Reader's Advisory

Today was a busy day for me. I had meetings and appointments throughout the course of the day, and between the abrupt and ongoing (yes, simultaneously abrupt and ongoing) grind of budgeting and planning, I tried to cram in the usual emails, messages and phone calls.

Yet the highlight of my day was a student request to help locate a book. I was moving from one thing to another, and moving quick as I could go, when I saw a student wandering from stack to stack with a certain look I've come to recognize on sight: vaguely confused curiosity united with awkward, constructed casualness. The "I'm lost, but I don't want it to be too obvious" look. (Don't laugh. Adults wear it too.)

I re-ordered my priorities on the spot and was able to help him find what he was looking for: The Portrait of Dorian Gray. (Not even an assigned text! Be still, my librarian heart.)

Oscar Wilde is one of my favorite literary personalities, and I find his work rich with meaning and humor. His Portrait is grim and dark, all the wry observations of Victorian wealth layered like soot in musing, intent turn of phrase. I always read that particular work hearing the voice of Dorian Gray, and it's possible to find the pieces of the country mouse starving into selfish ruthlessness in that prose. It makes you confront immortality, vanity, and the social responsibility of wealth.

"Like the gods of the Greeks, he would be strong, and fleet, and joyous. What did it matter what happened to the coloured image on the canvas? He would be safe. That was everything."

Paper Problems

This year we have seen a considerable increase in wasted paper as whole reams (hundreds of sheets a day) are left abandoned in the printers and copier. We've discussed this problem internally and we have gone through several options as possibilities, and in all likelihood it's a combination of circumstances.

In the last two years we have made it easier for students to print using personal devices. Though this ability is convenient, the connection is often unstable as students move around with their laptops. Laptops are also changeable as students install personal software and connect to home networks. Printing from these devices is also not prompt, relaying from several different devices, and so impatient students send a print "job" multiple times, resulting in extraneous copies that they then abandon or re-print in other places.

The Tech Team has been investigating some software options, but options like that can impede students from printing on their own, and could also add multiple steps to the printing process. Where possible, I prefer to look for cultural changes rather than ready technology answers, as "having the conversation" is often a first step in positive change.

We are still monitoring this issue, trying to balance cost and conservation with ease of use.

Poetry Contest Judging

http://www.poetrynation.com/

Tomorrow the committee of poetry judges meets to decide the winners of this year's contest. I am never conflicted about whether this is a good event, because it gives me so many opportunities to see of what our students are capable when presented with a challenge. I can feel the honesty in many of the works put forth, and I admire in particular the students who have mastered the haiku form, which encapsulates so much meaning in such a small number of words.

It is admirable that our students are willing to share their work with an audience; that's no mean thing, in my opinion. I am no poet myself, preferring prose in my spare time, and I definitely can't flatter myself in saying that I am capable of good prose, come to that. I feel that my lack of skill in that area gives me a greater respect for the potential of poetry in both long form and haiku (the major categories of this particular contest).

In the past, we have had a spoken word section of the contest, but because we only have two or three students who really have found their passion in that particular type of poetry, we decided to focus instead on written forms, and encourage our intrepid spoken word poets on during Town Meeting and similar events.

I look forward to meeting with the judges and discussing our favorites.

Blog-based Activity Example for MADE

From "HowToGeek.com"

I consulted a couple teachers and looked at a couple examples for this. I remember seeing a great blog assignment from Greg McCandless, who asked for some of us to comment back to his students’ posts and work; it was structured much like our initial assignment in this class, with students making individual posts on their own journals, and commenting at each other in response. Making the public available to your students and your students available to the public gives them additional points of view that you can’t offer.

Using Patrick Lemon’s upcoming Spring at Sage Seminar, “Build Your Own Computer,” I’m going to go through this activity in a purely hypothetical way, as I’m only supporting the seminar. It seems that a blog activity would be beneficial for a class like this, where the students might not know each other intimately or have any idea of their goals for the class (if any).

Though all students are participating in the seminar to build your own computer, all users have different expectations of their tools, particularly one as versatile as a computer. 

So to start off the class, it would be great to have a blogging activity where students introduce themselves and the things they’re looking for out of their computer. 

Some general categories might be:

• Productivity - Word processing, calendaring
• Graphics Editing
• Web Publishing
• Coding or Programming
• Gaming, which could be separated into various types that dictate graphic needs

After this activity we could then shake the students out into different smaller groups that have similar goals. 

These groups could continue blogging daily about what they’re needing to learn and do to meet the unique purpose(s) of their personalized computer. 

As part of the introductory lesson, the students could provide a video walk thru of the some of their common computer tasks using screen casting, showing some of the tasks, programs, and games they most like to use. Our students could also learn more about what they could be doing from their classmates with this multimedia activity.