Category: Weekly Review (Page 3 of 6)

What a week this was. I base that largely on one event.

Disseratation Defense

My youngest successfully defended her PhD. She is now a Dr. Her dissertation, THE EVOLUTION AND DEVELOPMENT OF AWNS IN THE GRASS SUBFAMILY POOIDEAE, allowed me to learn a bit more about what she does.

We left to visit. The night before involved a bit of last minute sewing and dinner. She was obviously very ready to defend her dissertation.

It was really wonderful to meet some of her colleagues. It was especially nice to her others describe her and her work.

She did the work. All credit goes to her. I’m just impressed and proud of the work that she has done.

Parent Night

I’ve also scheduled a Parent Tech Night for work. This will center on student use of devices, what the school does to help keep students’ safe, and what parents can do.

Karma

I posted an issue on Reddit about Darktale (menus not displaying correctly). It was deleted (pending moderator approval) as I don’t have enough Karma points.

Darktable issue was quickly solved through the Darktable forums though. And then I wrote it up.

Karma Part 2

Then there was this article on leaving teaching and going to work for Costco. Someone trying to tell me something?

In truth, the ex-techer makes more now as she has risen up to do training for corporate. The article headline is thus, a bit misleading.

Volunteer Sheet

I had to update the Volunteer Sheet. Thankfully, I had fully written up this process on this site. For some reason, I had to re-add the filter individually. Not sure why I had to do that, but everything works perfectly now.

Well, it’s been a summer. I have once again failed at keeping up on posting a weekly update. Hopefully, with the restarting of school, I can return to regular updates.

In the meantime, here is a quick overview of the summer.

Kayaking

I only got out a couple of times to kayak this year. In one trip, I watched some of the Sturgeon jumping on the Kennebec River. It is an amazing sight.

That trip was cut somewhat short as while attempting to pull Hazel back into the kayak, a nice little wave hit, and I capsized.

This led to the realization that I was not fully prepared with kayak re-entry procedures.

Bird Removal

Part 1

While dog sitting for my eldest daughter, I arrived to find a robin hanging out in the attached porch area. It took a good bit of broom work, the robin kept flying up to the ceiling fan, but the robin was eventually freed.

Part 2

A hummingbird decided to enter our mudroom. It is interesting how incredibly still they can be. Anyway, a bit of collaboration between my wife and I, and one hummingbird was returned safely to the wild.

Kitchen

Painting

The kitchen is now mostly painted (still a bit of touch up work to do). The difference is phenomenal. The kitchen looks so much better.

Floor

Tiling the floor turned into quite the project. A friend, Joe, and I ripped out the tile to see if the floor below was redeemable to be refinished. It turned out not to be a good path forward.

So, I had the kitchen measured to have someone else tile. Originally, I was going to do the tile, but there’s a story. Anyway, the measuring guy “forgot” to say that the floor really needed to be leveled. The tile company said to get a general contractor to level the floor. Now, to be fair, I’m not really looking for the floor to be level, just not quite as far off level as it currently is. For example, when we bought a cabinet that was about four feet wide, it sloped down 3/4 of inch over those four feet. Anyway, Joe and I went to work to make the floor flat and closer to level. It was quite the job, but I’m happy to report that the floor is now flat and close to level. It took five sheets of subfloor and about ten bags of leveling cement. Oh, and about 500 screws. Anyway, it looks good. Hopefully, we can get on the tile schedule soon.

Oh, redoing the floor meant a few weeks of applicances out of the kitchen. And, of course, we had to grind one section down, so dust is now present throughout the entire house.

Well, technically not a week, but a “weeks” note. I apparently fell off the posting regularly wagon once again.

AI

AI continues to dominate the thoughts and news (around education and in general). Some are saying that this will bring about as big of a change as mobile phones did. I’m not sure that I’m there yet, but I do think that there is “something” there. Currently, I’m thinking that AI will be more and more integrated into other tools. We are already seeing a good bit of that.

Mother-in-Law Visit

My Mother in law visited for a couple of weeks. In order to increase her comfort level, we’ve added a day bed to our setup. I think that she had a good time visiting a variety of places.

Continuing Redecorating

We headed off to the Vault and ended up picking up a couple of lamps. The original goal was to pick up a desk and chair that Rm had previously spied.

Rm also found a cabinet for the kitchen. That one was the result of the trip to see D2 at D1’s house. The real struggle was getting the cabinet (two pieces) into the Bronco. Ultimately, we failed. D1 came and took the top half of the cabinet.

Indictment

One of the biggest news pieces this week has been the indictment of Donald Trump (which he referred to as being “INDICATED”, in all caps of course). There were tons of people (especially politicians) coming out in defense of Trump before the charges were even revealed. Trump is, of course, using this as a fundraising opportunity – (Hey, I’m a billionaire who is really business smart, and you make minimum wage, but I need $47 from you for my defense).

