Last Post

This will likely be the last post here. It has been a good experiment, but there are other things to write. As well, since I found that blogging about my daily (or even weekly) activities tended to subliminally encourage me to do things that could be accomplished quickly and checked off a list.

If you're interested, though, check out some of my other blogs or follow me on Twitter.

2013-05-27 to 2013-05-31

This week I

• helped a Grade 1 teacher with uploaded her students' iMovie trailers as (private) YouTube videos.
• edited and launched the convergenceconference.ca site (using Box Clever's WebGuide CMS).
• met with the Convergence Communications Committee (via Google Hangouts) to prepare some things for the conference.
• investigated various M.Ed. programs, leaning toward UBC's.
• found out who my new boss will be.
• helped scaffold some digital citizenship resources for teachers and students.
• learned more JavaScript to write a Google Apps script for bulk deletion of Google Apps accounts.

2013-05-21 to 2013-05-24

A few notable things from this week were:

• My boss announced that she has decided to set down as Director for next year. There are a number of reasons for this, including a desire for change and, I think, more autonomy. She will be a school Principal next year.
• In preparation for the Convergence Conference in November, we launched the website and I toured around the venue again and took pictures to get a feel for how things will work.
• I helped do some tech support for a session with a number of our school Leaders that involved the Joint Consortium for School Health. As part of this I wrote a little script for the spreadsheet of a Google Form that I put together for them.

2013-05-13 to 2013-05-17

This last week I

• helped fix some Lego Mindstorms NXT brains by updating the firmware
• got in touch with Lego Education, and they are going to replace the brains that have bad screens
• suggested some workflow improvements for collecting data with Google Forms
• helped host the final "Innovation Exposition" session, this time with Elementary Teachers (the sharing site/pages will hopefully be going up soon)
• learned some more Python and JavaScript programming
• replaced a spark plug in a motorcycle during a lunch hour
• participated in an ATLE Convergence Conference planning meeting via Google Hangout
• attended an IT/ET meeting that featured good information sharing and collaborative discussion
• arranged to present a Lego Robotics session to a grade 3 and a grade 6 class
• and, of course, did all of the regular stuff like answering questions via phone and email.

2013-05-06 to 2013-05-10

This week saw the first of the "Innovation X" expositions where we brought in teachers that had participated in AISI projects. They shared about their projects, including highlights and lessons learned, and provided us with some feedback including how (if) they intend to continue in light of the cancellation of AISI support. It was amazing to hear from the teachers and to give them a chance to share with others.

I also attended the AEL / Serious Labs presentation about their AISI V project. One of the teachers has a husband that works for Serious Labs, so they were able to form an interesting collaboration where students provided feedback to an authentic audience.

As well, this week I helped configure some laptops for this weekend's Young Scientist Conference at the U of A, set up an Apple TV at AJS, judge a Science Fair at ERH, and all of the regular office-related things. I've said it before, but it bears repeating that it's valuable to just walk through a school because invariably there will be quick things to fix or technology-related questions to answer.

2013-05-03 Friday

This is the first of my weekly Friday posts. Since I've been posting daily this week, though, there's not as much to say.

I hear that there may be some interesting things coming out from Alberta Education in the next week or so, and there will be more information to come about my new job as well.

One of the highlights of today was a meeting this afternoon about Discovery Education services. We've been trying out Streaming Canada Plus and Science Techbook. I can't say I'm a big fan of either, but the direction that they are going is very interesting.

2013-05-02 Thursday

I spent some time with AirParrot, Reflector, and AirServer for different AirPlay options. I also experimented with Circuits.io and Upverter.com for circuit board design.

I've decided that this will be my penultimate daily blog post, from now on posts will go live on Friday afternoons.

2013-05-01 Wednesday

A few of the things I accomplished today:

Vectorizing a Scanned Object for CNC Cutting
Confirmed that the Dropbox program doesn't work on our Windows 7 machines
Experimented with GPIO, Pure Data, and Python and OpenSoundControl on a Raspberry Pi
Advised a Music Teacher on some sound system equipment
Answered some questions about Google Sites and Docs.
Tried out Reflector for iPad mirroring on PC and Mac.

And my wife stopped by for a visit at lunch with two of our daughters.

2012-04-30 Tuesday

This morning was CNC plasma cutting, tweaking some of the directions in a blog post I wrote a while ago, and then helping judge some student projects in a box-making competition.

