Setting up a blog

To set up your blog you need to:

1. Go to www.blogger.com
2. Click on Create A Blog
3. Enter your email address (username@cashmere.school.nz)
4. And repeat step 3
5. Enter a password and MAKE SURE YOU REMEMBER IT!
6. And repeat step 5
7. Enter your first name
8. Type the letters you see
9. You may need to repeat steps 5-8 until it works.
10. Enter the title of your blog eg "Jane's Blog"
11. Enter the URL or address you would like for your blog - you may need to try different options if your choice if name has been used.

Web 2

What is Web 2?

Questions to answer - either in your blog or by eail to fy@cashmere.school.nz if you cannot access your blog.

1. What is Web 2?
2. Give some examples of Web 2, and explain the purpose of each one.
3. What is a wiki?
4. How are blogs and wikis the same? How are they different?
5. Who writes wikipedia? Do you think you can trust it? Why/why not?
6. What is Flickr useful for?
7. What is delicious?
8. If you have time, experiment with igoogle or netvibes and report on what you do.

Hardware

Computers need hardware!

Questions to answer in your own blog:

• Why do computers need hardware?
• Find a definition of hardware - copy it and say where the definition came from.
• Explain the difference between hardware and software in your own words.
• Hardware can be split into four sorts: input, output, processing and storage. Give an example of each sort of hardware.
• What special hardware do networks need?
• What hardware is used by other sorts of DigiTech?
• Take a photo - not of a person - with a webcam or digital camera. Add the photo to your blog post or your user profile (go to dashboard to edit your profile).
• Record your voice using your headset. Email this file and your blog URL to your teacher fy@cashmere.school.nz
• If you have time: use Photostory 3 to make a video clip and add it to your blog post.

Accessing school email from home

To access school email from home, go to home.cashmere.school.nz/mymail

Answer these questions in your own blog:

• What is CC? What is BCC?
• How do you attach a file in CHS Mail?
• What formatting options do you have in CHS Mail?
• How can you make folders and move emails into them?
• What is the draft folder for?
• How do you add friends to the address book in CHS Mail?

Year 10 DigiTech Blogs

Last Friday, my Year 10 DigiTech class made blogs.
They can be found by clicking here:

• Scott
• MrDuck
• Ami
• Kate
• Hayden
• Atanisha
• Jesse
• Ashleigh
• Ashley
• Jonty
• Emma
• Katrina
• Jack
• Nikita
• Jonathan
• Michael H
  
• Oliver
• Jackie
• Harley
• Josh
• Kira
  

Actv8 Activities

Choose one or more of the following activities to do.

Digital technologies

1. List all the examples of digital technologies that you can find in the magazine.
2. Choose one example from your list and research its history, uses and future.
3. Make a poster about this piece of digital technology.

DigiTech careers

1. List all the careers involving DigiTech that you can find in the magazine.
2. Choose one career from your list and research the qualifications needed, the pay rates and what people do in this job. You might find this web site helpful.
3. Make a poster (or presentation, or web site) about this career.

Competitions

1. Make a table for each competition in the magazine, showing what the prize is and what you have to do to enter.
2. Decide which competition is the hardest, the easiest and the most fun.
3. Have a look on the Actv8 web site and see if there are any current competitions you could enter.
4. Pick one competition and work on an entry for it.

Further Studies

1. Make a list of all the places you could study and all the scholarships you could apply for.
2. Choose one of the places to study and find out more about it.
3. Present the information you found in a way that you can then share with the class.

Articles

1. Pick an article that interests you.
2. Summarise its content.
3. Analyse its layout and presentation.
4. List further questions that you would like to ask about the content.

Actv8 Magazine Acitivities

I am creating student activities based around the Actv8 magazine which we get boxes of at school every now and then. Thinking that there is a lot of learning to be done in each issue, I have written some tasks to choose from. Normally, I would type them up in Word and store them somewhere on my computer, and then have trouble finding them. I thought that tagging my files would be helpful, and then thought I could do that on my blog. The downside is that the tasks will be unavailable when the network is down, which is partly why I was writing them in the first place! So this solution to my problem is only a partial solution.

Homesick Creek

By Diane Hammond 2005

ISBN 0-385-50944-8

This is a five star book.

Themes of love, family, friendship, faithfulness, privilege and parenting are treated in a very sensitive fashion.

The plot is skilfully unfolded with layers of complexity unfolding gently without any sense of being rushed or any of the confusion that can occur when a story is written in a non-sequential manner.

