Mom & Dad's Visit










Popular posts from this blog

Merge Your Photo Libraries by Playing System Photos Library Musical Chairs

I started using iPhoto when it was first released for Mac a dozen years ago.  It’s had a good run, but the new Photos app has been a welcome update.  One of my favorite things about the new app is that it is fast…like really fast.  It does all kinds of caching and memory management with iCloud to keep your library as nimble as possible.  Back in the day large libraries would really slow down your machine to the point of being unusable.  One of the strategies that I used with iPhoto on older machines was to break up my libraries.  Every few years I would create a new library, which seemed to speed things up for me.  I also kept different libraries on different machines and ended up just kind of collecting libraries over the years.   Long story short, I have several iPhoto libraries, but with the way things work now I really just want one big fat library for everything.   Currently there is no way to merge or import Photo libraries on your computer. However, you can upload everything f...
more »

Threatening Engagement and Actual Engagement

For a teacher, popsicle sticks are a randomization tool.  You can write student names on them, stick them in a jar, and then use them to help you, as the teacher, to be unbiased when calling on students or picking a student for a job.  Let's not forget that the popsicle sticks are a tool for you as the teacher.  We should not confuse a randomization process for choosing engagement as helping to heighten levels of actual engagement. "Threatening possible engagement is not the same as actually being engaged," said me as a 5th grader. With a critical eye, look at your classroom instruction.  Is there any process in your day that is causing you to inadvertently manifest the above scenario, where compliance is the real goal and possible engagement is used as a threat for compliance?  Is this really what you wanted?
more »

School Budgets with OmniOutliner

As a grant administrator and school administrator I’m building budgets all of the time. No, really, it happens quite often.  Zero based budgeting and incremental budgeting are two methods that I use.  With the zero based method I start off with a total budget amount in mind and build my budget up to that amount, aiming to have zero money left over.  An incremental budget means that I take the last budgeting cycle amounts and base my new budget on what was actually spent last time, attempting to take into account future needs.  I find that using these methods together is very effective. Obviously, my school district has professional accounting software that tracks the real money, so there is no need for me to adopt another system that tracks actual purchases.  Most of the time the budgets that I create are quick, one-off, planning budgets that help inform purchasing, grant reporting, and grant writing.  That said, the normal Word, Excel, Pages, Numbers tools don’t really allow you to d...
more »