The afternoon was more help and documentation writing, and some other unrelated things.

For those that are curious, here's most of what my office currently looks like. Not pictured are the shelves on the north wall that are full of miscellaneous things.

013-04-29 Monday

I spend some more time this morning at SCA Secondary updating the CNC software, helping develop their CNC workflow, finishing a project, and showing a student how to vectorize scanned objects and import that into VCarve Pro to create tool paths.

I also hung the "please be quiet because we're recording" sign outside of our media room.

This afternoon was some discussion about social media, digital citizenship, and school and district policies.

And then I answered emails and phone calls, had some discussions about Configurator, and documented the vectorization process for students.

2013-04-26 Friday

It seems that the post didn't go up. I'll try again.

Today I finished up some (physical) projects, such as the one pictured.

I also met with a music teacher about technology and sound systems, and spent some time in a wood shop teaching some students how to use a CNC router and experimenting with creating an MDF tool control mat.

2013-04-25 Thursday

ADLC, Robots and Pencils, and GoForth Institute have developed an iPad app that teaches Entrepreneurship Essentials. Through the simulation of running a lemonade stand, it uses gamification principles, text slides, videos, and auto-graded quizzes to deliver the content for five one-credit CTS courses (ENT1010, 1020, 2010, 2020, and 2030).

It is fairly well designed, certainly better than most LMS-based online courses. Students will still need to be somewhat self-motivated to make it through, but the badges, notifications, and challenges should help.

From what I hear, schools that register students in this "course" can receive all of the CEU funding if they have a teacher assigned to do the "marking" and tracking, or they can receive 3/5 of the funding if they get ADLC to do all of that.

There has been some media coverage by CBC News and the Edmonton Journal. If you're interested, check out more information and an introduction video.

At any rate, I'm certainly going to recommend it to high schools that have students interested in entrepreneurship and/or interested in trying a different method for getting CTS credits. Information about registration is here.

2013-04-24 Wednesday

Most of the day today was spent on Configurator experimenting and documentation.

We also met to plan our upcoming "Innovation Exposition" sharing afternoons.

2013-04-23 Tuesday

The morning and part of the afternoon were spent at Salisbury helping people with things like digital signage, Source Filmmaker (and other things related to Comm Tech), and showing students the 3D printer.

Later in the afternoon we had a meeting about Configurator and staff training on a number of new things for our district (such as Adobe CS6, Discovery Streaming, Exchange/Outlook, etc.).

2013-04-22 Monday

After a quick stop at the office to get a few things done, I spent the morning at AJS helping with the Configurator process. They had 30 new iPads to get set up, and despite a few glitches with USB hubs everything seems to be working.

I had a great conversation at lunch about technology implementation and some related issues. His point, and I agree, was that we should certainly be using technology where possible, but it should all be in service of the greater purpose.

After lunch I got my scheduled time for a job interview later this week, did a little soldering, and started constructing some tutorials on the Volume Purchase Program and Configurator.

2013-04-19 Friday

The start of my day was the Professional Development Committee meeting where we had a hard look at how EIPS is offering professional development for staff.

I had good conversations today about pedagogy and technology, school-based decision-making, and collaboration between ET and IT.

We also shot Ed Tech Now Episode 6, so it should come out in the next few days.

2013-04-18 Thursday

I spent the day at Ardrossan Junior Senior High today. Most of the time was with the "Peer Helping" AISI project. They have about 25 students and 5 teachers involved.

A lot of my morning, though, was spent helping get the library's 30 new iPads set up and configured.

I also spent some time with a grade 7 computers class helping get some of them started with Arduino and CodeAcademy.

2013-04-17 Wednesday

Today I created some tutorials, did some programming, and organized some upcoming events.

2013-04-16 Tuesday

This morning I spent some time in CommTech at Salisbury helping them set up Source Filmmaker and talking about some future direction for their program.

Over the lunch hour I hung out with the Video Game Club.

This afternoon I spent some time preparing presentations, organizing our media studio, and other office-related things.

Oh, and I'm starting to teach a Maker course tonight.

2013-04-15 Monday

Here are a few highlights or notable events from today.

I was invited to a meeting with Discovery Education about their new digital textbook offering. In essence it looks like a CMS with digital resources.

This afternoon was a Convergence Conference planning meeting via Google Hangout.

