Neither Dead Nor Slumbering (Just Learning New Tricks)

There was and maybe still is a slogan for a particular brand of salt that said,"When it rains, it pours".  May be you can relate.  As I was working on adding a new operating system to a retired but functional laptop, my principal came to me, reminded me of a conversation we had months earlier and wanted to know what we needed to do to get rolling with the idea we had discussed -- a student run TV news program.  I had not given it another thought past the original conversation.  So the steady drizzle of things to do became a hurricane not only of things to do but things that needed to be done yesterday.  So, while I have not posted in recent days it has not been procrastination or lack of interest.  I have been learning new things.

As a result of the assignment to create a blog and post project progress and reflections on the process of information inquiry, I have (with the help of our IT) added a page to the school's website where students who have expressed interest in being part of the "TV News Experiment" can share ideas and work out details for developing a student run TV news program.  No one in our school has attempted such a thing.  I am the first.  They think I am really innovative and a real techno-gooroo.  To this point only the IT and I know better ( and you of course.)  It is an inhouse blog.  It took a whole day to work out the wrinkles and bugs that kept students from logging in and participating in the exchange of ideas.  We are only 24 hours into this blogging part of our website.  It will be interesting to see how students respond to this method of meeting since so many students have other obligations that make a physical meeting difficult.  We did meet together and the web page was shown to them.  I suspect that they will need to be reminded to use the webpage to make their enthusiasm for this project a reality.  Stay tuned.

Just a brief update on the inquiry project.  I have spent two days searching for information to solve a problem that keeps me from loading a new program from a disk as the download website says I should be able to do and I have not been able to get an older version to update to a version that can be made current nor can I seem to get the older version uninstalled so I can do a fresh install of the newest operating system.  Being truthful, I did not keep track of the websites I visited.  Having neglected to do that, I now see the need for some means of organization.  I did spend sometime looking at some organizers offered by Google.  Frankly, the principal's urgency for this TV news project and a few other major disasters have preempted all other activities and I have managed to sleep since then (but not much) so I haven't remembered what I looked at nor have I been able to think about where I need to go from here.

I have the principal satisfied for the moment, so the next item on my priority list is catching up on this project assignment and I will come back tomorrow and update the project particulars.  Take it from one who knows, the candle cannot be burned from both ends.  Later.