Land of Snow

Happy Easter from Up North! When I first moved to Michigan from Ohio, I had no idea where "up north" was. I remember the kids at the school I worked at talked about going up north for the weekend. I had friends at work who had family cottages up north. Over the years I grew to understand what up north meant, at least I thought I did until we arrived in the land of snow, better known as Houghton, Michigan. There is still snow up to the first story windows of our motel. Supposedly, the Northern Lights can be seen most evenings. I've never been a fan of snow, mostly because I hate driving in it. But on our way here, drivers weren't in a hurry and didn't drive crazy like they do at home. Of course there isn't much traffic. I'm beginning to sense that the pace of life may be a bit different here than in suburban Detroit.

View from the first floor windows.

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Weird Thing to Write a Poem About

This poem was written using a fun and free app called Visual Poet. The only drawback is that the final image that is created can't be sent directly to your camera roll. I had to email the image to myself first then save it to my camera roll. It would be interesting to further edit the image with a photo app. I think students could do some powerful writing with Visual Poet. The text blocks can be easily repositioned and edited making it particularly useful in teaching young writers about using line breaks and the spacing of the text. The three picture blocks could also be used to teach about stanzas. Another way to use this app relates to how the writer chooses the image for each of the blocks. Different areas of the image can be zoomed in on making it perfect for writing descriptive sentences. So many possibilites.

Pain in the Butt

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More Healing, More Writing

I think my son is about to turn the corner in his healing process. The original golf ball size pilonidal cyst cavity (warning: pictures from Wikipedia link are not for the squeamish) has almost closed. It started at approximately 2.9 cm deep and has reduced in size to .7 cm deep. He also has a 9 cm incision running the length of his butt crack that once contained additional channels caused by the cyst. This area is also healing nicely. Right now I want this entire nightmare to be over. Daily packing of his wound and monitoring his medication, pain, and signs of infection have been all consuming. I seldom leave the house unless I'm getting groceries or medical supplies. I relinquished control of my lap top so my son would have something to do while on the couch or in bed.

Even though I haven't written any posts in several days, I have been writing, mostly journal entries and lists. I knew I would eventually write about this pilonidal cyst thing but I wasn't sure what that would look like. And since I primarily use my lap top to compose and post, not having easy access to it was a convenient excuse. I have used my iPad and the Blogsy app to post before but I was so slow at using the iPad's internal keyboard that it took forever and I became frustrated. I decided to spring for an Apple wireless keyboard with my birthday Amazon gift cards. The keyboard is super lightweight and portable. Directions for using it with an iPad are not included in the tiny instruction book but one two-minute YouTube video is all it took to get things up and running. It wasn't cheap, almost $70.00, but I absolutely love it and I'm now enjoying posting with my iPad.

My Apple wireless keyboard was so easy to set up and works like a charm.

 

 

 

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Lessons in Wound Care

I'm learning more about wound care than I ever anticipated.

Sweet rain. I sat in my car in my driveway and listened. As I reclined my seat, I closed my eyes. Thunder. The taps of rain grew stronger and louder against the roof and windows. There was no need to worry about the groceries in the trunk. No ice cream to melt or milk to spoil. As the rain began to let up, I knew I would have to shlep the bags into the house, put everything away, then check on my son. He usually slept about an hour after each dressing change. I think it was a combination of the oxycodone and the stress of dealing with having several inches of sterile Kerlix poked and pushed into the gaping cavities created by that wretched pilonidal cyst. Wound packing occured twice daily. Learning the tools and procedures of this process nearly caused me to pass out when I first saw my son's wound after his surgery. Watching the surgeon pull the packing out as my son shook and cried out in pain was almost too much to bare.

The rain slowed to a sprinkle and I left my car cocoon and unloaded the groceries. I grabbed the bag containing cotton tip applicators, which are like Q-tips only longer and packaged to be sterile, and took them up to my his room. I was right. He was still sleeping. I put the applicators next to the other supplies on a table near his bed and watched him sleeping for a bit. He was only fifteen but he looked much older with his muscled 6' 2" frame and scruffy facial hair. He is still my brave little boy.

