TGIF

I am looking forward to the afternoon.  We are watching the broadcast at 1:30 so the kids should really enjoy that.  After that we have early out.  We dismiss at 2:00.  After school we have some collaboration time.  I think we are having a broadcast meeting, so we can make the important decisions that make our broadcast go well.  WE have the basketball games tonight at 7:00.  Shishmaref girls are coming to play our girls.  I have a couple of kids videotaping the game.  I called Shishmaref and asked them if they wanted us to broadcast to them, but they said no.  So that was a bummer.  It would be a good experience for our kids.  I am looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow.

Eggs = Cornbread

I took a nap after school today.  Which turned out to be a terrible mistake.  Ask you can see by the time of this blog entry.  I also hadn’t eaten really anything after school, so when I was laying in bed trying to sleep, my stomach started to growl.  I tried to ignore it, but had a hankering for some corn bread.  I had some at the school a couple of days ago, and it was mighty tasty.  So I decided to get up and make some.  Oh by the way.  I was able to make the corn bread because we finally got some eggs in at the store.  You’d be surprised at how many recipes require eggs.  Anyway…  I got up, mixed up the corn bread and threw it in the oven.  Set the timer and went to read up on PHP and MYSQL.  Sounds fun doesn’t it??  Well that got sidetracked by some television.  Until the corn bread was finally finished.  I ate three large pieces while watching TV and washed it down with some cold water.  Quite satisfying.  I was still wide a wake (as I am now) and decided I should just buy the book I was reading on PHP.  You see I found a book that allowed you to download the first 4 chapters.  So I hopped onto Amazon and searched for the book.  They of course had it.  Price was about 35 dollars.  I started to read the reviews of the book and one of them said that the book was not worth the money.  It was very small, had spelling errors, and wasn’t too in-depth.  They said for a cheaper price it would have been perfect for beginners, but not in-depth enough for the price listed.  So I looked around a little more on Amazon and ended up spending 50 dollars on two books.  I am a little worried that this might be categorized under impulse buying late at night, but maybe I’ll learn something from this in the end. After throwing away some money I decided to check out Fark.  Always good for a story.  This is what prompted the blog entry this early morning.  I read this article, which made me feel really sad for the people involved.  Apparently some professor had been working on an instrument for 18 years that was put into the unmanned space shuttle that just recently reached Saturn.  The shuttle left in 1997 and the instrument was designed to collect data from the wind over there.  Well unfortunately the crew that put the instrument onto the shuttle back in 97 forgot to turn it on.  So the poor guy that worked on this thing kind of wasted 18 years of his life.  🙁  There’s a little more to the story if you want to read up on it, but can you imagine?  He seemed in pretty good spirits about the whole thing, which is good.  I can’t imagine the frustration he must be going through.  Well I just wanted to pass that story on.  I had better get to bed.

School and Alias

Another beautiful day out today.  The sunset was comparable to the sunrise of yesterday.  The kids are getting more unruly everyday it seems.  The morning started out alright, but we had had a couple students show up after first hour that usually don’t attend.  So not only do they not know the routine, but they are also the ones that are discipline problems.  So that changes the dynamic of the classroom tremendously.  I think I’ll try to shoot a little video tomorrow and get it posted on here.  I’ll see if I can get it compressed enough to fit on the server. Erin and I stayed at school for lunch, so we could have three of our kids serve detention.  After lunch went pretty well.  I worked with a couple of the high school students to prepare them for the broadcast tomorrow.  We wrote up the segways, and they are now tasked with rehearsing them for the live show.Lesa Meath is here visiting again.  She is the Alaska teacher mentor from Fairbanks that comes up every month or so, to help out first and second year teachers with whatever she can to hopefully retain more teachers in the state.  She was kind enough to take Erin and my class for the last hour of the day.  We were able to spend some much needed time assessing what we need to accomplish for the rest of the year.  So the last part of the day was great. After school Lesa and I sat down to discuss things that I wanted to work on for the rest of the year as well as things she could do to help to help me out with my goals.  After we finished our meeting, Erin and I headed home.  After some dinner, C.O. and AnnMaire came over to watch Alias.  I got an IM from Katie asking if I was going to watch it, and a call from Lyndi for the same reason.  So the Alias fever is breaking out.  Gotta go watch.  🙂

