I somewhat foolishly thought that once I got through the month of October, things would slow down just a bit. No, that's not going to happen!
I'll continue my reporting on October's before I hint about the month of November. So after I finished at OTA/EncycloMedia. I headed back home. This was a short week at school with Fall Break, but those of you in education land know that the short weeks are usually the hardest. True to this - conferences, classes, and trying to help teachers get things done. The worst was our poor orchestra teacher. He's not tech savvy, and he had a ton of recording and scoring that needed to be finished for the students who made it into the All Metro Orchestra. Some of it even confused me, but we hung in there and got the job done. We had a fantastic Fall Break, complete with an 80th Birthday party for Ken's Uncle Roger. It was a surprise, and I made him his favorite upside-down pineapple cupcakes. We had supper club at India Palace and went to see The Martian - fantastic movie, but the book was even better. On a side note... I love talking about the The Martian because of our NASA event I discovered about through the NASA educators' e-newsletter, which I highly recommend subscribing too (not the most exciting read, but some cool gems hidden in there!). This live online chat featured the author Andy Weir, astronaut Ricky Arnold, and scientist Chris McKay. Oh! The stuff I learned! Andy Weir was just blogging about his favorite things - he's just a big nerd fascinated with NASA, creating crazy scenarios, and plotting possible trajectories for rockets. He was just blogging and people told him they wanted to read it like a book, so he went through Amazon, which requires you to charge something. He put it out there for $0.99, and within a week he had a publishing and movie deal. NASA is thrilled with him, as the popular book and now movie has brought about a huge surge of renewed interest in the space program. Very cool! I wished that the event would have been better for our students, but our school's technology blocked our opportunity to participate. the good news is that I had already submitted our questions, so they did use them and acknowledge us. We had a 2nd chance to participate in another live event with NASA's Journey to Mars program, but it failed again. Of course if you ask our IT dept., everything went well. It did because we were watching it just like any other school via NASA's video channel, but it didn't if we used the real link we were suppose to use so we could be one of the schools interacting with the guests. Oh well! Now I have a new funny statement when having tech issues at school - that NASA! Always messing up our technology! I've decided it's just easier to laugh. Now... I'm suppose to have a Skype event in December with author Dan Gemeinhart - it better work!
The following week i had not one, but two conferences... and I presented at both. The first one was Making Information Meaningful, and I did the Google Search Ninja session. Went well. The second conference I had two presentations - one on Twitter and the other was about MakerSpaces. I got a little too big for my britches by telling Ken that after you start presenting several times, you start to relax and not be so nervous - I was getting my groove on. Well, that was after my Twitter one and before the MakerSpaces. I'm greeting people as they come into my session and low and behold in walks my new superintendent - no pressure here! I will say that I psychologically told myself to relax - you got this. I did think it went well, and she stayed the entire time (I thought for sure she would leave and head to someone else's). Afterwards, as I was cleaning up, I met another biggie, our new chief of staff. She told me she wanted to come by and meet me and offer resources if I need them in the future. Very impressive! Of course, at the time this was going right over my head. It was a true whirlwind!
I also have been participating in OU Confucius Institute's Educators workshops on Saturdays. So far I've been to 2 of them and there are 4 more scheduled and a book study through November and December. I was lucky enough to go on one of the China trip in 2014. I could go on and on about it - best trip ever! Now if I hear of any of their sponsored events, I try to go.
I plan on writing about my Teen Read Week next time. Until then, enjoy the extra hour today!
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