The two week spring break has just ended and it's back to work again. I spent almost a week of the break in Bangkok for the annual EARCOS conference. The conference was excellent as usual, especially for a technology teacher; there were so many tech oriented workshops that I really had to work to decide which ones to attend and which ones to skip.
As I'm updating this page, I'm also noticing what I wrote here in December when I came back from a tech seminar in Jakarta. The message was pretty much the same in both Bangkok and Jakarta, although the depth was better in Bangkok. As I wrote in December: Blogs, wikis, websites, podcast, IM are all tech tools that were mentioned, but I've already used all of them.
During the last term, I started having my students work on this wiki (www.wikiplaces.wetpaint.com) for students to post pictures and text about Indonesia, especially the islands that we spend time on. We're going to continue working on this project over the next term in addition to several other web-based projects which I'm still working on.
As usual, the EARCOS conference encouraged me to keep on working in the direction that I've been moving over the past decade with some upgrades in thought and direction. Ian Jukes was one of the main keynoters at the conference, and I have to say he was impressive. I've heard a lot of what he said before, but it was great to hear it again. He has a very engaging speaking style. Wish I could do that.
We are going to place more student work on our school website, but after some suggestions from colleagues in Bangkok, we will password protect the student work.
I want to do some more podcasting work this term as well as finishing up the movies that we started last term. Our major problem with making movies is that our hardware is too outdated to perform the tasks that we want it to perform. We did buy two iMacs for movie work and the students love them. We're thinking about moving to a Mac base (specifically laptops) in the near future, but we have a lot of selling to do before that large jump becomes reality.
On another track, I did a check on the search terms used for this site and came up with some interesting stats. The overwhelming keyword was "Sumbawa" versus a year ago when the number one term was "Papua." More than half the keywords involved job searches for various schools in Asia. There were a number of keywords relating to math as well. And for the main surprise, there were six searches for my name. Hmm, I wonder who's looking for me.
On yet another track, I'm creating a new page for the Sumbawa.org site for selling our house in Sumbawa. The kids have made it clear that they want to move back to Bali once I've finished teaching here. As much as I love our house in Sekongkang, and as much as I love this village, we just won't be able to afford keeping four houses going during my retirement. So if you want to move to a lovely, somewhat remote island in Indonesia, check out the new page(www.sumbawa.org/houseforsale). We're looking at a sale date of June 2008.
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