skype skipping

There is one technology new to me which I have embraced and attempted to love. My son is in London for the semester and "skyping" is our means of communication. When it works, it is amazing...we are having a conversation, I am seeing him, getting a tour of his room, watching him eat biscuits. He sees the whole family in action, the beagle even sings to him. I may even get more of a conversation than if we were face to face. To his delight, I can't touch him and to ours, we can't smell him. BUT.....when it doesn't work the frustration is huge. We say hello, then he starts to break up, freezes or disconnects and we spend most of our time redialing and saying "Can you hear me?". I understand the wonders of what this instant communication can bring and am in awe when successful. The successes seem to be about 10% of the time, hence the frustration. It is an interesting dilemma. As I enter this era of technology, I am amazed by the possibilities it brings but find myself increasingly frustrated by how reliant we become on innovations that break down. "In the olden days" when I backpacked through Europe, my parents heard from me in the form of an occasional postcard. That was the extent of the expectation. Now I expect to have casual conversations with him on a regular basis and the biggest complication that I willingly accept is the time difference. How spoiled we become! I have just spent about 1/2 hour getting to talk to him for about 5 minutes. What a magical 5 minutes! What a frustrating 25. Despite the frustrations of the failures, I would have to say that the cup is half full when it comes to skype. We will be seeing him face to face (touching and smelling) in 6 days in London. I will be able to tell whether those dark shadows I see in his eyes are due to the quality of the camera/angle/lighting in his dorm room or if I should have brought chicken soup with me!

google me

I just googled myself and my footprint has certainly changed there. The first things on the listings were my nings and twitter. It's a little concerning to me since I signed up for so many things so casually. The PT ning that I posted has never had any responses yet it is the first thing someone sees when they google me. Can I throw these things away and if I do, will they disappear or they a forever part of who I am to the googlers?

can i still be president?

When I am away from the class and signing in and commenting on all these sites, I start to get nervous. This digital footprint that I am creating.....is it here forever or can I make it go away? Some day when I am a technological expert and earning millions because of my expertise (ha), will these comments come back to haunt me? Will I end up being quoted from someone who found some of my inane jabber and then blocked from advancement in some unknown area of my future life. I have certainly tried to impart that message to my children regarding facebook, and I wonder if some of these casual comments could somehow be dangerous.

who's out there?

I haven't figured out if I am using this blog to vent as in a journal or for some other purpose. I should have saved my wordles and tried to put them in here but as far as I can tell, once I closed down, they were gone forever.

running up the down escalator

I refuse to give up. For those of you who don't know how crazy I am, I am taking another course at the same time as this one. My most recent homework was about learning styles (abstract, random, concrete, etc) and for some strange reason I decided to challenge myself and use my new tech skills in my paper. Instead of writing about teaching strategies,I created wordles. They seem so simple but they disappear so easily. I must have retyped each one 6 times prior to succeeding. Ah, why not cut and paste from the report I just wrote, you might ask. Because my computers HATE me. My personal computer, the one that was just reimaged no longer allows me to use word. To the best of my knowledge, it no longer has any word processor, just one that I am now locked out of because I did not want the higher level (or more precisely, didn't want to spend increased $$$).That should involve a few hours of tech support to fix. Not on my calendar right now. My work computer did not work with wordle at all...probably too old. Then, I tried to be cute by making my puppy learners wordle be very random and beachball shaped like a beachball. wrong....perhaps a very flat one. Anyways, the end result for you elementary teachers, is similar to the projects you love where the parent did not complete the task and it is obvious that the child did it independently. The only problem is this child is 52....perhaps i should have had my child help me. so, although i enjoyed wordle, i also found it very frustrating. i couldn't shrink it, fix my typos, or dictate its shape. if i got carried away in trying to do this things, it disappeared completely. i did, however, enjoy playing with the pretty colors. i hope i didn't lose sight of the purpose of the assignment by getting excited to use one of my new tools functionally. i feel like i am running up the down escalator and the downward movement is faster than my upward.

can I do it right one day later?

OK....I am on my own now, can I find my blog? I am feeling confident on at least this spot and will be very disappointed if this ends up on the class blog instead. I left class yesterday feeling less confused about some areas and more confused on others. My hope is that as my bravery increases, I will also not give up and give nasty gestures to the computer as often. Last nite was an example of some increase in confidence. I needed to mail Dennis the address to this blog and when I went to my email, sending things out was grayed out. Instead of walking away, I calmly called first Lenovo, then comcast and was able to fix it without a single swear! Maybe at the end of this coure I will be able to do that without tech support. I am struggling on where to go with my project. I will continue to explore the items to see if there is a tool that seems like it would work for me and that I would be able to tackle.

A small success

I am feeling confident on my ability to post a new blog. I feel so far behind in this class but hopefully as I attack one piece at a time, I will gain confidence. I was even telling my husband how google reader would be useful for him. He has many financial blogs and sports blogs that he follows...will try to teach him. Isn't it true we remember 95% of what we teach?

3 strikes and I'm out

This is my third blog that I have created. I am really hoping that I succeed this time. I will use this space to chronicle my learning in 3c's as I continue to try hard to love and embrace technology. I am in week 4 and have had a series of challenges, including 2 dead computers, both after I have spent hours doing the research on that machine. My computer has come home from its vacation in Tennessee naked (I suppose referring to it as the hospital would be more appropriate) and now I am working on getting it back up and running. It is healthy now, just needs work (mcAfee, being introduced to my printer, etc.). Time to test this blog....