Principal Fill In

Due to the Principal and Vice Principal being out, I did some duties as the Administrator. The challenge for me has been the difference in culture. The most important thing in filling in is to support the vision and culture existing in the school. Some of my expectations and requirements are very different from what is in place.

BookWyrm

I’m exploring Bookwrym as a reading tracking site.

Snow Day (s)

Friday was a snow day. We ended up with about 4 inches of snow.
Now, Monday is another snow day. The weekend was cold, but no additional snow. This will be our last traditional snow day. From here on out, we will be utilizing remote learning days.

Heatrak

I purchased some Heatrak mats for the stairs going out the back door (not cheap, but the stairs are seriously dangerous when iced). These have been a great investment. However, one of them has stopped working. (Good news, it is really obvious which one). A call to the company and a replacement is on the way.

NOLEJ

Because of the Snow Day, I finally got a chance to play around with NOLEJ a bit. NOLEJ authors materials (quizzes, flashcards,glossaries, etc) based on a resource. So, I took a YouTube video (Gettysburg: Animated Map) and let it create material. The material is created as H5P resources. I then put that into Moodle. You can check it out in the MasterMoodle course (no registration required, but you may have to click on the Login as Guest button). These are the raw files, no additional editing. Obviously, they can (and should be edited). The questions fall into basic knowledge category and some grammar needs to be corrected. This could be a way to quickly create some of the basics of a course though. The teacher would need to add higher level thinking material, questions, and learning opportunities.

Free to Use Browser Extension

I’m enjoying the Free to Use Browser Extension even more than I thought that I would. Basically, this extension displays a Public Domain image in your browser window whenever you open a new tab.

Extension sets the background of blank tabs to a photo from the Library of Congress collections that is free to use and reuse.

I just find these random pictures a source of great joy. I frequently pause for just a minute to wonder what is going on in the picture.

Books

I’ve finished “Poguemahone” by Patrick McCabe. I liked it a ton. This is really different than most of the books that I’ve been reading. It is written in free-verse focusing around the 1970’s and music. Kind of. Sort of. Largely the story of Una and her reflections.

I’m starting Frederick Backman’s Us Against You. This is a follow up to the wonderful “Beartown”. Fredrick Backman is one of my favorite authors. He has several books out. I recommend all of them that I’ve read so far.

COVID

COVID finally caught up with me. Thankfully, I’m fully vaccinated, so the disease wasn’t fatal for me. Relatively, this was a like a pretty bad head cold for me. Be safe, and take precautions.

More AI

Tami Brass has a neat write-up about AI, teaching, and middle school. It is definitely worth a read.

Christmas

We got to spend some times with the kids around Christmas. This is one of the biggest reasons that we moved to Maine. It is great to have those opportunities.

We also got to spend some time with some new good friends.

Christmas with Kennerly

We did attend “Christmas with Kennerly” at the Portland Symphony. It was a good show and help us get into the Christmas mood.

After Twitter

“The internet’s town square should never have been one specific website with its own specific rules and incentives. It should have been, and should be, the web itself.”
Brent Simmons

I’ve pretty consistently heard Twitter referred to as the digital “Town Square”. However, Town Square as a privately owned rather than a publicly available place seems to be heading in the wrong direction. Whenever one person has complete control of the Town Square, it no longer becomes the Town Square, but a Square of an individual.

This is part of the balance that should be in America. America should really be reflective of three different components: People, Business, Goverment. There should be tension amongst those three. However, far too many people believe that Business (this is often pushed in terms of “freedom”), should be the default for everything. This leads to abuse by businesses. Business is designed to make money. This is partly why the stratification of wealth is continuing to be skewed. Business has managed to bake into the American psyche that freedom, letting business do what it wants, is what makes America great.

Twitter is proving to be a place that I don’t want to be. I’m working at making sure that I control my information. This is another thing that sounds great but takes effort. Mastodon is having a moment, but there are issues with Mastodon as well. Lots of people have moved to Mastodon, many looking for it to be “Twitter”, but the experience is different.

At the end of the day, people tend to want easy. Dr. Doug Belshaw and I have had a couple of conversations about this. I still believe that people want things to be very obvious and don’t want to learn how to control things. Dr. Belshaw is more optimistic.

With people moving to Mastodon, there is talk about the “return of the web”. This refers to blogging, and really people owning their own data. I’m still not convinced. The smallest roadblocks can be experience enders for many. People need to have something clear and easy to start with.

As one example, I’ve been hearing about how Linux is going to be the big thing this year.