Sections I particularly enjoyed:

“Bunny had got out of the habit of leaving town. There wasn’t anything beyond Hubbard that she really wanted. She wanted Vinny to give her grandchildren and be around to care for her when she got old. She wanted to have enough money for a new deck and decent wallpaper in the bathroom and a washing machine that didn’t walk around during the spin cycle. She wanted to have a wine cooler with her mother, Shirl, in the afternoon sometimes and to get on a later shift at the Anchor. She wanted to be the wife of someone who planned to stick around. Those weren’t the kinds of things you could get over in Sawyer.” Page 17

“…four months ago she had found a rat in the toilet. The property manager had told her just to put something heavy on the toilet lid and give it an hour. That was when Anita knew she might as well stop waiting for her real life to begin, the life that included a nice yard and a man who could maintain it. This was her real life, right here, right now, waiting in a piece-of-shit dump for a rat to die in her toilet.” Page 42

“You know what you end up asking yourself?” Fanny said. “How little can I live with? You ask yourself how little can I live with, and how much do I need. And the answer keeps getting smaller, and your marriage keeps shrinking. In the beginning it fits fine, you know, roomy enough to keep you warm, and you can move all around in it. Then you have the kids, and when your husband stay away from you, you’re mostly glad, because They just get in the way, and who gives a shit about sex when you haven’t had two minutes to yourself in five years? And all that time your marriage is getting smaller and smaller, except you don’t notice because it hasn’t occurred to you to notice, and why should you? You just pull it down and stretch it out, and if you feel a draft now and then, you ignore it because you don’t have time to deal with ti anyway. By the time you do, your marriage is this little tiny thing that doesn’t cover shit and you’re freezing to death out there in the cold.”

The Dirty Dollar

by Gerald Hammond (2002)
ISBN 0-7278-5842-4

This was a feel-good book about a young woman who went from rags to riches via a stint of swimming for a life in the midst of the Florida Everglades, complete with crocodiles in mid-breeding season. A non-challenging but satisfying read, with a strong main character who had what it took to grab life with both hands.

Seduced by Moonlight

by Laurell Hamilton 2004
ISBN 0-345-44356-X

This one surprised me and I nearly gave up. Trying to get my head around the Seelie and the Unseelie, sidhe, mortals, fays and hybrids, Kings, Queens, Princes and goblins and starting part way through a series was not a good idea. However I persevered and enjoyed some of the lyrical descriptions of wings, eyes and other body parts.
From a review by Alisa McCune it appears that this is not the best of the series so perhaps I should follow up on the earlier ones. However two of my requested books arrived at the library yesterday and will keep me busy added to term starting again on Monday.

Sugar Skull

by Denise Hamilton 2003
ISBN 0-7432-4539-3

Sugar skulls - I knew nothing, but now I do.
The past history of Eve Diamond and Silvio was also new to me.
It is weird reading a series backwards, at times it seems pointless when you know what is going to happen next, but it does fill in the background.
I finished reading this two weeks ago at PPTA Conference in Auckland, and can't remember much about it, but I did learn stuff, and I did enjoy it, and now it is due back to the library. It is much easier to write about books when they are fresh in your head!
I marked some pages but am a bit vague about why now.

1. On page 23, Eve writes "I felt acutely aware of my own dishabille." Is that spelled right? Having now researched it I see that is in fact correct, although it comes from the French déshabillé which is why I was confused, I guess. (I studied French all my time at high school.)
2. On page 47, Eve is avoiding police on a hillside and peeking into a cabana through windows that open onto a bathroom. She sees through the bathroom to a bedroom and observes "a man's black Speedo racing suit crumpled" at the foot of the bed. It strikes me as unlikely that anyone could be so sure about this observation in these circumstances.

New resolutions: to make notes about each book as I finish it, even if I don't have the Internet on tap, and to write pencil notes on pages that I mark.

Renfield Slave of Dracula

by Barbara Hambly 2006
ISBN 0-425-21168-1

Renfield is mad and he eats flies and spiders to maintain his strength.
This book is a "re-imagining of Bram Stoker's classic novel - told from the point of view of Renfield himself - exploring the chilling circumstances of his madness, his devotion to the Vampire Prince, and the mortal fear that feeds his need for revenge." As Dave Roy says at the start of his review, having not read the original Dracula made me wonder whether Renfield would make any sense. I suppose there are subtleties that I missed because of this lack of preparation, but I still found the book intriguing.
I loved the fly-spider theme as it developed from page 1 (20 May: 7 flies, 3 spiders) onwards.

Red herring: "There was an old lady who swallowed a fly. I don't know why she swallowed a fly. I think she'll die!" - see a delightful animation of this children's song.

And an explanation: I am not reading these books as fast I am posting comments on them - I have a pile that I have read and not recorded that I need to process before they are overdue.

Adverbs

By Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) 2006
ISBN 978-0-06-072441-2

A weird concept this, with separate vignettes about people who may or may not be the same people. After all, sharing a name does not make two people identical! There is also an on-going thread of song lyrics, taxis, volcanoes, and birds (especially magpies). Having read a section in Creative Journal Writing by Stephanie Dowrick yesterday on free association, this book serves to illustrate the concept in an intriguing fashion.

A quote to explain the title:
"It is not the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are none."
Each chapter has an adverb as its title, descriptive of the particular love story. Reminiscent of Love Actually, but less soppy.

