Small Changes; BIG RETURNS

I have Tom Jones’ voice in my head this morning.  It’s the end of Spring Break and I have 90 minutes to go until the classroom 2.0 session on Podcasting. Don’t want to miss that one. The keyboard on my laptop is showing wear marks from so  much typing since my desktop went wonky at the beginning of the month. It's been repaired and is apparently healthy now but I think 3 years worth of emails and bookmarks are gone. Woah,woah,woah . . .

I’m now officially back in school – yes I’m a student again at 57 taking the online Master’s in Instructional Media. My hope is to parlay this into some sort of work with student teachers at one of our local universities when I’m done. That’s pretty forward thinking for someone who’s just finished week 2, but that’s the long range plan. We’re deep into project-based learning and constructivism (there is no objective reality – only the meaning we attach to it). These courses zip by in 7 weeks so you just get a handle on one step and you have to leap to the next one without any time to breathe. Fortunately, I’ve connected with a collection of wonderful people who meet once a week in Elluminate to talk everything over.

The strength of the course is that it’s very practical – but in a way that’s also what makes it so tough. Sometimes the instructions for the assignments don’t provide sufficient clarity for me – but that could be because I’ve been away from all this for 20 years. Also the context is very clearly American – with meeting ‘the standards’ a constant concern and objective. Sometimes it’s hard for moi (Canadian) to fathom the pressures that the accountability initiatives have placed on colleagues in the US.  Every time I talk with them, I’m more impressed by the system we have here in BC. I also thank those BC teachers who came before me for their foresight in fighting so strongly for professional autonomy. I am quickly gaining an appreciation for just how precious that is.

One of the women in the course is a teacher in California who has classes of 35. Others have 40. Pink slips have just gone out to 25,000 teachers there,  and they’re worried that as many as 10 students more will be added to each class! My concerns seem so small by comparison. What will happen to that cohort of students if this lasts very long? Someone should be starting a longitudinal study on the effect of the added stress on the teachers still there trying to educate them. What will their health be like if the hard times last 5 years? 10? Where will the state turn for new teachers when this is all over? Who in their right mind would go into our profession there under these circumstances?

This may be a little disloyal –- using Posterous to tell you about a tool to use with Wordpress blogs --   for my courses I have to maintain a Wordpress Wilkes/Discovery blog. The available templates are so generically blah, and I’m going to be using the blog for a couple of years so I want it to say Pacific Northwest and breathe a little sea air into readers’ lives.

“Artisteer is the first and only Web design automation product that instantly creates fantastic looking, unique website templates and blog themes.” This is so cool. It lets you build a custom template for Wordpress blogs and websites without knowing anything about code. You can change the background and the header, and (within limits )the layout of the pages, font, colours and just about anything you can imagine to make a truly unique website. They also have loaded in lots of ideas and suggestions to help you get started. There is a free trial with the watermarks removed when you pay –- and yes, I did pay the $50 for the Home version. The business version is about $130.  

Artisteer works from a menu that looks and feels like MSWord 2007.

Here’s what the default  starter page looks like.

My personal template is beginning to take shape.

The background texture came from a website recommended by Technology Magazine where the texture photos are free for anyone to use, and the petroglyph lies in a secluded spot on a beach near where I live. My Wilkes blog will be called: No Looking Back referencing the Medusa myth. Anyone who turned back and looked at her would be turned into stone. (I’ve probably garbled it a little but it makes sense in my mind.)

I’m going to play with Artisteer a little more as the weeks go on, but there is one flaw for which  Paul at the company has kindly sent me a fix and which I have posted below. In the default, the page scrolls beautifully over a still background; however, if you change the background from the default, it no longer remains fixed.  The “Options . . .” pop-ups (where that magic function lies) are only available if you buy the expensive version. That means my lovely sea image scrolls away with the page and there is empty background  beneath the page.

To fix this right now, you have to export the template and – take courage ! – change one word in the CSS code. Now it feels to me like I’ll have to export a few times to get the position of the titles and the tabs working the way I want them to anyway, and I haven’t tried that yet.

When I contacted the company, they said they would look into how to add this feature for home users which would make this pretty near a perfect piece of software for me! So thanks, Lance, Marc, Ellin and Paul for responding to my cries for help.

One last word – compress those background images before you use them or else they’ll download very slowly when you use your new template in your blog or website.

Now I’m off to learn how to podcast –- this week’s session in Classroom 2.0 Live. It’s 9:02!