I have to applaud the federal government being for being so with the times by starting their new site Apps.gov. However, am I the only one who sees the irony with the fact that YouTube is prominently posted under their Social Media Apps section, yet pretty much no school site in America can access YouTube? So YouTube is too evil for our schools, but not to evil for our government employees? All I can say is LOL!

Here’s what I found at The NY Times: “The thing that concerned me most about it was it seemed like a direct channel from the president of the United States into the classroom, to my child,”  said a father in Texas. What? I feel like I am living on another planet right now. Maybe I was raised wrong, but my mother taught me that the President of The United States was someone to admire and respect. (Okay, so I haven’t always felt admiration and respect for a president).

Or this from CNN: "Thinking about my kids in school having to listen to that just really upsets me," suburban Colorado mother Shanneen Barron told CNN Denver affiliate KMGH. "I’m an American. They are Americans, and I don’t feel that’s OK. I feel very scared to be in this country with our leadership right now."

Seriously, what am I missing here? This man is our Commander In Chief. He is our president who wants to tell children that the best thing they can do for themselves and our country is to get an education. How is that grounds for keeping your child home, or flooding your school with calls inquiring as to whether or not they will be showing the broadcast, or calling the whole thing a socialist plot?

Alright, lets get down to the nitty-gritty here, shall we? This isn’t about politics. This is about racism. That’s the ugly, nasty truth. These people don’t give a darn what their kids watch, it’s all about having a black man for our president. This is why I really and truly believe that…

I start school on Wednesday and this year we have Channel 1 at our school. In my opinion Channel 1 is just another way for bad teachers to show more videos, but besides that Channel 1 requires us to show TEN MINUTES of ads each and everyday! So now my students will start every day by watching ads that we have absolutely no control over. We must keep them on, and we must keep the volume up, otherwise we lose all those fabulous free videos.

This is madness! Parents are worried about the child watching our President, the leader of the free world, but I have not heard of one parent complain about their child being held captive by a series of ads, IN SCHOOL! Please help me understand this.

I truly want to weep right now for the anger and shame that I feel toward this situation. I love my country, and for the first time in 8 years I love our president, but right now, I’m ashamed to be called an American.

Reflections:

(I’m all about the process, but if you just want the bottom line, keep scrolling to my conclusions.)

1. I set-up two websites, one for my students and this blog.

2. After working hours upon hours to set everything-up on our home server we realized it might be better to pay the few dollars per month and get professional hosting. That required more hours of set-up and learning a whole new system.

3. I’m ultra picky and just had to tweek every little aspect of the websites style sheets. Just one tiny detail: before 2 months ago I knew absolutely, positively nothing about html or CSS code or even what a style sheet was!

4. Staring at code, learning it one your own, is hard. Ultimately I was victorious and can now open up a style sheet and start playing around with relatively good results. I “broke” my site often in the beginning, not so much recently.

5. I spent hours and hours and more hours finding just the right and perfect theme for each site, only to change them over and over again (I just made another major change yesterday in fact). So was all of that a waste of time? As I reflect I say no. What better way to learn something than to dig into it over and over?

6. Although I’m continually behind, I’ve read about 100 posts from my RSS feeds per day.

7. I will literally return to work with skin paler then when my vacation started as a result of sitting at my computer approximately 16 hours per day (some days more!).

8. While I was good to my mind, I wasn’t good to my body and didn’t ride my bike once. Oh those first few days of commuting to school will be tough.

9. I set-up a website for a colleague who plans on directing the entire school there for leadership announcements, etc. (see more about this in my conclusions).

10. Each of my 1st period students has been set-up with their own blog, all ready for them to start posting as soon as their permission slips are returned.

11. Got a SmartBoard and began learning the software. Also began looking into tips and tricks from the online community.

12. Researched and tried a plethora of new online tools!

13. Spent many, many nights chatting with former (and a few current) students on Facebook.

14. My goal of a post per day on Paige’s Prose didn’t quite happen.

So all of that leads me to…

My Conclusions:

If you look at my list above what stands out is a monumental amount of learning on many fronts. One of the most prolific changes (or possibly just a shift) that occurred in me this summer came from all the fantastic posts and articles I’ve been reading. I’ve been lucky enough to find some amazing colleagues and feel privileged to glean knowledge and ideas from them (see my Blogs I Follow). What I’ve learned from them has helped me, but also frustrated me.

Here’s what I’ve always believed, but now more than ever before:

No one person should control the technology of a school.

