Looking back

31. December 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

It’s the last day of the year.  We have festivities planned and I will do what I normally do, which is to look forward not back.  But also, I like to learn from the past.  A year ago, I was halfway through the first year of a new job.  I was still really feeling my way.  To some extent, I still am, though there are certain parts of my job, especially interacting with kids, where I feel perfectly fine.  I think the nature of my field is such that I will always feel a little stretched.  So, it was mostly a good year.  One great thing about having a blog is that you have a bit of a record of your life.  I picked out the most popular posts to see what life was like and what my readers found most interesting.  Here’s the top six, with some commentary.

6.  Top Secret Rosies and Middle School:  In this post I reflect on seeing the movie Top Secret Rosies, which I ended up showing to a bunch of middle-schoolers.  They really related to the women in the movie and were impressed with their skills as the first real programmers.  I’m still proud of the work I’m doing at the middle school level in terms of computer science and hope to continue that work in the years to come.

5. Could you live without the Internet?:  A reflection on purposeful use of the Internet, and whether some critics of the Internet aren’t right about how it makes our connections weaker and our minds mushy.  One of the reasons I’ve started blogging more is of course, I have more time over the break, but also, I wanted to return to the reflective nature of blogging.  I wanted to use the Internet for its best purposes: to learn, to think through ideas, to connect with people with shared interests.  I think it’s important for us to keep thinking about our interactions with technology and not just accept them blindly.

4. Robotics competition results and more:  Some thoughts on last year’s robotics competitions.  I definitely learned a lot from that and thought I didn’t implement some of my plans for this year at the upper school level, I hope to next year.

3. Some thoughts on gender and robotics:  I muse about robotics again, and whether it’s worth the time and money and some of the inherent gender issues that come up, especially in this particular area.  I have a feeling this will be a regular feature of the blog.  I’m still sorting out what I think about it.  There are both pros and cons.

2. The meaning of life is over: A post about turning 43, wanting to lose weight (yes, it’s often on my mind), and what it’s like getting older.

1. Getting geeky wit’ it:  A post about taking my Mac apart to change out its hard drive, getting a new phone and other geeky projects. I enjoy writing these posts for sure!

Surprisingly, two or three of my top visited posts for 2011 are posts from 2010, so I didn’t include them.  It’s nice to see the geeky content is reigning supreme.  Here’s wishing you all a wonderful 2012, and may it be a bit geeky, too!

Refining the resolutions

30. December 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,

Over the last 24 hours or so, I’ve been thinking about what I really want to accomplish this year, and more importantly, why?  Here’s my list so far:

1. Keeping the house cleaner, more organized.  I find it stressful to come home to a messy kitchen with no food to prepare and piles of laundry to do.  I find the complete Flylady method a little overwhelming and too much to achieve if you work out of the home.  She does recommend a load of laundry per day, which I think I can manage.  I’d also like to get better at meal planning, recruiting the kids to do a little more in this regard.  Geeky Boy got a cookbook for Christmas, so I’ve suggested that he do the cooking on the night I have yoga.  Last year, and even the beginning of this year, I did pretty well on the meal front and had 3-4 meals scheduled each week, hoping for leftovers on at least one or two days.  Mr. Geeky does the grocery shopping, giving me some time to really think through the planning. So I think I can manage this.  I also want to really focus on decluttering.  Our house is a reasonable size, but we don’t have that much storage.  I feel that we have way too much stuff.  There are boxes of things we never use.  We have old cell phones sitting around that could be donated.  There are board games and toys that we’ve held onto for some reason. So, here’s my house cleaning resolutions in a nutshell:

  • Do a load of laundry every day. Wash, dry *and* fold.
  • Plan meals for each week and stick to the plan.  Also have easy backup meals on deck (pasta and sauce, sandwiches) for days when the plan falls apart or when the hoped-for leftovers do not appear.
  • Declutter 15 minutes/day.  At the end of the declutter session, make sure unwanted items are headed where they need to go–trash or donation pile.  I will start at the front of the house and work my way back, then move upstairs from front to back.  I think this will take the whole year.  I also think this will be the hardest plan to stick with.

