Category: SitRep

So much newness…

It’s the beginning of vacation for me, though I suspect there won’t be much in the way of “vacationing” going on around here. To busy for that sort of thing. Busy busy busy. So it goes.

Anyway, here’s the rundown of what lunacy I’ve involved myself in this week:

1. New England 1:1 Summit has over 300 tickets sold- we had limited to 300, but we’ve added another 200 tickets, just in case. I’ve got a post on it here, and clearly I’ll be there. I’m even leading a session. Come!

2. The transition to a self-hosted WordPress blog is complete- and wasn’t anywhere near as ugly as I was ready for. A big thanks to Noah over at Prxy. It wasn’t my skills that kept things moving and painless. All him.

3. I’m currently teaching Little Brother by Cory Doctorow in my freshman English class. I “taught” it last year while out on paternity leave, so this is my first year doing it in the class with students. Also: ePub only. Which means I actually have to bring my iPad to class a lot of days.

4. I’ve been pushing the Everything Is A Remix series for a good long time, and the last film just came out. It’s required watching, people- for both you and your students. Get on that.

5. I’ve got a couple of minor projects going together over the next week or three- all small stuff, but I’ll post up here about them as they get closer or after they’re done.

6. HUGE project in the works with some other very good folks. Cannot stress the nature of the HUGE-NESS, but alas, as of right now, it has to be hush-hush. Announcement on this coming soon. I promise.

Annndddd We’re Live!

There we go, folks. Live and back at ’em.

1. Email is live, too. So you can stop having your emails bounce. Which is nice.

2. I’m working on a pretty involved video project right now- multiple camera shoots, 1080/24p, and the like. I should have the A-roll finished this week, and with my fingers crossed, much of the B-Roll too. Then editing. Lots of editing. I can say that it’s for the New England 1:1 Summit, and that it will debut there, but I’ll post it here as well.

That’s it, for now.

Happy to be back and in action.

 

t.

 

Bit of news…

Couple of things going on. Allow me to enumerate them.

1. Our school is in the midst of Poetry Out Loud, a national poetry recitation/dramatic reading competition. School semi finals are today, and have just over 100 students taking part, which represents roughly the top 10% of performances. I’ll be running a livestream of the entire event today, which runs all day, from 7:35am until nearly 2:00pm (EST). Feel free to tune in over here to see what that looks like. The finals (which is much shorter & top 1% of all students) will be Feb 10th, and for that I’ll be producing the stream live- remote cameras and all. I’ll post that link then, too.

2. This blog/webpage is finally ready to move to a custom server- so expect that to be happening soon, likely over this weekend. If all goes well, it’ll look just as it does now, and you’d never be the wiser. But if things go sideways a bit… well, there you go.

3. The New England 1:1 Summit is gathering some steam- more people signing up, more sponsors getting on board… And you should, too. It’s free, it’s fun, and there will be tons of good talks about how 1:1 isn’t really about tech at all, and is about a shift in culture. The first-draft schedule just got posted too- check that out as well.

t.

SitRep

Ah yes. Time for another one of these.

1. I’m still hosting this site at wordpress.com, as my web guy hasn’t moved it over to timcalvin.com for whatever reason. As a result, my primary personal email is still busted. Sorry ’bout that. Plenty of other ways to get in touch in the meantime.

2. Just grabbed “DraftPad” (for free!) off the app store, and so far impressions are pretty good. Nice interface, excellent output options. A little less draw-y than Adobe Ideas (a prior fav), but with better output… so… get it while it’s free!

3. All the cool kids are at Educon this weekend- and I’m not. So if you ever had any doubts about me… there you go. That said, I’ll be at (and helping run… and leading sessions, no doubt…) the New England 1:1 Summit on March 10th. It’s free, and if you’re in the area you should totally come. Did I mention I’ll be there?

4. We’re booking school visits out into mid-March right now. If you’d like to get in and see how/what/why we do what we do, please get in touch soon- the year will be done before you know it.

5. My new business cards should be here early this week. Ted over at Terrapin Stationers printed them, and I can’t wait to have them in my hands. Check him out if you need quality work done.

6. I’m looking for a way to create Google Map layers on an iPad- anyone got a way to do this? I’ve tried via Safari & Google Maps, I’ve tried the Google Earth app… no luck so far.

7. I’ll be trying to drop a SitRep every Sunday- seems like the right way to wrap up/begin a week.

t.

SitRep

Here’s the quick update on the state of things around here:

1. This site is still being hosted at WordPress.com and I’m waiting for my web guy to install WordPress.org onto my server so I can be self hosted again, and so my email will start working. Taking more time than I’d like, but there you go.

2. I’m headed to Uxbridge on January 17 to train some of the lovely folks there on iPads- my focus is to be digital publication, as that seems to becoming an increasing focus in my life. Though my background has more to do with printed medium, I’m finding the shift towards ePubs to be (generally) a good thing, especially when we’re talking about texts in the classroom. More on that in a bit.

3. Apple (supposedly) is having a big event on January 19th regarding textbooks and schools- which seems like it might be the event they interviewed me for. I don’t know anything about this here- and it’s not that they’ve got me with some huge ugly NDA or anything. I literally don’t know. They set up an impressive rig in my classroom and I talked with an interviewer for something like an hour and a half about… stuff. How I got into teaching. What I like about it. What’s frustrating about it. Philosophy of teaching. And so on. So there’s this chance that I’ll be in whatever videos are associated with that. Or not.

4. There are two upcoming post for here I’m currently working on. The first is a product review of some samples that were given to me by a very enthusiastic CEO. The stuff looks interesting, and I can’t wait to try it out. The second post is about the class I taught on January 12th via a Google Video Chat. That’s a more complicated thing, and thus the post is a little longer. Again, soon.

Currently speaking…

Ah, yes.

An update.

This blog/site is mostly up and running, and I’ve even been slowly pushing older material from other blogs to here. So that’s good.

Bad news is that my email is still broken- it’s a matter of MX setting being funky and WordPress not playing nice with custom email solutions. Good news is that my former host and domain provider will happily run WordPress.org on my server, which means I can be self-hosted again and have my email work. Bad news (more!) is I’m going to have to migrate. Again. For the second time in a week.

Insert groan here.

So if things get a little lumpy here for a bit, I’m sorry. Try not to mind the dust on the floor and the paint cans scattered around- we’ll be back to normal in a bit.

Thanks!

t.

The State of Things

Here’s where I’m at with all this transitioning:

  • My About page is nearly done- though the email I’ve listed isn’t working right now
  • My Current Projects page is up, and is, in fact, current.
  • My twitter feed is showing the five most recent posts, in near-realtime.
  • My banner at the top of the page is from me, and not some stock image

All of which is good. Sadly, the list of things that remain to be done is longer:

  • Content, content, content
  • Email up and working
  • Rotating banners for pages
  • Migration of my content from other hosting sites to here

And it’s that last one I’m not sure about. Over the years, I’ve moved from platform to platform, trying to find something that works well, but in the course of that leaving my work strewn across the web like some angry toddler. I aim to move all (most?) of that content here. The drawback is it might seems as though I’m double posting old stuff. The solution to that, I think, is to selectively move the relevant stuff all to here, and in the process of that update it as I can to keep things current. I also have decided to not remove the older sites I’ve used- I’ll leave them there, untouched, in the meantime. That way, if people want to see what I was thinking about an issue at a specific time, that record will still exist. Seems like the only fair way to do this.