Ice storm boredom, e-books, MM update

So apparently the last three months or so, North Carolina has turned into North Dakota and no one told any of us.  I've lived or at least spent a lot of time in the various parts and climates in this country, and while NC can be incredibly helter skelter, this has been ridiculous.  I think in my first two years we lost one maybe two days tops.  We're now on day 8 and that is a low number for most of the districts around us.  We're used to 40 degree temperature changes, but rarely has it brought the ice, snow, sleet and cold that this winter/early spring has brought.  So we're out again today and it'll of course be in the 60's by the end of the week.  And since our daycare is through one of the community colleges in our area, they stay open and closed with the school.  So it's daddy daycare again.  Last time I did this, the twins were pretty young still.  Now my son is nearly crawling, both are much more active so the job is a little more difficult although they can now entertain themselves and one another a bit better.  It's a joy to stay home with them, but I know I'll be completely worn out by tonight by them too.  The only downside is I'm sure that our daycare bill will be the same even though my wife or I have had to stay home with them during these closings.  Such is life I guess.  Been a fun morning chasing my son around and occasionally finding sometime to play on the Google web store to get some new extensions and apps while they took their morning nap.  A big fan so far of following extentions:

• Shorten Me - shortens your url when needing to copy and paste it
• todoist - daily organizer and to do lists
• save to Drive - not bad but is only good for pages with no links.  Great for copying articles, texts, recipes, etc
• Send from Gmail - so outlook stops coming up
• Google calendar - easy way to add stuff rather than opening a new tab

On another money gripe, kudos for whoever came up with the idea that graduate students have to pay to graduate.  Wish I could have been there for that meeting.  Gee, we're getting tuition money from these students that we don't have to house or feed...how else can we stick it to them though.  It just doesn't seem like it's enough.  But I digress, complaining isn't going to get me anywhere, and it isn't going to get that fee to go away either.  So I'm down to just two reflective essays for my portfolio and a research paper and that's it. Roughly 5 more weeks and it'll thankfully be over with.  There have definitely been some things I wouldn't have learned without these classes, but there have also been some filler and other parts that really just reassured or reiterated what I already knew or taught.  Probably the biggest thing that I took from all this, was I learned how to create an e-book.  They are time consuming to make, but it is a great way to have your students learn about any kind of content and they are great for different learning styles as you can add audio and pictures to the entire thing for those that are EC or are just more visual learners or audio learners.  I did one in one of my classes for the Cold War, as just a way to introduce what the Cold War was and a lot of the key vocabulary that comes with it.  I think that over the summer when I get some time I'll look to make more of these.  At least that's the plan, we'll see how much time the twins really give me to do anything this summer.

In the classroom, we've assigned our American figures yesterday and started our research.  Unfortunately, Mother Nature was kept me from see my 7th graders, so we'll be moving things around yet again, but eventually we'll start up with our Most Powerful World Leader bracket as well.  I plan to post as much as I can here and on twitter.  I'm hoping that by sharing our progress and results, the students will take this a bit more seriously.  I know that a majority will because they are driven to do well and/or better their classmates, but hopefully this can get everyone on board to do well.  I also added a smack talk wall for the project, it should be fun to see them enjoy that part of it.  I'll have updates from both classes next week with where we are in our tournaments, I'm hoping to have the voting start of April.

Alright, back to chasing the kids around, this post has taken about 3 hours to write with all the stops.  Have a good one