Fantasy Football

i now have my very first fantasy football team. it is a trivial persuit, but for some reason it makes me smile. i won my first game and can't wait to see what happens this week. i did put a lot of my team on seattle! gotta stay true to the home team! so i picked hasselback as qb and the seattle defense. they didn't do so great last week, but i'm hoping they will step it up this week. fun, fun, fun!

weekends

I should really look forward to weekends, but I am in a funk. During the week I am busy with the school where I work and the girls go to school, college homework and basically trying to keep the house from completely turning into a science experiment and keeping us fed. This is about all I can do during the week and I find it satisfying despite it being tiring.

The weekend is another story. I should be catching up on laundry and cleaning and homework, but my back hurts and all I feel like doing is sitting around and being lazy. It doesn't help that Ari woke up sick last night and that just sucks the life out of me.

Today is filled with finishing up my homework and watching football. I think the biggest frustration is that I missed church because Ari was sick and Jason has a toothache and can't hear in one ear. I think when I miss that time with other Christians that it just sets off the weekend and makes me look forward to going back to work.

i dig her

i am stealing my husband's cool morphed picture because the more i hear about this person, the more i think that john mccain kicked butt on his choice for vp. not because he picked a woman, although it doesn't hurt. mainly because i love the way she is totally against wasting money and seems to be a straight shooter (at least when aiming a caribou). my hopes are high.

Goodbye

A couple of nights ago I heard about a hacking job on the news. The hackers used a broadband connection and a laptop (as well as some pretty good decoding software) to hack into a department stores computer and stole 41,000 credit card numbers. The news report said that a lot of stores have good encryption, but do not have passwords to get into the encrypted data. So the hackers just had to decode the encryption and BAM! they had the info. They also said that there is no legal requirement for businesses to have any kind of particular protection on their computer files, so as a consumer, there is no way to know how protected your credit card information is when you make purchases at the store.

Here we have been spending all of this time studying and learning about what can be done online and here you could have your credit card number hacked without every touching a computer. All you have to do is make a purchase at a store and you could lose your identity to a thief.

Throughout this class I have also been a proponent of the idea that stealing has always been a problem. Yet, I will concede that in the past people were stealing what you had, while today they are stealing what you may not have. They are creating debt for you. I guess people could charge things in your name in the past, but when they did it was face to face instead of anonymously online.

The news report concluded that the best way to protect yourself was to get cash from the bank and make more purchases with cash instead of trusting businesses with your credit card information because banks were more secure with their passwords, firewalls, and encrypted data.

I think the bottom line is that we are always at risk with our finances and we can do some basic things to be careful, teach kids ethics and hope for the best. The other option is crawling under a rock until the computer age goes away (which is not going to happen). Because of this class I will be more careful with passwords and make more of an effort to work with kids on these issues, but I refuse to crawl under a rock.

Goodbye ethics class and classmates that have completed the program. Hope to see you around!

skittles vs. webquest

for my ethics in tech. course (the reason i started this blog) we did a skittles lesson, where we learned a lot about how to create a graph through data used from the colors of skittles. we also did a lesson about webquests, evaluating them and finding good ones. these two assignments were similar in that we were required to learn about an area of technology. they were different in that one pertained more to a specific program, while the other was exploratory in nature. i don't think it is fair to say one is better than the other. i think that they are different lessons with different goals in mind. one would be better for working with graphs and learning about excell, while webquests are better for using the internet to explore content informaiton. i would say that the webquests are more appropriate for my educational setting because i have very limited time with my music students. a webquest gets them using technology in a way that will help them learn about music without taking time away to just learn about technology. in my opinion, it is my job as a music teacher to use technology as a tool to enhance curricular goals. i actually believe that is true for every teacher. a lesson like the skittle lesson, would be more appropriate in a math class or a computer class.

plagiarism in kansas

in order to find out my school's policy on plagiarism, i searched the online board policy. the word plagiarism was no where to be found, so this is the closest i could find.

"Dishonesty--Any act of lying, whether verbal or written, including forgery.

First Offense: Nullification of forged document. Principal/Student conference, detention, in-school suspension, or 1-10 days out-of-school suspension.

Subsequent Offense: Nullification of forged document. Detention, in-school suspension, 1-180 days out-of-school suspension, or expulsion." - copied from the board policy of belton school district number 124

my next comments are based on an article about a plagiarism case in piper, ks. click here if you are not familiar with the article. if i did it right, it will take you right to the article.

my response: if i had 28 students plagiarize, i would give them zeros, but i would be absolutely sure that plagiarism had taken place. i was shocked to see the school board in piper, ks, undermine the teacher because parents complained. her policy was in writing ahead of time and the students should have had to live with the consequences of their actions. i remember the first time i turned in a paper without a bibliography. i had put all of the items in quotes, but i just ran out of time to finish the paper and just printed and turned it in. that teacher gave me a "c" on the paper because i did use quotations, but warned that future papers with any omissions would be "torn up and thrown in the trash." i had not signed any policies regarding plagiarism, but it only took that one time for me to learn my lesson.

unfortunately, the lesson learned by the students in kansas was that anything is acceptable if your parents are willing to back you up. i applaud the teacher and others for having the guts to resign on principle.

to search or not to search

i have learned a lot recently about crawlers, human powered directories, spiders, and search engines in general. it is very interesting that search engines do not all index the same sites.  i guess i always thought they were searching the actual web, not an index of the web...very interesting.  i also did not know that they do not search libraries or article databases.  i guess that's why i have better luck doing research through the web and through the cass county library site.  the library site gives me more articles.  i really enjoy finding out how things work, so this was fun to check into. when i am trying to find important info, i will definitely be looking for a second opinion from now on.