2013-04-12 Friday

Professional Development day today. The first session was "Innovative Classroom Environments" with fruit.aisi.ca. Next was the "Innovation Playground" where participants could explore and get help with various websites and technologies, as well as hear about different innovative environments that other EIPS teachers are exploring.

After lunch I helped facilitate an iPad session with Donna Griffin that went all afternoon.

2013-04-11 Thursday

Today I prepared a little more for tomorrow's professional development day, helped with some troubleshooting, spent some time with the Salisbury Maker/Hacker Club, wrote a blog post about Source Filmmaker, and started curating some digital citizenship resources.

Speaking of digital citizenship, we've gotten a few requests recently to block (filter) some game websites on the EIPS network. Currently the category "games" is blocked, but of course there's no way that FortiGuard could possibly categorize all the game sites on the Internet, but they are flagging many of them.

The issue is usually that students are playing games on school computers when they are supposed to be doing something else. Occasionally the staff member finds the games themselves offensive, and requests that they be blocked for that reason. In general, though, the issue comes down to increasing supervision of students while on computers. As I tend to say, it's difficult or impossible to have technological solutions to behavioral problems.

2013-04-10 Wednesday

After a brief meeting about professional development sessions for Friday, I spent the rest of the day talking with Ministik teachers about gamification as well as technology.

We had good discussions about Edmodo, KidBlog, Reading-Rewards, and Minecraft.

2013-04-09 Tuesday

For the morning I was at Pearson's Schoolnet "Day of Discovery". It's certainly interesting what they are doing with their software/services, but I think they are going in the wrong direction. It is almost all predicated on management (of teachers and of students), with a particular focus on multiple-choice testing (with large item banks). There wasn't much focus on sharing information about students and assignments with parents or even with the students themselves.

As well, I take exception to using the term "feedback" to mean students getting their (numerical) marks as soon as they had finished a digital test. I suppose that is a form of feedback, but knowing that you got 6/10 on that multiple choice quiz is not particularly useful. And if a teacher really wants a system like that, Moodle can do it for free, including preventing students from looking up answers and automatically checking for plagiarism.

They showed a video at the start of the day about Pearson's vision for the future of education, but I haven't been able to find it on YouTube. Watch Corning's "A Day Made of Glass" instead, since it's similar.

The afternoon included more preparation for tonight's ElkFest event and for going to Ministik tomorrow.

2013-04-08 Monday

This morning I helped a teacher with some Moodle issues, answered some email questions, experimented with some Red5 configurations, and had a great conversation about IT, video games, and the direction that Tech Services is going.

This afternoon, among other tasks, I started writing some AISI reflections (I've also pasted them below) and I did some preparation to be the MC for tomorrow night's ElkFest Film Festival.

---

Reflections on flipped learning and blended learning

Early on in our "Innovative Learning Environments" project we realized that most of the environments involved blended learning in some form. This was particularly true for flipped learning, which seemed to be a good way to get teachers interested in posting materials and starting to interact with students online.

Some teachers were particularly excited about flipped learning, and started making videos and posting interactive and text-based resources. I liked being able to show them various options for creating videos and places to organize and curate content, such as Moodle, Edmodo, Google Sites, and others. Different choices appealed to different teachers based on their experience and needs, or those of their students.

The great thing about teachers posting materials online was that it gave students, and in most cases parents, a place to get information about the class. More importantly it started to create an online space for interactions with the teacher and among students. This space was sometimes used synchronously, but more often was used outside of class time. Teachers even found that absent students could keep up with what they needed to learn and do.

Not to upstage the Horizon Report, but I think it won't be long until most learning is blended learning. One of our favorite quotes from a teacher about her experience with blended learning was, "I won't go back to teaching the way I used to." I think that epitomizes the goals of the AISI project and innovative learning environments.

cross-posted from AISI Reflections.

2013-04-05 Friday

I spent a good portion of today with Moodle. I was at Fort Saskatchewan High to show them the Moodle Language Lab and talk about some other technology things. Next I was off to Ardrossan Junior Senior High to help some other teachers with their Moodle sites, and also to show off the Moodle Language Lab. I also spent some time helping a student get set up with some more advanced programming options, including Alice, Arduino, and CodeAcademy.

Back at the office I finished the following video for our Innovation session at next week's professional development day, helped troubleshoot some technical issues, and read some new job postings.

2013-04-04 Thursday

The first thing I did this morning was record a quick demonstration of Moodle Language Lab. I used two webcams and microphones, which was cool. Check it out.