Linux

I heard for years about how “this year is going to be the year of Linux”. It is finally as easy to use as Windows, gives you much more power, you can do so much, …. And, yet, we still haven’t gotten to the “year of Linux”. Yes, Linux is just about everywhere. But, it is “unseen”. Linux is used as an embedded system.

People clearly don’t want the maintenance and effort that Linux requires. People seem to want things that are familiar, and “easy”.

Down For the Count

For the first time in a couple of years, I got sick. It seems to have been food poisoning, several COVID tests continually came back negative. So Saturday was no podcast. I was pretty much out for the whole day.

Back to Work

Time for schools to open. Time for me to be back to work full time. This was the first summer that I had off in roughly twelve years. (To be clear, I still did lots of work this summer. I still held meetings with my guys. But I didn’t work every day. I mostly had meetings remotely.)

I’m hoping that this year will be much more “normal”. There were so many things that I wanted to do last year, but just couldn’t.

Moodle Times

Lots of Moodle work over the past couple of weeks. This was generated by yearly training requirements. Every year, we need to do compliance training. It’s not the most enthralling experience (either for the teachers that take it or the organization that has to provide it), but it is an important process. There are legal considerations.

I utilized Lesson for the staff members. This allows me to control their path so that they must be successful. If they don’t get a question correct, I can give them information and redirect them to try again. I give them unlimited attempts so, really, they just need to pay a little bit of attention and they will be successful. However, I hit just a bit of a roadblock. Even though I have no penalties set, and the highest attempt, by default, Moodle tells them that their additional attempt may not count. Ouch. Some staff members will read that and freak out. Not what I want. So, a quick trip to Language Strings and I can then edit out that parenthetical language. Now the staff members will not receive the inaccurate language. Yea!

I’m being told that the Lesson module will be deprecated in the future. There is a push for H5P to be utilized instead. Now, I love H5P. But there are issues with H5P sometimes too. For example, I also did the activities in H5P, since I did them last year in H5P, it was a simple Reuse download and upload. H5P is currently duplicating the Header (which is really ugly and confusing for users). There is a CSS addition to remove the extra Heading.

/* Hide the doubling of the description on H5P activities */
div#hvpintro.box.py-3.mod_introbox {
display: none!important;
}

That goes into the Raw Initial SCSS box. This fixes the duplicate header.

However, the Lesson module ends up being much cleaner and better organized. Specifically, in H5P, the student (in this case the staff) has to click on the “Submit Report” button to, well, Submit their answers. Since this looks like a summary sheet, some staff members miss that they need to click that button.

So, I generally try to add in a bit of humor. (I have to be very careful about this though.) Everyone has an indicator of Awesomeness. Each staff member can see their very own Current Level of Awesomeness… via Checklist plugin and the Checklist block. This provides the staff members with a quick thermometer of how much they have completed and how much is left to go.
*Mine is empty as I’m the teacher of the course. I also have the ability, and the button, for the Overview of Students.

Once they have completed the course, every user gets a badge and a certificate. Moodle has two different certificate possibilities (which leads to some confusion). One of them gave me fits trying to develop the certificate. I couldn’t get elements to reliably “stick” where they were put.

The documentation on the other one is less than stellar. Developed for Moodle Workplace, rather than the open-source Moodle version, it is built-in to Workplace. The key is to add an activity “Course Certificate” and the appropriate restrictions. Then, things work wonderfully well.

Presentation

Yea, my presentation proposal was accepted. Now, I have to prepare a presentation. I’ll be presenting on H5P at the ACTEM Conference. I have some ideas on how to structure the presentation, but I need to further develop them. I’m thinking that I’ll be making them play as part of the presentation. That may involve setting up a server. There are some great support resources available, so mostly, I’ll be putting my spin on the use of H5P.

Vactionland

It seems like I’m still on vacation in many ways. Some of this is due to a conscious decision to enjoy things. Some is probably due to moving and not having the same kind of supports and connections around. I don’t really have friends in the area. Many of the places that we are going are places that we are learning about. We lack familiarity of place and people. Thus, things sometimes seem more like vacation than home.,

Book Banning

There are several movements to ban books around the country. Here in Maine, two books seem to be under the microscope. There is a push from some people to ban GenderQueer by Maia Kobabe. This is a graphic novel that is in some high schools. I borrowed it from Hoopla through my local library. It is a quick read. The book addresses growing up, sexuality, and gender identification. This is definitely a book that high schoolers should have access to. Even though it may make some parents feel uncomfortable, it is crucial that our teenagers have access to this information. Our goal should never be to make things like they were for us but to make things better for our kids.