I spent yesterday with a co-worker setting up a site similar to mine for her students. As we talked through her goals she came to one that made me pause. You see she is the leadership teacher at our school, so all leadership based events are scheduled through her. What she eventually wants for the site we set-up is that it to be the go-to place for the entire student body. She’s setting up a calendar and different pages for each grade level. Very cool.

But what’s wrong with this picture? Why are we doing this? Why did I spend (literally) my entire vacation doing this? Isn’t this stuff supposed to be on the school website? That would be a logical thought, but unfortunately reality hasn’t played out that way. Our school website is pretty sad. (why do you think I am paying to have my own?) This is a result of one person controlling every aspect of technology for a “community” of about 2000 (not including parents)! This is seriously wrong.

So here’s what I’ve come to believe:

1. School site technology should be monitored by consortium of individuals. Certainly at every school there are a few people who are completely capable, and almost as important, willing, to “assist” with the technology responsibilities. If it takes a year to get a piece of software loaded onto a computer, or the antivirus updates happen every three years, isn’t that a bad sign?

2. More trust needs to be put into the hands of teachers. It is a bit insulting that as a highly-educated, professional, adult, we are not “allowed” to monitor certain things ourselves (i.e. using YouTube or GMail).

3. The technology leaders of the school must be given time to train the teachers who are not tech savvy. That’s the only way we will ever progress. If there is a problem with teachers “abusing” certain things I believe it stems from not being properly trained.

So now what? What’s the answer? I truly wish I had one (and hoping some of you do!). In 12 days I return to school, and while I’ve taken little time to re-charge, I have learned an awful lot. Maybe just enough to make my job more frustrating than it already is.

I would love to hear how things work at your school.

1. No new posts: I am the kind of teacher that “saves” everything up for summer. During the school year there just isn’t time to start new things, or take on big projects. Summer is it. Jim Burke mentioned in one of his blogs about the misconception that teachers are just lounging around by the pool all summer. Right. Well, I have been “lounging” in front of my computer since we finished school. Literally! Not only did I take on the challenge of hosting and setting-up this website, then last week I decided I wanted to do the same for my class website, Lahaise’s Lair. So for the past 5 days I have been focused on setting it up, transferring everything over from our old site, and general styling. It has been challenging.

2. At some point yesterday things started clicking with Lahaise’s Lair. Everything was working, things were lining up. It was a beautiful thing! I breathed a sigh of relief and told my husband I was ready to go, let’s make it live. That’s when things got weird. Running everything off a home server…yep it’s a learning experience for me.

Well, while he was working on that I thought I would do some style changes here, at Paige’s Prose. I am a very picky person and have not been able to find the “perfect” style to suit me and what I want to do here. Gosh does style really matter? No, it’s about the information. I know that, but I just couldn’t help myself. You’ve heard a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, right? It is so true. Because of all this I now have “a little CSS & HTML coding” knowledge. Just enough to get me in trouble. So I tried some different themes, started tweaking elements, and started breaking things. Agh! It was scary.

The upshot is I had to sit down and think of all the elements that reflect me and my blogging goals. I think the current design expresses me nicely. Although there are still things that aren’t “perfect”. However this time I went to the source for help instead of wasting my time breaking code. LOL.

3. This one is pretty obvious. At a few points my husband had to take this site down because of getting the other site going.

At this point everything is running nicely (surely not to last) and maybe I will go out and lounge by the pool with my iPhone

After a long month of sitting at my computer it seems like I am at the conclusion of the challenging part, so here’s the bottom line…

I think every teacher should have a website, or two really. One certainly for the students, like my Lahaise’s Lair, and maybe one just for them. My advice though: use a free service like PBWorks for a class wiki and WordPress.com for your own site. Life will be much simpler for you!

Even before the design could be implemented there was the actual set-up of the everything on our server (thanks ever so much to my husband Paul). Then we had some technical issues and had to delete everything and re-install. But success was finally had and here we are…welcome to Paige’s Prose!

Now I can get to the nitty-gritty of what I want to accomplish here.  Which is what? Hmmm, well, I think the first place to start is by making a list of reasons why I wanted a blog in the first place. If you are curious as to what I came up with take a peek at the “about” page.

Thanks for stopping in. I hope you will bookmark “me”, or better yet click on the feed button at the top of the page and add me to your RSS Reader, that way you will never miss a post.

P.S. Be sure to look at the tabs at the top…all my best links are under the Diigo Bookmarks tab and my very favorite blogs are under the Ed-Tech Blogs tab.