It is after midnight, so I guess it's now Thursday, July 12. I went up to school today and tried to clean up the lab a little. It will be such a big job if they move everything out into the hall to wax the floor. It badly needs it because the rolly chairs chewed up the floor pretty badly.

I just tried orienting myself in the online environment called Second Life. I am NOT a gamer, so it's pretty foreign to me. I am trying to figure out how to operate in this interactive world, but I am pretty confused so far. I have an avatar - wish I looked like her. I named her KatherineRuth, which is what I would have named a daughter had I had one. I picked out the name Dench from a list provided, because I love the work of Judith Dench.

I read an article today in an ed-tech magazine about the demise of blogging. I hope not, as I'm just getting used to it.

Happy 4th of July!


We are back in CT. We arrived home on Monday evening, July 2, and were thankful to be home safe and sound. It was a great trip.
The first thing we did was go and check on the back yard. The grass needs to be mowed, and a couple of the plants that our sons missed watering were very droopy, but in all, it looked good after our eleven-day absence. The rasberry bushes were absolutely dripping with ripe. sweet rasberries, so I picked a whole colander full before the mosquitoes drove me inside.

We unpacked part of the car, but there is still stuff that needs to be brought in.

I awoke at 5:50 A.M. on Tuesday and worked the entire day doing laundry and hanging it on the line, making a wonderful rasberry cake, going through a mountain of mail, getting bills ready to be paid, making something to eat, etc. I never even unpacked the laptop to download my pictures until late Tuesday evening, if you can imagine that. Then I sat up until midnight looking at all my digital pics and paying bills electronically.

It is now Wednesday morning, and the 4th of July. Today, I plan on sitting in the backyard by the pond and pouring over all the "stuff" I picked up at NECC.

Do you remember the resource "Marco Polo" that was such a remarkable clearing house for teachers to access? I guess it had been funded by World Com, and when that company went under, the site stagnated for a while. Well, Verizon has taken over the sponsorship of the site, and it has a new moniker - Thinkfinity.org. I think that name is probably more fitting than Marcho Polo.The company had included a booklet of post-it notes in the tote bag provided by ISTE. I had used those notes to try and organize what I wanted to see on Monday. As I said, the choices were overwhelming, and without some planning, I would have been totally lost. When I got to the booth, I showed the representatives how I had used their freebee, and they thought it was neat and asked me to email them a picture. I am including it here.



I had best get busy, so I'll close for now.

More postings about the conference later.