Next was a meeting about our sessions for the upcoming professional development day, and we put some work into preparing for that. I'll post a Source Filmmaker video tomorrow that I was working on.

This afternoon I was off for a bit because of an appointment, then I participated in an "AISI Legacy" webinar.

2013-04-03 Wednesday

This morning I judged and commented on some ElkFest videos, and volunteered to MC the festival event. The student-produced videos that I've watched have all been very good.

We also had a brief meeting about contacting AISI teachers about the upcoming sharing sessions, and I spent some time emailing those teachers.

I also looked into why the Moodle Language Lab was working on the EIPS networks but wasn't working on outside networks. No conclusions yet, but I'm thinking it has to do with the DNS settings. Edit: It turns out it wasn't a network-related problem, the issue was that the flash player hadn't been updated on the machines I was using.

A good portion of my afternoon was spent providing written feedback for the ElkFest video submissions. Despite common issues with sound and lighting, I continued to be impressed by the quality of the student work.

2013-04-02 Tuesday

We're back from Spring Break today, and continuing despite the end of the AISI project.

This morning I caught up on some communications that had languished over the break, and then I took apart the nozzle on the MakerBot Thing-O-Matic in my office to clean it out and get it printing properly again. Here's a successfully printed iPad sound deflector.

Next on the agenda was getting out Episode 5 of Ed Tech Now, but that was mostly Donna Griffin's doing.

I also spent some time helping with a redesign of atleconference.ca to get it ready for the pending launch, and organizing a Communications Committee meeting. The conference will be November 20 - 22, 2013.

After that I spent some time troubleshooting and fixing some devices.

I also had another conversation about school language labs, and how schools are looking at spending $20,000 to $40,000 (per site) on software to replace tape-based language labs. I suggested, again, that all of that could be accomplished using Moodle Language Lab, which is already set up. And also that most of what teachers want to do with a language lab can be accomplished better with services such as YouTube or SoundCloud.

At lunch I had a great conversation with a teacher about the things she is doing differently in her classroom, and how student engagement and achievement have improved. She hadn't been involved in an AISI project, but had just been doing this on her own. I had talked to her in the past about some of her ideas, but it was very cool to hear more of what's going on in her classroom.

This afternoon I spent some time with our Moodle Language Lab making sure things were configured and working. It turns out that it wasn't working after an upgrade because I had to change the languagelab_red5server variable to be just the FQDN without a port number, since we're using the default port (5080).

I also experimented with and installed PoodLL in our Moodle as an alternative approach to language assignments.

At the end of the day I was at the ElkFest Film Festival judges meeting.

2013-03-22 Friday

Since schools were closed today, it was a somewhat more relaxing day in the office. We had a meeting about digital citizenship and policy development. We need to avoid punitive policies, and talk more about educating students to be ethical and stay safe, and about their digital footprints. There's a lot more to be said about this, but perhaps that a topic for a later post.

In the afternoon I worked on, among other things, Ed Tech Now.

2013-03-21 Thursday

This morning as part of our staff meeting we did a professional development session involving setting up Raspberry Pi computers and getting Minecraft running on them. There were a few technical glitches along the way, but everyone was able to get it all done.

This afternoon I answered some emails, of course, and spent some more time with Source Filmmaker.

2013-03-20 Wednesday

Yesterday after work we had an interesting meeting about what what next year will look like in Instructional Services. We've been encouraged to apply for Assistant Principal positions, and there will be a few Instructional Services Consultant positions starting in September.

This morning we met about "AISI Legacy" planning, including how to share stories and set up supports for people to continue with innovative environments. We also did some planning for our sessions on the upcoming professional development day.

This afternoon I spent some time with Source Filmmaker working on episode five of Ed Tech Now. If you have some time, I'd certainly recommend that you check out Source Filmmaker. It's a program for creating 3D animations. It's a little difficult to start with, but you can quickly do some amazing things.

2013-03-19 Tuesday

Last night I realized that this process of blogging my daily work seemed to be encouraging me to avoid unbloggable activities. Other than all of the Scratch Day stuff, I've sometimes tended to choose things to do that would translate well to a line or two of a blog entry.

I've also realized that not even my wife is interested in reading about the daily minutia of my job. So I'm going to try to write about some different things. Starting today.

Starting last September, we've been putting together a new media studio here in the Education Technology Building. It's set up to be a place for staff to experiment with podcasting, shooting video, recording tutorials, and other related tasks. It's also where we record most of Ed Tech Now.

