Friday, October 21, 2005

Links to my students' new blogs

Here are the links to my students' blogs here on Blogger. They like Blogger better already!

Beto
Juan
Son

So far you have to have a blogger account to comment on their blogs. We may change that once they are used to the new site. Until then, I apologize for the inconvenience.

Changes...

I finally gave up on journalspace and decided to move the students to Blogger. We are working on it right now. I will update the links here as soon as I can.

Where do the days go?

It has been over a week since I last posted. I honestly can't understand why. I am busy, but I think the biggest problem is still not having internet at home. I hope someday to get back in the swing of this.

Thursday, October 13, 2005

Filters

Bud and others have been talking about the subject of filters ... something near but not-so-dear to my heart. E-school news has an interesting article on it that you might want to check out!

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

An example

I meant to include an example of cell phone failure in the last post. It will give you an idea.

I called my son, Parviz, yesterday. The first time I tried, it rang and then went to his voice mail. But instead of the male voice I was expecting, I heard a woman say, "You have reached the voice mail of Roz A..." I hung up, figuring she -- whoever she is -- wasn't going to get a message to my son. I tried a couple more times to get him, but I always got a "System is busy" message. Finally, I was able to make the call. It rang a couple times and then there was silence. I said, "Hello," and a woman's voice answered, "I'd like to speak to Terry, please." I explained that I had been trying to call my son. We hung up. Then I tried calling my son again. I got through this time. As I started to explain what had happened, he told me that he had answered that last call to him. His phone, instead of saying I was calling him, said that he was calling me. And when he said hello, he found he was talking to someone in a store somewhere.

That story, 100% true, is my life in a nutshell right now. Things like that seem to be happening on all fronts. So if I seem a little crazy these days... I probably am!

An update

Well, I guess it is time to give you an update on life in these parts. There really isn't much to say except that we are all still recovering. Those of us who suffered no real damage - and I am fortunate to be in that group - have the luxury of talking about how our cell phones don't work half the time and we still don't have cable. Others, of course, are not so lucky.

Time here is still screwy. We can't remember what day it is. Did something happen last week or three weeks ago? Now, normally I have a little problem that way (old age, I guess), but this is way beyond me and my normal forgetfulness. Things are not helped by the fact that a trip that used to take a half hour may now take an hour.

You have to think about what stores are open and what hours they are open. Most stores still aren't back to normal hours -- largely because there aren't enough employees to keep them open. The ones that are open (which is most of them), have trouble keeping items on the shelves because so many people have had to replace so much.

We are trying to retain a sense of humor, but for all of us from time to time, it gets old. We are short on patience. We want things to be easy again.

And then we hear the stories of more bodies found or someone's elderly relative having suffeed due to being evacuataed. Then -- if only for a moment -- we are grateful.

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Links to my students' blogs

Well, here are the links to my students' blogs. We have a new student who started today, so his is empty at the moment, but it won't stay that way for long!

Beto

Juan

Son

Also, they are now listed in a sidebar on this blog, for those of you who actually look at the blog!

Another glitch

Well, as you may know, I have chosen journalspace for my student blogs because it was the only site we could access at school with our regular ISP. (Things are different now because of Katrina, but I didn't want to set them up anywhere else in case we go back to the old ISP next semester.) Well, Bud just told me that he can't access the site at his school because it is blocked. I hope there won't be many people who have that problem.

Journalspace is really clunky to me -- probably just because I started here on Blogger. For instance, I had trouble figuring out how to get links to my students' blogs on my journalspace blog. And it says there is RSS feed, but I haven't gotten that straightened out on their blogs yet. Next semester, if it looks safe, I will set my students up here. It is so much easier.

But at least we are up and sort of running. I'm happy about that!

Monday, October 03, 2005

An invitation

Well, my students have started posting to their blogs, and it is quite exciting. They have really gotten the idea of publishing their work! They were writing stories for another class and told me that they wanted to post them on the wall outside the other class so others in the college could read them. I suggested that they post them to their blogs, and they are going to do it!

So here is the invitation: Come over to my blog at journalspace. In the top right corner is the list of our class blogs. Click on them and see what has been posted so far.

I guess I am going to have to go back in and look at how to set up RSS feeds for their blogs as I couldn't get it to work today when I tried to subscribe. I probably just need to have them change a setting. Until then, though, you can get to them easily through mine.