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where our wasted time becomes your wasted time

lincoln lutheran

No world wide web

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The internet was (actually still is) down at Lincoln Lutheran for most of the day today. I told Windstream of our woes around 10:30 and bothered them every hour for an update on what they had found. Finally, at about 3:00, the 7th guy I talked to said that they had been, “really busy” and no one had actually even looked at my problem yet. Thanks Windstream.

Being without internet is more of a thing than it was even two years ago. Our teachers and students use it for getting assignments, working on them and turning them in. I spent most of the day in conversations like this:

everyone at school: When is the wi-fi going to be working?
me: The wi-fi is working.
everyone at school: Did it just come back?
me: No, it’s been working all day.
everyone at school: huh?

At this point I generally just walk off. Usually –here I’m just assuming– they figure out the difference between the wi-fi and the Internet. But if they don’t, I don’t really care at this point.

Eventually Jim from Windstream came by (I told the last Windstream guy I talked to to change our business hours to 8:00am to 8:00pm, because today was Awards Night, and I would be here anyway.) He couldn’t figure out why they had dispatched him without first doing some off-site diagnostics. I theorized with him that it was done mostly in an attempt to slow down the rate at which I was calling them.

Jim was nice, and seemed to know what he was doing, but a series of unfortunate coincidences (including, but not limited to a tornado warning) kept him from actually fixing the problem. He did, however, diagnose the problem.  There was evidently a light that won’t light on one side*. He took it back to his workshop to fix it up there and bring it back here. He’s actually going to try to bring it back tonight.

I’ve arranged a secret knock between Jim and our custodian Todd, so Todd can, at least theoretically, let Jim in. Jim says that best case scenario is that our internet might be back up in about two hours. Worst case scenario is, in his words, “a while”.

 

 

 

*It is actually quite surprising how accurate a description of the problem this turns out to be. The SFP that converts the light in the fiber optic cable from light to electrical impulses is receiving light correctly, but is failing to turn the corresponding electrical impulses back to light for the return trip.

Old Timers

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We got new atomic clocks at Lincoln Lutheran this year. Our clock system is older than the High School, and the display was shot, so we couldn’t program it anymore. We were no longer using it to ring the bells for class to start/stop (there’s a neat addon to the phone system that plays any  .wav file).

Instead of replacing it with a new clock system, it was decided to put atomic clocks in every classroom. I told them that all of our students had a clock with them at all times now, but you know how administrators love clocks.

Anyway, I asked Doug to put the old clocks in the Tech Center. I originally thought that we would do something more orderly with them. You know, arrange them like you see on the wall of a news room with time zones. But there were no more than two of any style of clock in the whole school. Instead we hung them on the bulletin board. It turns out that I’m pretty good at bulletin boards. Who knew?

clock1

Our current plan is to label each with an imaginary location. Any suggestions?

Gamification and Programming

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So, while Lauren has been heating up and cooling down multiple times a day, I’ve been working on trying something new with my programming class.

For the last couple of years people have been experimenting with using common elements in games in classrooms. It’s called Gamification, and it’s not playing games in class. People have been doing that for a long time. It’s turning the whole class into a game. People are also doing it outside of education too. You’ve maybe been gamified yourself without knowing it. If you want to know more about it in general, watch this video:

Okay, everything make sense now?

I’ve been working on how this will look in my class, and in a nutshell, students will still do (mostly) all of the same stuff I’ve had them do in this class for years. But this time around, they will get points for doing them and when they get enough points they will go up a level and when they go up a level they can pick certain perks. Additionally, they can see on Leaderboards how the rest of the class is doing and earn Achievements for doing certain things well.

Gamification Design Documents

See, Mom, I knew all those hours playing video games were going to pay off for me.

Gamification Design Documents

If you’re really interested, you can take a look at the Programming website. I’ve already rolled out a few of the leaderboards, I’m also keeping a list of useful resources and making some posts about how I’m doing things, why I’m doing them that way and how they are turning out. I’ve done 4 posts so far.

Surprise Video of the Semester

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Friday was the last day of school at Lincoln Lutheran and for our “Finals” period we watched the videos that the students had been working on for the past 5 weeks. They were pretty good, given (a) the time constraints, (b) that it was their first attempt at editing together a video and (c) the fact that it was the end of the school year.

But after Ben showed his, the whole room erupted in applause.

This is probably the best stop motion animation that anyone has ever done for one of my classes. Some of the ways he uses those legos is really inspired.

Party planning

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Happy Birthday, Dad!

Last weekend was graduation at Lincoln Lutheran. This calls for attending more parties than I typically go to during the whole rest of the year combined. In the past I’ve just sort of looked at addresses and times and driven around. This year there were more parties that I really wanted to make sure I got to, so I upped the organizational skills a bit.

Exhibit A:

top: Saturday; bottom: Sunday

Exhibit B:

And one was WAY over to the right.

Exhibit B is kind of fun. You make a spreadsheet that has address, state and zip-code as well as whatever other information you want to include (name, times, whatever) and upload it to batchgeo.com and they turn it into a google map.

Anyway, the graduation parties were fun, and Lauren decided to do the right thing and go to(ward) the parties with me. Then she got off somewhere close by and did whatever she wanted to do.

$35,000 presentation

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iPad presentation smallIt’s late here; it’s been a long day, and Lauren is too tired to write a post. Our Gala dinner and auction fundraiser for Lincoln Lutheran High School was last night and I was in charge of the presentation where we asked our supporters to donate $36,000 to buy iPads for all of the teachers. I was supposed to give a $36,000 presentation, but I only delivered $35,000.

Rather than me bore you to death with details, ask me any question about the evening that you want and I’ll answer it.

UPDATE:
Lauren here with some photos. Note, I really needed a flash, so they are mostly blurry.

Lloyd and Curt behind the centerpiece:

Lloyd’s display for the iPad project. We borrowed the display boards from the nice local Apple store.

Charles photobombing:

Bob was the emcee. He said he was a little nervous, but he didn’t look it one bit.

I am sad this didn’t turn out better. Charles and Deborah looked great!

I was curious how the golf-ball-patterned butter balls were made. I asked the wait staff and it turns out they don’t make them on side. They arrive as bags of butter golf balls, to be shaken out onto little plates.

UPDATE UPDATE:
Here’s the presentation: small presentation (PDF ~3Mb) large presentation (PDF ~30Mb)