More staples and an unpleasant surprise

Stardate 19022011: Finished off the staple pulling today. But under a cloud. Settlement was supposed to happen but at the last minute a previous tenant filed a caveat. On the property. Preventing the settlement from happening. The first I knew about this is when the vendor phones me, obviously upset and apologizing  - I assumed about not cleaning up the property - but in reality because of what has happened. 

Unpleasant surprises have this quality to them, namely being both unpleasant and a surprise. You're out there renovating and you turn up a rotten board or a damp section of ceiling. Well this is unpleasant - perhaps - but not really a surprise. Or perhaps it's a surprise, but it's hardly unpleasant. You can after all cut a section out and fix it up. Unexpected 3rd party legal hassles - this may well be the epitome of unpleasant surprise. At any rate it makes me appreciate all of the nice people I've met out in this part of the world. 

So, without knowing that I should be keeping about the Kobayashi Maru scenario in mind I've torn up all the lino (before settlement) and now I'm facing having to finish off a job on the floor *just in case* this deal goes South and I end up with no house. So I spent part of the day pulling tacks and trimming in good fresh timber into my (?) new floor. The local hardware store had meranti so I used that to fix up where there used to be walls and I also patched the section of floor that had been attacked by wood worm at some point. I also used a some plasterer's tape and 

So where to next? Well who knows? All these are over a shed (admittedly 100' x 20') that was leased by a previous owner of the property who sold it to the current owner of the property. As I understand it the terms of the lease weren't met and so the current vendor was able to evict the shed tenant and sell the property to us with vacant possession. Vacant possession being a condition of the sale contract. So we'll have to see I guess. 

In the end timber remains a wonderful thing to work with. Such integrity and wholeness to it. And clean. Sawdust - is there any finer mess? I doubt it. 

And so the day ends with a cheap red. All's well that ends well. 

Staple pulling

All renovations start somewhere. In our case it began with pulling up the vinyl flooring and getting to the boards beneath. Boards always look so promising. You peel up the edge and they look all polished and half decent. They all but beg you to reveal them in the seductive tones of a new best friend. Encouraged you start to pull back and chip away at the lino and masonite underlay. With a shovel (true discovery always requires a shovel).

And so you continue the process of discovery. Like a slightly awkward date you get over the odd unpleasant revelation and continue on with high hopes. At some point you plug on because, well you have torn up most of the lino by now but if this were a date you'd be thinking "You know what, I'd rather be home watching a DVD, reading a book or what ever by now".

Now, the sane rational man inside you just knows that there was a reason why these boards were covered up in the first place. Especially when the other half of the house has exposed boards, but this, for some reason doesn't. But hope sprung eternal. And as it turned out they weren't too bad. Turns out we're looking at oak floorboards. A little bit of woodworm in a couple of planks right next to the carpet. And a little bit of patching to do where old walls were removed at some point in the past. 

Rotten boards but good sound bearers with no rot. Below is the old patch that I'll pull out and redo with some matching oak from elsewhere in the house. 

If this were a date I'd be feeling OK. Certainly none of that sinking in pit of your stomach feeling. There'll certainly be enough work to keep me honest for a while. The biggest thing to deal with is the staples. They must have had a brand new air powered stapler - cause there's staples everywhere. Man these guys loved staples!

Like all good renovators I tried the easy mechanical way - hammer it in hard with a hammer, cut it off with a Dremel, pull with my undersized pincers and then finally I purchased the right tool for the job. Big Pincers. 

So far I've spent about 4 hours and pulled out 40 odd square meters of staple. About 40 sq/m to go! For some reason as I pulled staples I kept on thinking about "The Shawshank Redemption". Don't know why. Just did. Perhaps renovating floors is like prison. Like doing time. But with any luck you'll get out at the end.

Looking at the horizon

It's been a dream to own some land and now we own some debt that comes with a house, shed, chook run, a bore, some fencing, a whole pile of rubbish and metal and scrap and wood and remnants of things that were - reminders of something that happened. Sometime at some point. But you don't buy land (and the house on it) because of how things are. But rather because we see how things might be. 

Teachertube & Pivot Stickfigure Animator

By the way, have you come across this site http://www.teachertube.com/ yet? It's a retty cool alternative to YouTube and obviously has a lot less issues about language, profanity (some YouTube comments are amazingly profance) and questionable images. Not only good for students but also for teachers as well as it has some good motivational videos and other material that illustrate how ICT in everyday life and in education are changing (almost in front of our eyes). Plus its gots lots of small student created materials that can really help orient and inspire a class of students.

And yay! it's not blocked by default by DECS - so it must be clean and wholesome and teachers can go to it straight away.

I've also been using a nice little freeware program called Pivot Stickfigure Animator. It's a small 485 kb download and it comes with some sample files and you can save your work as animated gif's. It lets you create stick figure animations. It works well with students and provides a very simple way of giving them the chance to do a 'free time' (if you like) fill in lesson where they use the computer to CREATE something. But even a simple free time filler can be scaffolded into quite productive projects if you have a mind to do it. You can save the little files it creates as animated image files (animated gif's) and these files (there's only one file for a whole movie) will keep on replaying over and over. Then you can take these images and use them in Word documents, in PowerPoints and even embed them into excel spreadsheets. You could use Excel to create a timeline and have images for each stage or for key events in a narrative- a good way to use Excel with it's ability to pivot text, colour cells to represent sections and so on).