It's a work in progress, of course, as studios usually are. Let me share some photos of it here though.

First of all there's the SMART Board, projector, Mac mini, and Windows 7 (Dell) PC, along with some extra parts and furniture and such. We also have some microphones, headsets, and webcams.

The lights are being stored/used here by our district's Media Producer.

The green screen is just PVC pipe, safety pins, and some green fabric that I picked up on sale.

So if you work in EIPS and want to try your hand at recording, send us an email.

2013-03-18 Monday

I've started to put together Moodle courses for some high school CTS courses. I'm focusing on some courses (modules) that are not currently offered at many of our high schools, but that could easily be implemented.

There was a meeting this morning about Off-Campus Education (work experience) and how we can help streamline and digitize as much of the process as possible. We've started to put together a website and some Google Docs (forms and spreadsheets) to help with that.

This afternoon I continued to work on those Moodle courses, the OCE site/docs, and getting some materials ready for the upcoming professional development day.

And I had a dentist appointment.

2013-03-15 Friday

Today I helped a Special Needs teacher at Salisbury to get her students playing video games. We've been working on this project off and on for some time, but it was nice to finally see some things come together.

Jill had gotten an email from Brentwood Elementary yesterday about them not being able to clean the filters in their projectors, and they didn't know who to get in touch with about that. So I stopped by there to adjust the way the projectors were mounted; now they can blow the dust of the front and back filters.

I dropped off at SCS a couple of iPad sound deflectors that I had printed on our MakerBot. Unfortunately the MakerBot's extruder has been stopping occasionally, so I need to take apart the hot end and replace the plunger.

Today was also the last of the Scratch Day logistics, things like moving tables and sending thank you notes.

This afternoon there was a brief meeting about possibilities for digital textbooks and other resources. We brainstormed about what the requirements might be, and what recommendations we can make.

I also spoke with the Manager of Youth Services for the Strathcona County Library about some possibilities for a summer Maker program.

2013-03-14 Thursday

After unpacking from Scratch Day and returning things to their proper places and owners, there was some debriefing about the day.

I spent the lunch hour with the Salisbury Maker/Hacker Club, talking to some students about Energia programming, the Scratch Picoboard, and other hackery. And since it was Pi Day, Mr. Basaraba saved a piece of pie for me.

The afternoon involved sending and answering emails, fixing and troubleshooting a few things for some people, and organizing some things around the building here.

And at 4:25 this afternoon I reached an important, although fleeting, milestone: Inbox Zero.

2013-03-13 Wednesday

Today was Scratch Day.

What an amazing day. We had a lot of staff helping out to make everything go well, including people from Technology Services, Curriculum Services, Communications, and of course Education Technology and AISI. The teachers who brought students were also great at helping things go smoothly. We also had visitors from the EIPS Executive Team, 2Learn, and the County Library.

We tried to have all of the adults walking around with iPads (or other devices) awarding points that went up on the leaderboard. Unfortunately the script for adding points got a little overwhelmed and we occasionally had to add things manually. In all today, we had just under 2000 challenges completed by almost 200 students. The student at the top of the leaderboard was marked as having completed 11 beginner challenges, 15 intermediate challenges, and 18 advanced challenges (out of a possible 22).

We had also given each student three "help tickets" for asking questions of other students. If they asked a question of another student, they gave that student one of their tickets. At the end of the day we gave a prize to the student with the most. According to the count of his tickets, he had answered 37 questions.

One of things I was most impressed by, however, was a student who came to me near the end of the day to show me what he had been working on. He had decided not to do too many challenges, and instead to spend most of his time drawing sprites that he could use for future projects in Scratch or a game that he plays. These sprites were as good as, or better than, characters I've seen in commercial video games. If we'd had any prizes left at that point I would like to have given him one.

If I had to pick a favourite part of the day, though, it would have been the keynote at the beginning. Dr. Karen Brennan was enthusiastic, engaging, and really set the tone for the day. She was great at answering the students' questions about Scratch and her work, and even the question from a high school student "would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or one hundred duck-sized horses?".

I think the stickers and the "Scratch Programmer" water bottles went over well too. I would definitely do both again, since students seemed to like them.

There were, of course, some glitches during the day. The biggest issue was network/Internet access, which was not as reliable as we had hoped, but thankfully we hadn't planned activities that used too much bandwidth. Power was another big issue, since many of the laptop batteries lasted less than two hours. We had set up charging stations around the room, but since we were in a gym there weren't any power outlets in the floor that would have allowed laptops to be plugged in all day.

