Hintonblogger

Yes, I'm still alive. Though after a 2am work session for the San Tan Incorporation Committee website I am wondering. Today while setting up Greenfield Junior High for the upcoming school year, we ran into a problem of how to update thirty wireless laptops with the latest OS X updates (almost 235mb worth of stuff). There were 12 different updates with 5 or 6 separate updates that required restarts.

A colleague of mine and myself found a program called, Iceberg, that allows the user to create a metapackage - a collection of packages. Iceberg allowed us to group sets of updates together, minimizing the restart time and baby-sitting of the update process. While it took a little while to learn the program and then troubleshoot the correct sequence of updates, I think it was well worth the time spent. Once we got the twelve updates narrowed down to two metapackages, we were able to quickly distribute those packages via firewire hard drives and the update process was completed an hour and a half later.

I have been in my current position (Instructional Technologist) for a year now, and am very grateful to my school district (Gilbert Public Schools in Arizona) for the opportunity to attend NECC. The whole conference opened my eyes to a different paradigm of learning and to consider that the student perspective, with the advent of technology, might really have shifted effective educational techniques more than I had been willing to admit. The sessions I attended not only helped expose my to that paradigm, but also provided some potential short-term actions I could do to help begin meeting the challenge of educating today's students, who are truly digital natives.

No, I didn't run out of blogging steam from NECC or my brief sightseeing trip to Washington D.C. I am simply swamped trying to catch up with Master's course work that took a back burner while I was at NECC (and really since I left for vacation on June 11th - it's kind of hard to keep up with an online catch when your Internet access options are changing day to day - and most regularly are dial-up dependent). I also spent one day trying to see everything there was to see on the Mall in Washington D.C. For those of you who have been there, you know that such a task is an impossibility, there is much too much to see. If could've spent a week going through the different buildings and tours that were available. However, since I had exactly 24 hours, of which 6 hours travel time coming from and returning to Philadelphia, as well as 6-7 hours of sleeping time, had to be subtracted, I was pressed for time to say the least.

I've decided to move my full-time blog to a more full-featured blogging interface.  I was looking for the option to email blogposts and to allow for comments, as well as some categorization features.  I'm running Wordpress at http://blog.hintonweb.com and want to invite you over there to take a look and leave comments, whatever you feel like.  If you do leave comments there is a registration required, however it's free and your information is totally confidential.  It's just a formality