Anyway I've taken students individual animated gif's and stitched them together into a PowerPoint presentation. I did this during a lesson as they were creating their animations. You can simply save what they have and it will be animated provided there are more than 2 frames.

I added some colour effects, the names of the student authors and this certainly impressed the year 2/3 middle primary class. We could use the PowerPoint to go and create a movie and storyboard what we want to cover in future lessons. A teacher could also insert these animated gif's into Photostory, Movie Maker and add narration and descriptive captions and build up quite powerful texts combining sounds / narration, images, text - and all without photographs! The default background is white but you can add a single background image if you like and this gives us lots of options (scanned pictures of student art, photographs, images created in kidpix and so on) to go on with.

Digital / Manual

All my life I've had hobbies - even before I knew what a 'hobby' was. I look back at my life and see what must be a cycle - hobby 1, hobby 2, hobby 3, hobby 1 - over and over again. I'm back onto photography again. But things have changed - this time I'm using a Pentax *ist DL but with a manual screw mount lens. It's kind of a blast. However as more than person has noticed - swapping from k-mount to M42 lens mount is about the the easiest thing to do in the world. Getting it undone - well that takes some effort and I note here what one has to do so that I can remember it for next time:

The screw mount to bayonet adapter is easy enough to insert in the camera, removing it turned out to be more tricky. If you study the adapter closely, you see a small spring steel spring that is screwed on to the adapter proper. When this is in the camera, the spring will engage a small catch inside the lens mount, preventing the adapter from rotating when the lens is unscrewed. To remove the adapter it is necessary to disengage the spring by inserting the tool that comes with the adapter in the right place, that is outside the spring. However, when subsequently trying to turn the adpater clockwise, the tool easily cathes on to the bayonet flange, preventing removal.Obviously, this procedure requires training, preferably in a dust free environment, before trying it in the field. I am tempted to purchase a prime screw mount lens to use in the field together with the Peleng, just to avoid having to fiddle with the adapter!

However, the instructions don't mention why the adaptor ring tool has a small prong on one side. The prong is what goes over the spring to push it in. After the first few degrees of movement you then have to raise up the prong so that you can then turn the adaptor for the final turn. It's no where near as easy as a bayonet mount lens. But I still think using the M42 lenses is worth the effort.

DVD Commentaries and Oral Literacy

I'm feeling sick today as a great wave of pestilence sweeps across our merry school. I would have taken a sick day off last week, but you know how it is ... programming requirements - gotta get to meetings, a sports / dance carnival. Hey grin and bear it baby! And that was before we all swagged it out by a campfire overnight in another school's grounds. Sometimes, you know, even when we're feeling down - living and working out in The APY Lands has its real upsides.

Anyway feeling poorly as I was this morning I lingered over that coffee and was casting my eyes through The Weekend Australian when I came across an article about alternative homebrewed DVD commentaries that appeared in Lawrie Zion's DVD Letterbox column on the 9th of September, 2006. In the article (see below) Zion refers to MMM Commentaries, an Aussie site. It occured to me what an excellent opportunity this could provide for an alternative literacy outlet - students creating their own commentary of a movie (perhaps based on their shared class reading of a text) or providing a commentary to any genre movie / documentary or whatever based on their study (for example they could take on the role of 'scholar' and explain some technical detail - or tell you why its wrong). It would certainly provide a refreshing alternative to the traditional 'my book report' format. And I think in my context, it would give students who are essentially ESL / EFL, an opportunity to construct a higher order text when they don't (mostly) have the necessary independent reading and writing skills to construct an equivalent written text. More information on Alternative DVD commentaries can be found here in a 2002 article and of course here, on Wikipedia.

Be the sound of a tech savy teacher (there is no sound)

Graham Wegener's Teaching Generation Z blog reflects on The Blue Skunk Blog's perspective on Hiring a tech savvy teacher. In particular I was taken with the question:

How should a tech-savvy teacher create lesson plans? What is the mix of off-the-shelf apps, teacher-created projects/apps and traditional media (books etc.)? I've always thought the first sign of a technologically literate teacher is one who knows when to use technology and when not to use technology. A good teacher will use a variety of instructional strategies depending on the needs of the individual learner and the skill to be mastered.

It was just earlier today that I was faced with the imortance of this point; knowing when to use technology. Namely that tech savvy teaching doesn't just mean that you use computers. At the end of the day computers / the internet can be a potentially wide-band medium for us to convey our message with (just as a pen and paper can be narrow band). I think that potentially, the sound of a tech-savy teacher is going to be the sound of someone making the links between formal literacy lessons, various classroom discussions, pen and paper / chalk and talk learning activities. All of these things need to come along (and sometimes it may seem like these things come kicking and screaming) when one enters the tech-savy ICT zone.

I think that all too often we see teachers entering the computer room as if that room were a place apart, another realm on the far side of a great divide. And routinely we see lessons undertaken as if all that had been planned and learned in the past was now, somehow, irrelevant (i.e. that's old technology). It's not any great point, but it has to be recognised that ICT is everywhere - it isn't a mode in other words like old word processing programs used to operate (1st I'm in type mode, then I'm in preview mode, now I'm in print mode after I've been in spelling mode). ICT is essentially modeless - or it should be - and we should recognise that, ideally, technology is not a divide in our lives, rather it is everywhere. I'm sure that a lot of teachers get put off the idea of teaching ICT / or teaching in a tech savy manner because they do not realise this very point. And so they still go to the computer room and think 'computer mode'.