<strong>Your Name</strong>: Erin
<strong>Today's Date:</strong> 2006/11/11
<strong>Day(s) worked or described:</strong> T Th¸
<strong>Total hours for week: </strong>4
<strong>The School: </strong>Emmett Till
<strong>Kind of Work:</strong> Project preparation and execution, general tech
<strong>Main Report or Narrative:</strong>

<em>Tuesday</em>
I spent some time updating the linkroll of the Book Club blog, then helped Mrs. Jacobson sort out some problems with her Excel graphs of classroom circulation data.
I met with Mr. Poole to follow up on some blog-related things we'd discussed the previous week. He's really been making good use of his <a target="_blank" href="http://tillblogs.cuip.net/till-fourth/">classroom blog</a>! I fixed some layout issues and talked with him a bit about incorporating student input. On Mitch's suggestion, I installed Firefox 2.0 on Mr. Poole's classroom computer, along with a couple of useful extensions. I gave him a brief tour of the program and he seemed interested in using it. Finally he had me take a look at his laptop which has been running very slowly lately, so I gave him some general strategies (delete useless programs, clear temp files, defrag) to combat this. My mind wasn't on spyware at the time, but if he's still reporting problems this week, I'll try out Spybot and maybe adAware.
Mrs. White has started working on the blog she made at CCPT, so she asked me to refresh her memory about things like logins, image locations, and post editing. I also installed Firefox 2.0 on her machine, but I didn't have a chance to tour it with her.


<em>Thursday</em>
Instead of my usual morning hours, I came in the evening during Mrs. Jacobson's afterschool Book Club to show the students the weblog and introduce them to the projects they'll be doing with it. The kids were really excited about seeing their videos and reading everything they'd written. As a group they practiced making comments on posts.
Last week, I made a WP account for each student with the intention that they would log in to comment and make posts, but because of a layout oversight on my part there was no convenient way for the students to log in. Rather than lose the students' interest by editing the theme during the presentation, I just made anonymous comments (using the students' names but no email or login info) and this seemed to make sense to the kids. I'm now on the fence about introducing them to logins at all-- Mrs. Jacobson and I agreed that this way of doing things was easy and exciting for the students, so it might be best to keep their role to commenters and leave the posting to the two of us. Next week I'll be meeting with the students again, so I guess we can withhold judgment until then.


<em>Firefox 2.0</em>
Mozilla recently released <a href="http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/">Firefox 2.0</a>, which has some features that would make it extremely valuable to classrooms using blogs, especially those which involve a lot of student-generated content. The built-in spell-checker is totally automated and will underline problem words in text-entry boxes without any extra work from the user. There's a number of extensions available for FF that I think make it a little more functional (especially <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1419/">IE Tab</a> for someone switching from IE)-- I feel like a list of these extensions should be incorporated in the <a href="http://techwiki.cuip.net">wiki</a>, but I'm not quite sure how.

<em>Problem solution: generic blog login</em>
Several teachers have asked me for help maintaining their weblogs, and fairly often this requires some logoffs and logins. Having the teacher log in every time in order to get at the admin functions isn't always feasible, and asking for the password doesn't maintain the kind of privacy that they need. As a solution to this, I created what I intend to be a "generic" admin login on two of the blogs I worked on. I named it "techco" and gave it a password that I intend to be common among all of these projects in the school, then gave it admin privileges. This seems like a nice way to get my job done efficiently while still respecting the teacher's privacy-- any other CUIPers working in schools with multiple blogs might look into this as a solution.