Some pictures to make you smile

Summer Chaos

In the midst of all this brain-bending professional development I've been deluging the blog with, I have also had a lot of issues in my personal life.

Swim lessons are this week and next, and I of course planned them right in the same week as Linda's surgery (more details to follow) and right in the middle of the day.

The kids are enjoying the lessons, so I hear. They've been three days. I've only been to one of those days. It's sad because I really enjoy watching them learn and grow.

I'm trying to lose weight again. I've gained back 12-15 pounds and am now trying to track my eating on SparkPeople and drink much more water.

Linda, Joel's mom, had a partial hip replacement this week, the third one in 5 years. The first two were total replacements, and her left side one was never very strong. Sure enough they had to go back and replace the socket and ball, but thank God she didn't have any infection, and they didn't have to replace the rod (which is inserted into the femur by an uncomfortable process).

I wanted to really show her support through this time so over the last two days my kids have been with 4 different families and I have only seen them 5 hours total. The rest of the time I've been up at the hospital. Most of the time I feel useless. I was able to get some professional development done on the computer, but overall there's a lot of sitting. There have been a couple times when I was really glad I was there. Today her IV "infiltrated" her hand, which basically means the vein broke and started leaking fluid into her hand. It got really tight and her fingers started turning purple from lack of circulation. She was so heavily medicated that when she called the nurse on her phone she was unable to fully communicate the urgency of the situation. I was able to run out into the hall and grab someone.

I am so thankful for my friends who have really stepped up here and helped with the kids. I feel like a sorta bad mom right now but Linda needs me, and that makes me a good daughter-in-law, I guess. We are praying that she will be accepted into a rehab hospital for a few days because recovery is so much easier there. We are also praying that this recovery is overall easier because they didn't have to replace the rod.

I have been able to do some housework and laundry but have basically handed food over to the processed kind. My kids are taking lunchables and pre-packaged fruit everywhere. We pick up kolaches for breakfast and tonight we ate Taco Cabana (which is a better choice than some fast foods).

I honestly don't know how in the world people can handle long term illness or especially NICU. It must be just like this only 500 times more emotionally stressful and chaotic. If this is as bad as it gets I am grateful.

Well I'm off to take a bath and try to relax. Have a blessed and grateful evening. God is good all the time.

technorati asks me to do this

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Thing 19

I explored the web 2.0 awards from 2008 and found a lot of interesting sites. Probably the one I liked the most was called swivel.com, and it has lots of infographics. Infographics is a term for imparting information to people through pictures. Think bar graphs, etc. But swivel.com takes really good ones and posts them. You can quickly learn something new, because a picture is like a thousand words.

This is highly applicable in education settings. Not only can you search for information on a topic you're teaching, but you can show students so many new ways of charting their information and discuss the pros and cons of each method. You can also discuss why charting and accuracy is so important. This website really makes me want to write a lesson plan or share the ideas with my kids.

Thing 14

Side note: this is my 900th post! Pretty exciting!

Technorati is something I've heard about but never used myself. When I searched for School Library Learning 2.0 I got some surprising results. I think I was supposed to use quotation marks because the blog posts results were mostly just about education in general and not this program I'm involved in. Once I searched in tags however I found some that looked familiar. I couldn't figure out how to search the blog directory, only browsing it through the topic headings.

I was surprised that "olympics" was in the top 15 searches, since it's not an olympic year. Most of the other popular ones were not too surprising, mostly celebrity stuff which is not really my gig.

I can totally see using technorati as another tool to find blog posts on topics that interest me. I plan to take a little more time to publish info about my blogs and see who else has tagged their blogs in similar ways.

The more I learn about tagging the more I realize that it is just another way of organizing info. Different people categorize things in different ways, so it's nice to be able to personally choose my categories. I also like the fact that the more people tag something, the more info the computer has to make generalizations about people.

Thing 18

I have used both OpenOffice and Google Docs for quite some time. They are both open platforms for word processing as alternatives to Microsoft Office. For a long time I preferred OpenOffice, because the program emulates Microsoft Office so well. You can basically do anything you used to do in Microsoft Office. They are so similar that you hardly have to do any learning of new processes.

The only problem is that since we use a mac we have to have another program to run OpenOffice, and that program has not been working on our computer for a while. Joel does a great job at keeping our home computers working but we never seem to communicate properly about OpenOffice so we've not gotten that fixed.

So currently I use Google Docs. It's fabulous. It is so much better than mac's version of word processing, and the best part is that if you have the internet, you have your documents. You can keep them private or share them with others.

Since we are on a mac I cannot even tell you how long it's been since I used Microsoft Office.

Thing 15

I know I'm going out of order but my computer won't watch videos today so I'm limited to those that don't require video.

One point made in this article that really hit me was that libraries really need to continue to grow and change. I still use our local library pretty extensively, mostly because they've made some awesome upgrades that I really appreciate. When I hear about a book I want to read I can immediately go to my library's website, search for it, and request it to be sent to the branch closest to my house. They email me when it arrives, they email me when my books are almost due, and they email me when my books are overdue. I think that's great.

I take my kids to the library but sometimes it's more like "what one could do" rather than "what we need to do". I can see in the near future when they will read me out of house and home but we're not quite there yet.

Another post I read talked about the frustration in talking or thinking about education reform, and how in his mind the important piece of the puzzle is assessment. Almost every teacher I talk to right now is tired. They are tired of the endless assessment. They are tired of not being able to use their creativity.

I liken it to a pendulum. I feel that right now we are at the very top of a pendulum swing with assessment. I do not see how it could possibly get any more intense for teachers, and I really hope it starts to swing in the other direction soon.

There were a lot of good discussions about how to take education and change it to follow the times.