When I drove up the long curved driveway, I noticed that not much had really changed except that it seemed somehow much quieter almost as you'd find any high school later in the day when the seniors have graduated in May. I know it probably would have been different if I had been there earlier or later in the day when the buses where arriving or leaving. Still it was different.
Before I went into the building, I lingered briefly under the portico and remembered standing with my wonderful colleagues listening to their banter while we performed our bus duty on our assigned mornings.
When I entered the school and looked into the main office, I was propelled back in time to March 17, 1985, my first day as a teacher there. We all have those, what I call "snapshot moments" in our memories. I still have that one as I gazed into the busy office that morning and thinking to myself, "What have I done? I had left a junior high school that I had been comfortable with, bored but comfortable, 2/3 of the way through the school year.
My host took me by the "Royal Suite" where the queens of guidance reign and although I was too late to glom onto the free parents open house breakfast (breakfast is my favorite pastime after lunch), I did manage to get an audience with three of the hardest workers of the high school's staff.
My last stop was the technology wing that was newly built just prior to my arrival. Sadly, it's now closed. The wood and automotive shops are dusty and filled with rusty machinery and stored items such as cases of copy paper. How did something taught for a couple of hundred years and serviced so many students, disappear so quickly? Where do those kids go from here?
On the way out my host took me by the library-very nice, well stocked and maintained. While there, I noticed my little corner where I usually sat during faculty meetings. Finally I spotted my corner in the technology office. It caused me to wonder how I could have ever dreamed all the wonderful things that would happen to me since leaving that little corner.
Today, we'll talk about RSS feeds and how one can easily and regularly have blogs dropped into their email account. We'll try a couple of different methods, but we're going to be somewhat hobbled by our desktop security in the computer lab. With that in mind, I'm going to talk about portable apps and I'm going to give you a disk that contains some of them. We'll try using Firefox instead of Explorer as our browser.
"Until that time, Maynard, until that time." Dobie Gillis
Eric
BTW Here are some links that will enlighten us with regard to RSS or Really Simple Syndication:
http://help.blogger.com/bin/topic.py?topic=12455
http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=97933&ctx=sibling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
Don't forget, there will be no class, real or otherwise, next week, October 28th. Our next meeting will take place in space in my office at TappedIn on November 4th at 4:00pm. I'll be waiting for you there. Among other things, we'll be covering Copyright issues including Copyright Commons. I'll have files for you to access including an interactive quiz at the end.
About Firefox Live Bookmarks: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Live+Bookmarks
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