Hypothesis

I’m a big fan of Hypothesis. Essentially, Hypothesis is social bookmarking. Hypothesis allows for annotation on web pages. These annotations can be public or private and include tagging. I’ve used Hypothesis to replace Diigo. I had used Diigo for quite a while, but then reached the limits of the free version. Hypothesis is free and open-source. Theoretically, I could set up a server to run Hypothesis, but that isn’t necessary. The web version of Hypothesis doesn’t have limits.

Hypothesis also allows for the use of groups. I use this group feature pretty extensively. I have a group for Middle School Matters which I use to bookmark things for the Middle School Matters Podcast.

One of the features that I would love, is the ability to see annotations or bookmarks by groups. I would love to see an indicator as to which group a site is bookmarked in.

Dinner with Friends

We had a terrific dinner with a couple of friends. Rm made some Detroit Style Pizza. Yes, this involved purchasing the correct pan (you’ve got to have the proper tools). This was the first go with the new pan. I must say, Rm knocked it out of the park as usual. Anyway, everyone enjoyed the pizza.

We also shared some Venor’s with them. This is a magical elixir that is difficult to get in Maine. Maine has Moxie, like several other local area specialties. Venor’s is really a treat for us.

We also shared a bottle of wine from Black Star Farms Winery that was acquired on a recent trip back to Michigan. We are big fans of the wines from Black Star Farms Winery. We now have a couple more friends that are also fans (at least of the Arcturos Pinot Noir).

Clambake

We also had an opportunity to partake in the Cabbage Island Clambake. This was part of enjoying our wedding anniversary. We headed down to Booth Bay Harbor and checked in. Naturally, we were a bit early, so we got to do a little wandering around Booth Bay as well. The boat ride out includes a tour and explanation of some of the islands.

Then it’s time to dock on Cabbage Island. You can see and smell the smoke rising from the prep area. We disembarked on the island and found a table overlooking the water. There was a young married couple there as well.

A bit of conversation, a bit of enjoying the view, and it’s time for dinner. We started with clam chowder. We were lucky enough to be able to go up to collect our dinner early. Oh, what a dinner it was. Two lobsters, corn on the cob, oysters, onion, and an egg. The couple next to us had a great time working on the lobsters and such. Next up was a generous piece of blueberry cake.

We had some time left so we took a quick walk over to the other side of the island to watch the sunset.

The ferry ride back was much quicker (which I’m sure Hazel appreciated).

D1 Housework

I had the wonderful opportunity to visit D1 and help her with some work around the house. This is one of the main reasons that we moved to Maine in the first place.

For some reason, it is much easier to work on someone else’s house. The motivation seems a bit higher. I really enjoyed helping her out and getting to hang out with her for a while.

Dark Table

I’ve been working on increasing my proficiency in photography. As part of that, I’ve been working on improving my photo editing skills. Really, I should say developing (see what I did there?) my skills as I’m starting out as a total newbie.

Anyway, along those lines, I’ve started a series on Darktable through Youtube. Darktable is an open-source photo editing program. Yes, I do have access to Adobe Lightroom through work. However, photography is mostly for personal pleasure. I like to keep some of those lines clear. When the time comes and I don’t have access through work, I don’t want to lose all my photos.

So, I’m starting with the basics and learning Darktable. Darktable is a really powerful program that can really do so much. I’ll never win awards, but I am enjoying figuring out what I like and how to improve the pictures that I take.

I have learned and applied a few specific things with Darktable already. Now though, I’m looking to really build my understanding and ability to correct photos to what I want to see.

Cars and Independence

Two of the cars now have updated registrations and inspections. It is a big change moving from cars being registered to match my birthday to being registered all willy-nilly. Plus, in Maine, there is no reminder mailed to me to register my cars. I’ve got to do the adult thing and keep track of that myself. So, all set now, reminders set for the future, and one more difference noted between living in Maine versus Michigan.

Schooner Charm

Rm and I had a wonderful trip on the Schooner Charm. The day was very hot so getting out on the water and the cooling effects of doing so, was greatly appreciated. There is something very calming about being out on the ocean. Due to the hot weather, there was a bit of haze in the distance. Largely this had the effect of seeming like we were out on the water far from land.

Google Photo Embed

We all love pictures. It can be great to share pictures. However, how that happens can matter. One way to do this is to move all of your pictures into a service that hosts and serves them. Usually, this is at the “cost” of everyone staying in that service. For example, Facebook will host your pictures, but they will then keep you in their service (and all that that entails).

I use a self-hosted version of WordPress to post my material. This means that I have control over all the data, but it also means that I have to pay for storage, bandwidth, etc. Pictures can quickly use up space.

Google meanwhile, offers to host and provide photos. You can easily share pictures in Google Photo through a link. However, you can’t embed that link in a WordPress site. Unless…..

The wonderful Amit Agarwal over digital inspiration has developed a site that converts Google Photos links into links that can be embedded into WordPress. Brilliant.