Wet Grave

By Barbara Hambly (2002)

ISBN 0-553-10935-9

This “novel of suspense” is another instalment in the life of Benjamin January. Sequentially, the first few pages precede and the bulk of the story follows A Free Man of Color. Tales of piracy and hurricanes, of love and slavery, of treasure and illness, of mosquitoes and alligators, of fire and flood – a good holiday read. Characters also sympathetically described, and relationships drawn with a fine brush. As a teacher, I enjoyed my first meeting with Rose Vitrac, who tutored Artois and encouraged his pursuit of understanding of scientific principles.

Representing nature

Waking up at Tauranga Bay south of Westport on Monday 21^st April, I pondered on the view from my bed. The picture shown here is taken the following day, and does not have the same sky. My photography skills have not captured the texture of the distant hills.

My pondering was around the idea of representing the view artistically. The sky asked to be rendered in water paint. The foreground suggested embroidery. The hills could be brocade, or oil paint. But what about the waves? They need to be video, or at least animated, because they are moving.

So the next question became, why is video always rectangular? There is an obvious and easy answer – because the screen/viewing space is rectangular. But that does not satisfy me, and when I get back to “civilisation” I will be talking to my media studies contacts and filmmaking friends about whether any work has been done on non-rectangular film.

And then, how could we create the described multimedia product – a combination of digital and analogue media is truly MULTImedia!

We could digitise the painting and collage and set it as an irregularly shaped border to our video somehow. But then the result is all digital.

Or we could overlay the water paint and collage on a rectangular screen, with just the waves showing. But I want more than that.

More on Blogging

Great to know that three teachers have looked at my blog! Thanks to Mandy, Brian and Luke. Luke tells me that he prefers wordpress (easier to use and better functionality) to blogger. He has used it to set up a blog for his classes. You can see how he has structured it, and that students have commented on his posts. I do encourage you to have a play with this powerful, easy and FREE way of having a web presence!

Knight of the Demon Queen

(Click here if you are looking for my blog post about blogging for teachers.)

by Barbara Hambly (2000)
ISBN 0-345-42189-2

This book is a sequel to Dragonsbane and Dragonshadow, but I did not find it as compelling to read. This may have been my state of health at the time, or may have been a function of reduced lyrical beauty and increased desperation and despair. Other reviewers have made similar comments. However I still care enough about John and Jenny, their children and their world to want to carry on.

In this book, John goes on a quest for the Demon Queen which involves him visiting different Hells, all of which have their snares. One of the aspects of the book that I did find intriguing was the hell he visited that was reminiscent of the worst of our civilized world - advertisements and drugs everywhere, no sunshine or trees.

"Day came. The rain ceased for a time, but the gray blank overhead smelled of more. Te crowds increased, unbelievably." "The noise was dizzying, the sides of the buildings plastered and patches with garish lights and flashing panels of color. Panels of pictures, too, that moved as if living: tiny as a thumbnail or towering a dozen stories up the side of a building whose uppermost floors were wreathed in low-hanging cloud. These pictures spoke, and music - if it was music - rivered from them, but because the speech was artificially produced he could not understand wast was being said."

Blogging in Education

At our school staff meeting on Monday I suggested that staff might like to have a go at blogging, largely because it is an easy way to have a regular web presence. I see three main reasons why you might want to have a blog:

1. To communicate. Examples of this include

• my blog, which currently is mostly about my reading but can be used for anything I feel like talking about
• Kim's blog that she made over the summer when travelling, using Internet cafes in the main. I did not teach her how to do pictures before she left, so hers is text only.
• Rosa's blog, also made when travelling. Note that Rosa has great pictures on her blog but the file sizes are large so it is slow to load and I wouldn't even try on dial-up.

2. To reflect. Educational research suggests that reflecting on our teaching practice is an essential part of refining our technique. An example is Kay's blog, which she is using to reflect on her appraisal goals. You will also find here links to lots of cool ICT tools and ideas that you may wish to try out.

3. To summarise. A class could be rostered to summarise the activities and main points of each day's lesson in a blog, which would be a great exercise for them and a great resource for the class.

To make a blog, you could start at www.blogger.com

One of the features of blogs is that people can comment on each posting - try adding a comment to a blog that you find of interest.

Prisoner of Memory

by Denise Hamilton (2006)
ISBN 9780743261944

My first Eve Diamond book was a good read. Eve is a reporter, and her involvement with reporting and investigating a murder puts her at risk but also helps her to understand herself and her family better. The story includes Cold War spying, hacking, Russian Mafia, and the drinking of tea while holding a sugar cube in one's mouth.

A Free Man of Colour

by Barbara Hambly (1997)
ISBN 9780553102581

An historical novel of suspense set in New Orleans in the 1830s, this is gripping story that kept me intrigued.
The hero has three black grandparents but is a free man. He is accused of murder and has to save himself by finding out who the real murderer was. The backdrop to the story includes Carnival costumes, social distinctions of the time, issues of slavery, voodoo and attitudes to the incoming Americans and riverboat men.
Having enjoyed this book I was pleased to find that it is one of a series, so I can follow the fortunes of Benjamin and his family.