Here are some of the highlights from a feedback form we had the students fill out at the end of the day:

• It was fun!
• We got to miss a day of school. And Prizes. And Food. and Motivation to be better at scratch.
• Learning to use Scratch was great, and the challenges and competition were a lot of fun. It was also fun crashing the server :p
• I liked that we could make our own stuff up.
• The trivia questions to go get lunch.
• I liked that everyone was so nice and helpful. and the challenges were fun, as well as the human sprite projects :)
• cool giveaways
• I liked that you could view the leaderboard, instead of it being a secret until the end of the day.
• My friend made a jetpack.

There are also a few other things that we would consider if we do this again, both from our own observations and from the feedback form:

• more open-ended challenges
• other programming environments or languages as well
• more stations with sensors/robots and instructors
• age or grade groupings for competitions
• expert judges for merit prizes
• more learning resources and/or people
• charge a nominal registration fee to discourage drop-outs and help defray costs
• intermingle school groups more intentionally
• more table interactions
• more varied activities
• some similar to the people programming (human sprite) activity
• Minecraft LAN

A lot of work went into this day, but I think it was valuable and it was certainly fun for the students and staff involved. I'm hopeful that we'll get the opportunity to do it again next year, perhaps at a bigger venue with more students.

This entry was cross-posted to the ScratchED site.

2013-03-12 Tuesday

Okay, last post about getting ready for Scratch Day. We had a final pre-briefing meeting this morning, followed by some setup at Salisbury.

I've set up a few laptops to have at the side with Enchanting (for controlling Lego Mindstorms robots), a mOway robot, and Kinect2Scratch. Speaking of Kinect, we're also going to have an Xbox set up in the corner as kids come in, with Kinect Party as a demonstration of some ideas for Kinect-enabled Scratch games.

Hopefully tomorrow we'll take a lot of pictures and video, and get some digital feedback from students. I sincerely hope we'll be able to have another Scratch Day next year, maybe even a bigger one with EIPS and surrounding districts at the Edmonton Expo Centre. But maybe that's dreaming too big :)

2013-03-11 Monday

More Scratch Day logistics today, including a dry run at Salisbury of the audiovisual setup, and finalizing all of the prizes. I think Wednesday is going to be a great day.

The basic plan for the day is:
7:00 - 8:30 Set up: tables, screens, signs, audiovisual, etc.
8:30 - 9:15 Students arriving: name tags, water bottles, chairs, videos showing, etc.
9:15 - 9:30 Welcome and introductions by Faye McConnell
9:30 - 10:00 Keynote interview with Dr. Karen Brennan by David Hay, including questions from students
10:00 - 11:30 Challenges: students working, adults assigning points to them on the leaderboard
11:30 - 12:30 Lunch (a buffet in the grab-and-go style)
12:30 - 1:00 Sharing some projects and ideas
1:00 - 2:00 Challenges continued, with a reminder of the resources available
2:00 - 2:30 Prize draws (although we may do some earlier), debrief (including feedback form)
2:30 - 3:00 Project sharing (although some schools will have to leave earlier)

2013-03-08 Friday

The day started with a meeting that had previously been scheduled for AISI planning, but had a somewhat different agenda following yesterday's provincial budget announcement.

Most of the rest of the day was spent with Scratch Day logistics. There were, as always, a number of Education Technology related questions to answer via email.

I also responded to an email exchange from someone at the County Library regarding my upcoming Maker class and possibilities for future classes and programs. I really think Makerspaces (or Hackerspaces) are good for kids, grown-ups, and society in general, but maybe that's something we need to explore in a future post.

2013-03-07 Thursday

Despite being home on a sick day, I still managed to attend a Google Hangout with some staff from BoxClever. I also participated in a brief teleconference about an announcement that will affect our work.

2013-03-06 Wednesday

This morning I installed a new video card in my desktop computer, started putting together prize packages for Scratch Day. and we met with our keynote speaker for Scratch Day, Dr. Karen Brennan. Following that was an Ed Tech meeting about a number of different topics.

I then needed to pick my daughter a couple of friends up from the County Library where they had been on a preschool field trip for the morning.

After lunch I organized some things in our new media studio before a funeral that many of us attended. Then just a few more things to take care of before the end of the day.