 

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Keep on Writing

Big sigh. Participating in the TWT Slice of Life Challenge and NaNoWriMo showed me how to stick with it. These experiences taught me that sometimes writing feels hard. I realize this is a normal feeling but I'm still annoyed with myself. I have been writing so much in my head for days and days but unable to commit anything to paper. So today, I'm allowing myself to rip the Band-Aid off, lower my standards, and just get something down. I have been feeling a little paralyzed in general lately. To avoid actually writing anything, I managed to organize all of my professional books into one bookcase. One shelf for coaching and PD, one for reading, one for writing, and one for word study. And I created a new blog, One Speech Therapist, and I've spent far too much time Pinterest cruising. I have several writing projects staring at me. For example, I wanted to create some kind of eBook or photo book for my lit coach buddies using stories we wrote on napkins when we were together presenting in Corpus Christi several years ago. I got started then I got stuck and the half finished project is sitting on my office chair nestled between two other unfinished projects. I'm thinking I need to impose a deadline on myself. Or maybe I need to get myself going by finishing something smaller, like this post.

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Sticking with Blogger (for now)

With my recent move back to speech therapy I figured why not start a new blog to document this transition. I created One Speech Therapist as a companion blog to One Literacy Coach. Since I view blogs as ongoing pieces of writing, I needed to consider audience and purpose for the new blog. My purpose for blogging really hasn't changed in the last year and a half. I blog because I enjoy connecting with other educators, bloggers, and writers and sharing ideas. I'm not interested in selling anything or blogging for profit. The challenging part for me for this new blog is audience. Who do I want to connect with? Speech therapists have lots of different specialties and work in many different settings. And I'm not even sure who I am as a speech therapist anymore, although I'm working on it. I've been reading, reading, reading, articles and published handouts and PowerPoint's from recent conferences. I'm also reading professional books written by speech therapists with a deep understanding of literacy and the reciprocal nature of oral language, written language, and reading. So what does all this have to do with sticking with Blogger?

I considered using WordPress for my new blog. I read and reread blog post after blog post touting the benefits and disadvantages of a variety of web hosts, and I decided to stick with Blogger. I know I don't own my content but I'm okay with that. And WordPress isn't going to help me with my concerns about audience. Figuring out audience will take time and effort regardless of the blogging platform I choose to use. WordPress has wonderful features but  I'm not willing to invest the time yet to learn how to navigate it. Blogger is so easy to use and I haven't encountered significant reasons to switch. My biggest whine about Blogger used to be the lack of threaded comments and they added that feature a few months ago. I also enjoy using Blogsy to write and publish posts and it works like a charm in Blogger. Actually, I think Blogsy works great with WordPress and other web hosts as well. Blogsy is an awesome app by the way. So for now, I'm sticking with Blogger.

Blog Neglect

My blog is in major need of some spring cleaning. I tend to let it get so cluttered up, like my desk. But it is time. Time to revisit my purpose for this blog. What do I hope to accomplish, if anything? Many things to think about. I started thinking about overhauling my blog back in April when Stacey and Ruth unveiled the new fancy shmancy TWT layout, which I love. I experimented with a few templates but nothing felt right. What I should be doing is keeping a list of things I enjoy or appreciate about other blogs. Since the beginning, I wanted my blog to be an avenue for sharing and connecting with other educators and writers. I wanted to use the blog to sharpen and develop my writer's voice. Since those goals remain important, maybe I should just tweak rather than completely gutting it.

Planning for Intervention and Enrichment

I recently had the amazing experience of working with members of my school's SIP team to create some tools to assist classroom teachers to make instructional decisions for students who are struggling as well as students who are excelling beyond developmental or grade level expectations. Collaborating and sharing with professionals so passionate about student achievement was a blast to say the least. We based our work on Richard Allington's Six T's of exemplary teaching and the Optimal Learning Model (Regie Routman's version). Further, we brought with us a belief that all students can achieve at high levels and all learners need instruction that engages higher level thinking. We visualized groups of teachers coming together monthly to examine their classroom formative and summative data, sharing ideas with peers, and walking away with a tier 1/tier 2 plan of action all in one hour. Yes, it may seem lofty, but why not try? And add to that, we wanted teachers and administrators to be able to access these tools with their iPads. Our pie-in-the-sky plan incorporates Google Docs and LiveBinders. The mind map below is an overview of the planning process.

 

Blogging with My iPad

Blogging with my iPad . . . seems like a natural next step in my growing app addiction. This post was written and posted using an app called Blogsy. The app is fun to use and not difficult to figure out. Blogsy includes excellent tutorial videos. Embedding images from Picasa, Flicker, or your iPad camera roll is surprisingly easy. Maybe this will be the push I need to clean all my photos and images out of my hard drive and organize them in web albums in Picasa. Many fixes for Wordpress users were included in the most recent update. If you are interested in composing posts from your iPad, the $4.99 price is quite reasonable. So far, Blogsy is an app that actually does what it claims to do.