Ebates

Guess what everyone!!!!  I finally got Erin to see that there is a reason to have a blog.  You may notice the new addition to the shopping column on the right hand side.  That’s right…. ebates.  Erin stumbled onto this site while shopping on the internet (which we do A LOT of up here).  Basically how it works is you go to the site, sign up, and search for a product or store.  If it is one of the 700 stores that work with ebates.com they will track your order via a pop up window.  When you make your purchase, ebates gives you some sort of rebate.  Some are percentages others are like coupons giving you a discount.  Four times a year ebates mails you a check of your cumulative rebates.  Erin has received one check already, so it really does work.  It doesn’t cost a thing and I think Erin believes it gets you into heaven earlier.  🙂  You know how I talk about computers all the time.  Well with her is all about the savings she’s made with ebates, or the deals she has found on drugstore.com. What else happened today…..  Schools was a little crazy.  The kids were a little worse than usual.  Which is a bit frustrating.  After working with the same kids for over a year and half it gets old seeing them pull the same crap you dealt with last year.  We have kids that should be in Jr. High that are acting like they are in 2nd grade.  It’s tough when they don’t have any idea how students act in school.  So they get stuck in their little petty games. Enough negativity for the day I think.  We had an amazing sunrise this morning.  I unfortunately don’t have a digital camera, so I had to enlist Paul to go out and take a picture for me.  He did one better and used the built in pano stitcher on his canon powershot s500 (a sweet camera).

After school, I sat down with one of the Jr. High students (Sharosha) and he built the boys basketball page on the Brevig website.  He resized pictures, compressed videos, and typed up the little review.  I am hoping I can get a few kids excited about the webpage, and hopefully can get them to take over the project.  I have started to scale down the difficulty of the site.  Removing a lot of the layers I have used in the past. Wales (one of the schools in our district) just came out with a new website.  It is really nice.  Very professional looking.  They used PHP, which is way above my head.  I am intrigued by it and downloaded part of a book on how to create your own site with PHP and MYSQL.  The cool thing about sites designed using these techniques is they are database driven.  When a page loads it goes back to the server for info in each part of the page.  Giving you the opportunity to have up to the minute data on your site.  I also want to figure out how to incorporate a way for people to post feedback on topics on a site.  Stuff I need to read up on and learn how to do.  The problem is PHP and MYSQL is all done in code.  So it takes the visual part out of it.  The end result it fun, but he building process is pretty boring unless you like to look at code.

Kids don’t like HTML

Well it’s going to be interesting to see how the broadcast ends up this week.  We are getting some clips in, but we don’t have our anchors picked out yet.  So they haven’t practiced a script resulting in poor fluency when they are live.  I stayed after school yesterday pretty late getting some video editing done.  I finished up a clip about the basketball games last weekend and imported the clip our class is doing on the Tsunami in Asia.  I need to find some pictures to add into the clip.  I’m running into some difficulties with that.  I need ones that are pretty high resolution, so they don’t look pixilated on the TV. Class is going pretty well this morning.  I have 6 that showed up for SFA.  They are tired, but seem to be working pretty well.  Only mild prodding to get them going. I am trying to make the website a little easier to edit.  In all of the new pages I create, I’m going to get rid of the layers, and hopefully train in some kids to take it over.  I am having trouble getting kids interested in web design.  I’ll see if I can get someone to make the basketball page.  They should be interested in the topic.  We’ll see how it goes.

Vikings on TV?