2. Getting fit, developing an exercise habit.  For now, I’m not going to worry too much about eating.  Over the holidays, I’ve indulged in chips and snack food, chocolate, too much wine and beer, but during “normal” times, I’m much better and my eating habits are not that bad.  We eat mostly vegetarian and fish, not a lot of red meat and I try to incorporate vegetables as much as possible.  Though I think I should add more fruits and veggies, especially as snacks, until I’m set in my fitness routine.  Here’s my plan for that:

  • Yoga once a week, with a plan to increase to twice a week after 3 months.
  • Go for a walk every day.  I feel like I need to do something every day, and I like walking.  I don’t even need to put special clothes on.  I’m going to start with a mile, but work up to 3.  Time-wise, I’m not sure I can go further than that.

3. Sticking to the budget.  I must admit that I often hate dealing with money.  Always have.  In times when we had no money, we checked our accounts all the time, making sure we didn’t overdraw (not that we didn’t on occasion).  Now, we’re less careful, and though we don’t often overdraw, we do end up charging things or not buying things that we wanted to because we overspent.  So here’s the plan for that:

  • Reduce spending by $100/month in each of these categories: groceries, eating out (including fast food), and shopping.  The plan is to increase the reduction if possible.
  • Put the amount saved in these categories (up to $300/month) into savings.

Well, I think that’s enough to start with.  I have at least one more that I’m contemplating.  It’s kind of work-related.  Back in September, I promised myself I’d practice programming every day.  Though I’ve come close to that, it’s not perfect.  I need to make time at work to do this.  So I’m still thinking about how this would work.

Moving forward

29. December 2011 · 3 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,

So I went to a yoga class last night run by my old friend with whom I used to do yoga 10 years ago.  It was fabulous.  I am actually sore today, but in a good way.  I think I worked every muscle in my body.  The class is offered every Wednesday, so I think I’ll start going at least to that, and then maybe add another class later.

Another area I want to work on in the coming year is money.  We suck at budgeting.  We usually manage to come out okay, but every once in a while, we find ourselves resorting to a credit card, and, in general, we’re not saving enough.  I have made a good effort to pay off our credit cards, but need to do some work in that area.  One thing I keep talking about doing is canceling cable and our land line.  That would save us over $100/month.  We subscribed to Netflix streaming, and have used it a lot.  Geeky Girl and I spent our time over the break watching How I Met Your Mother from the beginning.  Though we’d seen most of the episodes, we enjoyed watching them in order.  Mr. Geeky watches whatever movies it throws at him.  He’s on a foreign film kick at the moment.

I have no problem canceling cable.  We have TiVo and frankly, if we didn’t, this decision would be a lot easier.  We’d just figure out whether to go with Apple.tv or Google.tv or Boxee, etc.  As it is, we’re trying to figure out things that will work with our existing box.  We can access Netflix and Amazon.  We could also go with Hulu plus, which is available on TiVo as well.  But newer services like Vudu are not available and you can’t really just go to a web site like Clicker.com to connect to your shows of choice.  We could connect a computer to our tv, but then we need remote control.  We’d actually lose some of the shows we watch regularly.  At least, we’d lose the convenience of being about to watch them in one place at the click of a button. So I think we’ll keep looking and thinking about it.  And I know, we could give up tv altogether.  Not outside the realm of possibility.

Mr. Geeky and I went over our budget the other day and most of our money goes to food (both groceries and eating out) and shopping (mostly for clothes).  We’re going to try to cut back a little in those areas.  I think that will have a bigger impact than getting rid of cable.  I’ve proposed cutting those by a couple hundred each.  We may have to start slow, but maybe we’ll get there.  We definitely like our food!

