Archive for June 2018

I took some time last night and did figure out how to get the Tweets showing up correctly using IFTTT and the Embed Tweet feature. The only thing I don’t like is that is shows retweets and replies. There is a way for me to get rid of them, but I would have to rewrite a bunch of code and I don’t think that is where I should be putting that much energy right now. Maybe another time…

I also added Beaver Builder as the theme, which is my currently preferred WordPress theme for building sites. The site look is definitely not the same as most other teachers, but I’m not really trying to promote anything else. I just want a place that I can force myself to write until I get into writing how-tos for classroom activities, processes, and such.

This wasn’t supposed to be a Sunday night post, but I let the weekend get away from me. So let’s start off with the week – it was quite the learning experience! I spent all week at my Region 13 ESC WeTeach_CS training.  I’ve posted some about this on Twitter, so let’s just say I reviewed a lot of information and am slowly progressing toward my CS certification test, which I’m planning on taking around July 11 in San Marcos. My plan is to complete my online training for the test in the next 2 weeks, which will also complete my PD hours requirement for the CS project. I think my biggest takeaway was the connections I made (or re-made) with some of my colleagues. It’s nice to know that I have more teachers I can reach out to when I hit a wall on Computer Science or Makerspace issues. We also did 2 days of programming on TI Nspire calculators. I’m not sure how I can translate that back to my school, but I’ll pocket it for future use.

I spent most of the weekday evenings exhausted. Two weeks into summer and I’m still struggling with my schedule. I was hoping that having a solid daytime schedule would help things, but I just couldn’t get much done at night. I decided to forgive myself and just go with it. I finished watching a couple of TV shows and focused on rest. My big plan was to get a lot done starting Saturday.

It took a couple of hours, but I finally got focused on Saturday. I decided that since my brain was being indecisive, I would start in the yard – sunshine and manual labor. It turned out to be the exact thing I needed and after mowing both yards and some light tree-trimming, I was on my way. I started checking things off my to-do list, including going to the Dollar Store to finally figure out my classroom activity organization. I think I have a solution, but I want to write it in another post. I walked into the workroom to begin picking everything apart, but only lasted a few minutes before I became unfocused again – I’m still not ready to get organized for next year, so I’ll work on other things in the meantime.

Today is Father’s Day and the boys and I took my dad to Topgolf for a couple of hours. Everyone was either tired or injured so I’m not sure everyone else had a good time, but I definitely did. But immediately after, I needed a nap! After another morning of being outside then resting, I felt ready to get some work done (I’m starting to see a pattern here).

This afternoon I have completed an inventory program in Google Sheets for our Transformation Room inventory. I just sent it to the room manager for review and I’m quite impressed with myself! After we polish it up some, I might write a how-to article on what it does and how it accomplishes everything.

Right now, I feel in the zone on the computer. One of the things bugging me is how tweets I post to the website show links but don’t make them clickable or show photos from the tweets. I think I’m going to try and solve that tonight before writing up my book review notes for the first two books I have read. I’m wasting time not getting the other books read and want to get that project moving!