It's been such a long time.....

It has been a long time since I last blogged. Lost time with many building projects going on at work, and the exhaustion related to that.
We now have a new VoIP system installed, which hooks into the Email system, making for unified communications. I love being able to “read” my voice mail. Voice mail has been something I have always hated, having to take notes while listening, and waiting to press repeat. Now the message is a sound file on the email, and easily playable. Email can be listened to on the phone too.
What else. Wireless throughout the district. Using Trapeze for that.
Had some server issues at the beginning of the school year, these are solved.
New electrical is being put in parts of the buildings and emergency generators. Problem is the power surges and is off for large block of time, such as 8 hours, during some of that work, we do not have 8 hour batteries on the servers, so stuff goes down, always fun with new equipment. One more large outage until all systems are set and life is good.
Still working on cleaning stuff up and making it work smoothly. Will see how that goes.
Installing several Smartboards with built in projectors. This year's model is much better than last year's. More solid and looks better.
Seems as if things are settling down and can get back to what I really want to do. Work with teachers to integrate technology into the classroom.

First podcast project podcasts

The first interviews of my podcast project are up
http://www.gcast.com/u/tsakshaug/main
If you are interested in participating, let me know

An Audio Project

I have decided to start an audio project regarding learning and teaching. I want to find out from as many people as possible how they learn. There are some simple questions, and will post these to a site as soon as I get that set up and have more than my introduction recorded.

After some demographic info; age, level of education, profession.
The questions I will ask are:
How do you best learn something new?
Think of the best teacher you ever had, in or out of school, what made them a good teacher? No names please
If you were to teach someone a skill, how would you go about doing it?
Under what circumstances do you find it difficult to learn?

I am looking forward to doing this, and will have some info about how to contribute to the project later on.

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Summer

It has been awhile since I last blogged, summer it seems, slips away quickly. Many things are happening, but right now, I am sitting on the Porch at camp, watching the sunset. Been up here a week, and have two more to enjoy. Need to move inside however, due to the dang mosquitoes.
It is nice to getaway from work for a bit. I did go into work Thursday to fix a server issue. Had to bring Eric home anyway, so it was not too bed. Five hours one-way is a bit excessive otherwise. Loaded Remote desktop on the laptop, so I can do some things, from here. Tried to talk someone at work through some of it by phone, but no dice.
I won the 140 character book review, I may have upset some administrators, but heck, I am an administrator also. Entered the Technology poetry contest, with a piece I wrote earlier when one of The Servers died on me. “The Dead Server Blues” not great, but it was already written.
Nice to get mentioned on another blog, I lead the blogs at Students from an education class, made some comments. This writer seems to understand how. Education and learning can be improved by technology.
Time to get back to important things, making Some chairs, re glazing windows, watching loons, an being with my wife.

Pineapple chicken

4 boneless skinless chicken breasts
1 can pineapple slices
4 slices provolone cheese
Teriyaki sauce


Drain pineapple juice into a container; add about ½ cup teriyaki sauce. Store about 1/3 cup of this for cooking; use the rest to marinate the chicken-use a plastic bag in the fridge overnight for best results

Grill Chicken over medium heat; put pineapple sliced on the grill a bit later on. Use the reserved pineapple/teriyaki marinade to baste.

When the chicken and pineapple are cooked, put a slice on pineapple on the chicken, slap the provolone on top and cook until the provolone is melted, serve

Simple to make and good to eat

Trying hard to get things done.

We go on vacation in a few days for 3 weeks of Adirondack wilderness, well not really wilderness, but it is nice. Here are some pictures from this spring up there. What needs to be done here before I go? You name it. The big problem is waiting for equipment to arrive. We did the paperwork in June, so that July 1, the beginning of the fiscal year, the orders could go out. Have received one order, and that stuff is setup, but waiting for more stuff to come in to work on before school starts. Makes it tough to be up and running if there is no equipment.
We are working on a new phone system to make a unified communications system, and wireless network in all the buildings. Contractors are handling these, but it is making me nervous, as I will be in charge of both of these. The cutover date for the phones is when I am away.
Updating the computers is almost done, but having to figure out the somewhat random room cleaning pattern is difficult, not sure how they choose what room to clean. Do they draw lots or something?
Having some issues with the web server, or that is the old mail server that will be the new web server, looks like I need to do a clean install. So do I wait for software upgrade to 10.5 or do it with 10.4? hard to say. Just waiting for software.
Time to get back to updating things
Why do I go away at this time for so long? I am really a 10-month employee, with 20 extra days tacked on. This is just how it fell this year.

narrowing the vision

In the blog, Dangerously Irrelevant, Scott McLeod made and interesting post about The Personalization and Polarization of America. He makes the point that we are segregating ourselves more than before, and tend to listen to like-minded people. This is done in our neighborhood choices, work environment and new gathering choices.

A few days ago, I was watching a network news show, and they had a story regarding the downfall of newspapers, part of the reason is that younger readers get their information from the Internet. Getting news from the various sources is good, but generally a person will sign up for a news feed that shares their views and interests. The newspaper allows for diverse news and opinions to come into your busy closed world. In the time it takes to boot up my computer I can get a quick overview of what is going on. I have the ability to read opinions other than my own. This is one of the great things about a newspaper. You get depth unlike network news, not as much depth as in the past, but it is there. Yes there is a bias to any writer, so articles can have a right or left slant to them, just as my local paper’s sports page has a pro-Yankees stance.

We need to have an educated populace in this nation, part of education is opening your mind to opinions other than your own, listening to one or two voices is not the way to continue your education about the world.