from their brain time with learning code.

So, here is what I have discovered. In Blogger.com you MUST be using certain browsers for the pictures to show up. I have switched to Firefox from Safari and I am going to attempt it again.

Here is The Parthenon

Greece WebQuest on QuestGarden

I think that in order to prepare for this trip to Greece I am going to create a WebQuest about Greece. I am thinking that it might make the most sense to tie it in with curriculum from a class that is participating. One of the classes is a 5th grade which studies Greece as a beginning of democracy, so that may be what I will work on. Or maybe I will work on Greek architecture.

Today I will begin exploring QuestGarden and looking for resources and also thinking about the essential question of the WebQuest. I think I will also set up a place online (maybe a folder in my web space) for pictures that I want to share. The ParthenonThe first one comes from http://mye-coach.com. Here is the citation on it:
Bray, Sara. The Parthenon. parthenon.jpg. 2003. My eCoach® eLibrary. Online. Available. 19 September 2005.

Now on to QuestGarden

Teachers using Blogs

I have recently been browsing classroom blogs to see what is happening and it reminds me of the push for classroom web pages which is still going on.

From what I saw it looks like there are schools which are promoting the use of blogs for all of their teachers. They have set up a blog accounts for each teacher and given them some instruction on using them. When you click on them often you will find comments like "It worked!" and that is all. This gives me the impression that there was a workshop where teachers were taught how to access the blog and got in and wrote one sentence and haven't gone back.

There are a few blogs that teachers have attempted to use in pretty minimal ways. They have entries for many days which tell what the homework assignment is for that night. Some teachers are using them with their students, but still in a pretty basic way. Each student is listed and they all have entries the same date responding to the same question from their reading. There is no interaction and no creativity in the writing.

Then there are the VERY few blogs that are being used by teachers to truly enhance what they are doing in the classroom. In one of them Mary Kruel's classroom (http://marykreul.teacherhosting.com/blog/) uses the blog (you may have to go back to the end of last year) as a chance for students to write about what is happening in the classroom. Everyday someone writes, is edited and published. Parents can read what is happening in the classroom. This is truly cool, but right now is rare.

Reaction to Hurricane Katrina

My reaction to the Hurricane and that of many people I know is to feel so far away and so shocked by the devastation that we don't know what to do. I do plan to give some money, but that seems so pathetic. I am going to give to Mennonite Disaster Service because it is an organization with long standing integrity.

I sit here in my nice house in Austin and feel so lucky. We have a guestroom and extra bathroom. Maybe we can help out by offering someone some space to get on their feet. That is a scarey thing. It is difficult to have people you don't know camping out at your house. I am not sure what will happen, but I am open to it.