2013-03-05 Tuesday

Today was another day spent mostly in the office. I should take some pictures of my office and post them here.

This morning I arranging logistics and resources for Scratch Day, configured a BigBlueButton server (and discovered that the router we're using doesn't support port forwarding), and set up some things for our Skype meeting tomorrow with Dr. Karen Brennan who will be our keynote speaker for Scratch Day.

Around lunch I picked up the last few prizes for Scratch Day, as well as the stickers and posters that we had printed. I spent the lunch hour with the Salisbury Video Game Club, a student club that I started in 2002 and still feel a certain fondness for.

The afternoon was mostly taken up with teacher conversations, Scratch logistics, and an ATLE Conference planning meeting.

2013-03-04 Monday

Over the weekend I ordered prizes for Scratch Day from Adafruit (Raspberry Pi computers), SparkFun (Arduinos and parts, and Picoboards), Element14 (parts for Raspberry Pi and Arduino devices) and Walmart (SD cards for the Raspberry Pi computers). Hopefully those should all arrive in the next week or so.

As a grammar nerd, I had trouble deciding how to pluralize Raspberry Pi. Should it be Pis, Pies, πs? Perhaps it could be Raspberries Pi or Raspberrys Pi. The official site occasionally calls them Raspberry Pis, but I don't like that, so I decided to avoid the plural issue entirely.

This morning I answered some questions about Chrome (and ChromeOS), completed some long-neglected paperwork, met with a Consultant from Student Support Services about possibilities for sharing and posting digital resources.

My afternoon mostly consisted of writing challenges for Scratch Day, setting up other digital resources, and developing the live leaderboard for the day. I blogged about the process of setting up a leaderboard.

I also learned that when you restrict the visibility of Picasaweb photos when using your Google Apps for Education account, they can't be public anymore.

2013-03-01 Friday

Today was a School Based Professional Learning (SBPL) day in EIPS. Staff from a number of different junior high schools got together at Clover Bar for networking and technology sessions. I was involved with some of the technology sessions that we had structured to be more like a café rather than sit-and-get sessions. Staff were able to ask questions, get individual and group help, and collaborate with their colleagues.

2013-02-28 Thursday

Today started with a Google Hangout with the (ATLE) Convergence Conference 2013 Communications Committee. We're handling the conference website, online schedule, social media, advertising and promotion, and live video streaming.

After getting some other things done and some emails answered in the office, I was off to Salisbury to meet with the Maker/Hacker Club over lunch. Then it was on to Strathcona Christian Academy Secondary to help them with Google Apps user management.

After that was a little more time in the office to set up our district Showbie account and a few things related to Ed Tech Now, followed by a planning meeting about Scratch Day.

2013-02-27 Wednesday

I was in the office today organizing Scratch Day things, preparing for Friday's collaborative School-Based Professional Learning Day, 3D printing with our MakerBot Thing-o-Matic, helping with a school's Digital Signage, and updating our Moodle. I also explored some free alternatives to MathType at the request of a teacher; I especially like this online equation editor by WIRIS.

2013-02-26 Tuesday

Today was the My Voice, My Future Student Conference at the Dow Centre in Fort Saskatchewan. I helped out with technology and the general flow of the day, until just after lunch.

Next I was at Salisbury sorting out some details for our Scratch Day. In addition to some logistics, I also talked to a Computing Science class about what will be happening that day.

After a quick stop at Walmart to pick up some name tags to print for Scratch Day, I was back at the office. There I continued to arrange some logistics, answered some emails, and helped prepare a presentation.

2013-02-25 Monday

Since I'm often asked what I do for a living, and I can't always define it succinctly, I've decided to start blogging about what I do. For now I'll try to blog daily, but I may fall back to just "critical incidents".

Despite staying home with my sick daughter for the morning today, I was able to accomplish quite a bit related to our upcoming Scratch Day, which will be March 13, 2013. I've ordered custom water bottles that say "Scratch Programmer" in the Scratch Font. We've also started finalizing the prizes that we're going to buy/order. Most of them will be related to Scratch and/or programming, of course. This morning I suggested that perhaps we could have an essay contest leading up to the day for awarding the bulk of the prizes; we'll see

This afternoon I helped some members of our Finance Services department set up some questions using the SMART Responders for their presentation to the Leadership Team on Wednesday.

As usual, I also answered some Moodle questions, and responded to some emails about the upcoming School Based Professional Learning day on Friday.