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Losing weight, getting fit, again

28. December 2011 · 4 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

For the last five or so years, I’ve wanted to lose weight.  I’ve written about it here a lot.  I’ve made it a New Year’s Resolution many times.  And many times, I’ve failed to lose weight.  I’ve fallen off the exercise/diet wagon.  I was lamenting not having time to exercise to someone last night, and they said, “You have to make time for it.”  Which I know.  And I can’t decide where to make time.  Morning seems out unless I get up 1/2 hour earlier, which I don’t see happening.  I have a hard enough time with the crack of dawn hour I get up at now.  Last year, I did get home at a semi-reasonable hour most days–by 4 or 4:30, which allowed time for a walk or something and which I honestly did every once in a while.  But now I’m running an after-school program and I sometimes don’t get home until 6.  On my best days, I’m home at 5:15.  My inclination when I get home is not to jump into an exercise routine, but have a glass of wine, chat with husband and start dinner.

My other issue is what kind of exercise to do.  Walking is fine and dandy, but it’s working the same muscle groups and probably not doing anything to work off inches where I want, namely, my butt and thighs. Also, I get wimpy about cold weather.  I’d like to do some yoga again, but feel the need to take a class, which costs money.  Maybe I just need to bite the bullet and do that.  I have a friend who runs a yoga studio and I think I should look into that.

So, I keep seeing this series of decisions I can’t seem to make and failing.  I’m inclined to at least give it a try.  Mornings are out, evenings are in, and dammit, I’m going to call my friend with the yoga place.  I’ll let you know how it works out.

 

Technology in the Classroom

27. December 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: Educational Technology · Tags: ,

Chuck Tryon is revamping his Technology in the Language Arts course and I left a long comment on his blog about what we do.  Here’s a slightly more organized and extended version of that:

  • Google Apps for Education: we have this installed and teachers have taken advantage of it in many ways
    • Google Docs: Teachers have used this for collaborative projects as well as suggested it for an easy way to go from school to home. There’s no emailing a paper, saving it to a flash drive, and ultimately having it get lost. Teachers have also used the presentation tool, and, to a lesser extent, the spreadsheets, though I have students use them to create surveys.
    • Sites: I teach students to make a website using Google sites in 6th grade.  This year, the 8th grade social studies classes created online newspapers for states just after the Revolution.
    • Blogger: I have one teacher using this and another considering it.  An art history teacher is posting images and having students comment on it, discussing the art work’s attributes.
    • Groups: This is being used by clubs and classes as a way to get out documents and announcements.
    • Video/YouTube: always popular, and a few teachers use it to post student work
  • Video: speaking of video, we use it a lot.  Using Flip video cameras, students create videos about literature and/or history as well as personal topics.  Often they incorporate photos.  We have access to both Windows Movie maker and iMovie.  Students often use what they have access to at home, though our biggest issue is going back and forth between home and school to work on these projects.
  • Animation: related to video, we’ve used GoAnimate and DoInk for animation.  GoAnimate is better for people-based animations while DoInk is better for animating things like physics or biology, perhaps even math.  You can draw whatever you want in DoInk while GoAnimate provides characters.
  • Presentations: I mentioned Google’s presentation tool, which is really an online version of PowerPoint, which many students still use.  But we use Prezi an awful lot.  Students like it a lot more and teachers use it to teach structure–of poems and stories, but also of student work–which can be illustrated better via Prezi.  A story is not always linear like PowerPoint.
  • Audio: I teach podcasts in 7th grade and a colleague of mine runs an after-school program that uses podcasts.  Audio in the form of narration often gets incorporated into video projects and/or presentations.
  • Other tools.  I teach Scratch and it’s been used a couple of times in other classes, and I have a teacher who’s doing a project in a couple of weeks that has students create an animation using Scratch followed by an interactive quiz.  We also have teachers considering things like Twitter (having a historical figure “tweet” the events of his/her life).  Teachers also use print-based things like newsletters and brochures created with Publisher or comic strips for languages.  And we’re exploring the use of iPads and other mobile devices, including cell phones.  Things are always changing and we’re always trying to find ways to essentially teach both a concept within a discipline and the use of technology.
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Back to (house)work