Monday morning is always a tough to get out of bed.  I of course slept in till noon on both Saturday and Sunday.  So needless to say it was difficult to get to sleep last night.  C.O., AnnMaire, and Paul came over Saturday to watch the first two episodes of Alais season 4.  Erin figured out a way to burn the episodes off of the dish, which will be cool.  On Sunday we got up and watched the Vikings lose to Philadelphia.   I worked on the KTS website a bit last night, but basically just relaxed. We have a news broadcast this Thursday at 2:00.  Things are coming together pretty slowly this time.  We didn’t have our normal planning meetings which means we aren’t all on the same page.  It also doesn’t look like we have very much footage this time.  We’ll see how it goes.

Power Outage…

Well we just had a power outage that lasted for about 10-15 minutes. It’s still kind of dusk outside, so there wasn’t much ambient light to see off of. So work was pretty much out of the question. The kids wanted to tell gost stories. I knew that would keep them pretty entertained, and relativly quite. So thats what they did. The power just turned back on, so I had better get them back to work.

Flickr

Finally Friday.  I am really looking forward to a couple of days off.  A little sleeping in and not thinking about much.  The weather is pretty nice out.  The temperature is warming up a bit, and we have had some really clear days.  Rumor has it we are going to have some blowing snow the next couple of days.I just signed up for an account at www.flickr.com.  This site allows you to post pictures on the web for free so friends and family can see your pictures.  You can view my pictures on my flicker account.  I have only uploaded three pictures for now.  Seems like a nice service.  What got me turned on to it was a plug in I found for iPhoto.  It allows you to upload directly to Flickr from iPhoto.  You don’t have to worry about a web interface.  Works out really well.Erin and I have been watching a lot of Alias lately.  Lyndi was nice enough to tape the first episode of this season for us.  We were going to watch it, but the weather was pretty bad out and the dish wasn’t getting a signal.  So we weren’t able to catch that one.  When Lyndi told us she recorded it for us we decided we would wait to watch the second one until we had seen the first one.  So we recorded episode 2 on Wednesday night.  In the mean time we borrowed season 3 from AnnMaire and C.O. So we have been trying to get through all of those by this weekend.  AnnMaire and C.O. are coming over to watch the first two episodes with us.  Should be a good time.

I don’t want to do any stinkin work…

The day is finally done.  School went pretty well today.  The kids are always a little squirrelly.  Erin is working with the battle of the book team right now.  She’s a little frustrated with their work ethic.  Seems like the kids want everything handed to them on a golden platter.  The thought of actually doing some work on their own doesn’t seem to have entered their mind.  There were about 15 kids here for battle of the books.  They were supposed to have read the books by this week.  Next Monday is the beginning of the district competition.  Erin was quizzing the group with practice questions.  The correct answers were few and far between.  So needless to say the competition next week doesn’t look too promising. Its definitely nice that today was our last long day for the week.  Friday’s we dismiss the students at 2:00 allowing the staff to have some much needed collaboration/planning time.  We also have basketball games this weekend.  Stebbins is flying in for the competition.  The kids are all excited.  Basketball is one of the most important things in their lives it seems.

Fark Goodness

I just remembered a couple of cool articles I read last night.  I found them of course on Fark.com.  The first was about a kid over in India I believe.  He is only 8 years old and is like this computer genius.  He started using a computer when he was two.  If I remember correctly from the article he sent out an email when he was 2 or 3.  Crazy.  He is MOUS certified (Microsoft Officer User Specialist) – Core & Expert Level.  He has done web design, met the president, and Bill Gates.  I read in there that he is doing some video conferencing.  I think it would be cool for our kids to have a videoconference with him and interview him for the KKTS News Broadcast.  His website is www.microsoftkid.com to read the article about him follow this link.The other story I thought was interesting last night was about a couple of kids in PA that “borrowed” on of their dads’ planes.  Their mission:  To bomb their school with eggs.  There were two of them 15 and 16.  Neither of them had their pilots license.  Sounds like their mission was successful.  They did however scare everyone in town by flying so low.  On top of that it was really foggy out.  The police weren’t able to ID the planes tail number.  They waited for the plane to land at the local airport.  That didn’t work out so well when the kids landed at a private strip owned by the father.  The boys ended up turning themselves in when they heard they were being looked for.  I don’t think they realized how much of a stir they caused.  Follow this link to read the full article.