Category Archives: blogging

blogging, cooltools, environment, work

Your teaching environment

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It’s a meme that’s going around. No-one tagged me (yet, boo-hoo), but this blog post by Eric, complete with neat Gliffy diagram) sparked my imagination. Where I work, we’re not allowed to put things on the walls or leave non-standard (i.e. personalized) furniture in any classroom. The classrooms don’t belong to any teacher, or any class; they are supposed to be “neutral” so that anyone can use them. My partner-in-crime once put some posters up in a classroom, but someone complained and he had to take them down (he was miffed, to say the least; perhaps they both were).

I think it’s a cultural thing. The posters were nice: colourful and bright. But! They are the signs of someone else’s presence in the room, and that disturbs some teachers. Also, the posters were in English, and that classroom is used by a lot of different teachers teaching a lot of different subjects, of which English is only one.

I think Japanese would feel that posters on the wall were SOMEONE ELSE’S POSTERS and therefore an infringement on their personal space and autonomy, whereas I suspect many Westerners wouldn’t mind, and might actually welcome the introduction of colour to the bland, off-white blank walls.

Classes finished several weeks ago here in Japan (none now until April, but it’s not like we’re on vacation on anything, ya know, there’s tons to do like like like grades ‘n’ stuff really there is). I’ll try and put up some photos of my workspace. (I see WriteToMyBlog just added Flickr functionality but once again WriteToMyBlog refuses to publish my blog entries. Maybe it’s personal: “you seriously want me to publish this? Are you SURE??? I don’t think so. Forget it, pal. The world’s better off without it. Trust me.”

So it’s back to the ol’ reliable Performancing.

Damn. Can’t figure how to persuade Performancing to upload a photo.

So, what’s your workspace look like?

blogging, Google, makeover

Makeover

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I switched to the “new” (Google-run) Blogger. It took me a week-10 days to figure things out, but after a couple of false starts (like choosing an inconvenient Google account to associate with this blog), I’m finally here, and quite happy with the environment. What do you think? I’m not sure about the colour scheme, but it will do for now.

I lost everything in my old sidebar when I moved, but manage to get it back, more or less. I took the opportunity of pruning my blogroll. If you think you should be on there, let me know.

blogging, cooltools, edtech, web-based apps

Can’t WriteToMyBlog

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Thru Borderland’s Google Reader feed I discovered WriteToMyBlog It looks cool, and I’m all for web-based applications. Only one problem – I can’t for the life of me get it to work! I always get an error message when I click “Manage posts” or “publish”. Can’t be bothered to write for help.

Update: I take that back. I’ve finally managed to get something posted, after going around and around in some kind of Kafkaesque loop. Plus, for some reason all the <> and () and similar characters were all screwed up which took 5 minutes of just editing. Not sure it’s worth it.

I just added this post: after writing in the edit window, I click “publish”. A new window opens with the editing window still open. The new window is the main WriteToMyBlog window, which shows me which ID I’m logged in under. There’s a bunch of options and buttons, fortunately including the one I want: PUBLISH (why are all the others there? I just GOT here from clicking the PUBLISH button, so take me straight there already). Then I get another funny window which lists the blogs listed under my login ID. I click the one I want and hit PUBLISH NOW. Am I published yet? The editing window is STILL open. Weird.

Now, how do I create a NEW post?

Can’t get Ecto’s trial version to work, either. Oh screw it.

Zoho looks interesting (via the Fischbowl ). I think I’ll drop all this grading and go and explore! On the other hand, maybe later.