26. December 2011 · 3 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

Once the school year got into full swing, I found it really hard to keep up with maintaining any kind of semblance of order in the house.  I found it especially difficult to keep up with cooking and laundry, two things I really care about getting done.  Far too often, I found myself digging through laundry baskets and ordering pizza.  Jeeves, my new little robot vacuum, will help (well, at least with the floors):

I’m returning to some sort of Flylady method. I don’t think the whole system works for me, but I can adapt pieces of it.  There will be more goals for the year, but this is one I will be starting before the new year.  I need to destress my house.

A Happy Geeky Christmas

25. December 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized

To one and all.  I swear, I’m getting geekier than Mr. Geeky.  For Christmas I got a robot vacuum cleaner, the Neat-O (and he is awesome!), and an Arduino kit.  Mr. Geeky did get a new Android phone, but otherwise, he got pretty non-geeky stuff:  sweaters and whatnot.  I think there’s a Geeky competition going on.

Hope you all have had a wonderful holiday!

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CS Ed Week Begins

06. December 2011 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,

Yesterday I kicked off CS Ed Week by bringing in two hip Computer Science-y women to talk to our high school students.  Kimberly Blessing and Lindsay Lindstrom joined us to talk about why they like Computer Science and what they do.  They also showed off some resources for students who are interested in learning about CS, but who may not have the time to fit it into their schedule.  They pointed out Web Start Women and TechGirlz, just two of the many organizations out there hosting classes in the evenings and on the weekends to give women and girls the opportunity to learn programming or other IT skills in a friendly environment.

Today, my Upper School students visited a 1st grade science class to show off their projects.  They showed how their robots took pictures, went through mazes, and played tag.  They really seemed to like it.  Tomorrow, they’ll take the same show to the Middle School assembly.

It’s a real challenge to get girls interested in CS.  We have a lot of smart girls in our school, and a lot are interested in entering fields related to science and math, but CS is not on their radar.  These kinds of things keep it on their radar.  I also am trying to put CS in their sights early.  Today I had my first session on computing with 1st and 2nd graders.  Eventually we’ll build robots.  And then maybe they’ll join the robotics club in middle school and then take CS in high school.  I hope that by keeping it on the radar throughout their years here, we’ll draw in a few more.  And I don’t necessarily want to create a ton of new programmers, but I do want everyone to know a little something about programming.  I’m encouraged so far, but this is a long-term investment that will take a while to bear fruit.

What makes it worth it

01. December 2011 · 2 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

Today, as I was moving around the room during robotics club, checking in with each team, I had a moment where I realized I really liked what was happening.  I still have reservations about robotics as a pathway to Computer Science, but there is so much the kids have gotten out of this.  They no longer call screws and nuts “thingys”.  They’re screws and nuts–and the tools to work with them are 3/64 or 5/32 allen wrenches not “thing-a-ma-bobs”.  Lefty-loosy, righty tighty is no longer needed.  We talk about L-pieces and C-channels.   They sound like they know what they’re doing.  Each team member (mostly) has a job to do and does it.  They’re working together fairly well.  They’re getting a lot out of this.

And just before that, I had a study hall where students chatted with me about their experience visiting upper school classes that day and how they’re looking forward to upper school.  Two girls were chatting with each other about books and one said to the other, “I didn’t know you talked so much.  I’ve never really heard you talk.”  I smiled to myself, because I knew she talked and I knew she was interesting to talk to, and I was happy to see her classmates recognizing that.

And in homeroom, we talked about upper school, the upcoming holidays and speeches that they’re preparing.  I really enjoyed hanging out with them.

And that’s what makes the long hours worth it.  Because you hope you’re making a difference in these young people’s lives.  And really, they’re making a difference in yours.