I’m currently designing a website to put most of my photos on (well the ones I want publicly available anyway). I don’t really want to ‘clog my blog’ with heaps of photos. I love photography, I’m not necessarily good at it but having a digital camera has allowed me to persue this hobby. We all use the camera for fun and also to document school projects, excursions etc. I have many, many photos of Jessica where she’s actually holding the camera taking a photo of herself LOL.

I’m hoping the website will also act as a feeder to this blog, by linking to blog posts from the website I may get some more visitors. I’ve also used the Google Pages wysiwyg page creator to do the same sort of thing there except I won’t have the photos there just an intro of me and links to the blog. It’s an experiment. I don’t know if any of this will work but I’m trying it out. It’s fun to do. Having links to my blog posts also boosts my ranking with Technorati too.

The other reason for trying Google Pages was to see if it would be suitable for any of my students. I found it easier to use than Yahoo/Geocities but that’s me. I’ll have to try it out on a class and see how they go. I’m not into wysiwyg editors but for some students they’re good. I do also teach basic plain html coding for those who can handle it.

The site url is http://www.lm.net.au/~kmw There’ll probably be plenty of things to pick at about it and yes I’ve used someone else’s template. I don’t have time to make my own and why re-create the wheel anyway. It’s a rough and quick site just for fun and a place to put my photos.

digital photography, personal websites, Google Pages

I went to the preview performance last night of our local production of Joseph which Jessica’s in. It was terrific! It was very bright, energetic, colourful, funny and full of life. The kids were great, they really knew their stuff and worked hard! Jessica’s been coming home from rehearsals worn out but happy. Our theatre group always produces shows of a high standard. The lighting and visual effects were good too. A data projector was used to project scenes on a backdrop instead of painted scenery which needs to be changed for each set.

Now we’ve got eight more performances. We did Jesus Christ Superstar two years ago and the hall was packed out each performance, one of the Sunday matinees more chairs had to be brought in. I should think this will be the same. I’ll be helping with makeup for a number of the performances and I’ll attend another performance as a spectator too!

amateur theatre, Joseph And The Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, musicals

The original post is here.

The Year 12 students have been working well on this project. They’re making their way through the piles of assorted tech. So far we have one box which has Xubuntu installed. They were so excited to install the base Ubuntu system and then configure the network from the command line they kept thinking of websites to ping. Ooo let’s ping this one, now we’ll ping this other one. 🙂 LOL

Both of these young men have excellent MS Windows and hardware skills and are very keen to learn Linux. They pick things up so quickly it leaves me in awe!

Now I just need to install some xfce4 games and then this box is ready to be given away.

xubuntu, ubuntu, computer recycling

Pia Waugh from Linux Australia is featured in this rather patchy article in the
Sydney Morning Herald technology section. Pia is represented well in the article, it covers all the things she’s involved in but I feel it kind of jumps around all over the place. One minute it’s talking about her community work and then it’s about her business and her philosophies for success. To me it’s a bit patchy. I don’t know if patchy is the right word, maybe light or lacking in substance. It’s a ‘nice’ article. It says a lot without saying much at all. Maybe it was a longer article which got the chop?…. I’ve had the privilege of hearing Pia speak, have read her blog and her emails on the Linux Australia list and I know that there’s more depth to her than what the article portrayed.

Anyway well done Pia, it’s great to see women in IT doing good stuff and being interviewed in major newspapers!

women in IT, Linux Australia, Sydney Morning Herald

“Homeschoolers around Australia celebrate National Home Education Week annually in May. The
motivation behind this is to inform the general community about this enriching alternative to
regular school attendance and to celebrate the freedom we have as families working toward a
common end. There will be events held in cities and many country areas.”

This is quoted from an email from the Home Education Association Inc.

I haven’t heard yet what our local Home Education Network will be doing but I’m sure we’ll be doing something. If the whole group aren’t getting together that week then individuals may hold some activities. If noone else is I might write something for the local newspaper too.

home education, children’s education, schooling

I’ve been reading some more home education blogs today and came across Bruggie Tales and their posts about Audio Books Listening Up A Storm and Audio Books Update There are lots of suggestions for how to use audio books for children and adults as well as enjoying books and music on cd, mp3 player and cassette.

Being a lover of Open Source & Open Content I’m impressed with LibriVox From the LibriVox site:

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net (podcast and catalog). Our objective is to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project.

Some of their books are very large to download but they can be downloaded chapter by chapter if you can’t download the whole thing at once.

Even though it’s school holidays here it doesn’t make much difference to us and our routine. I’m going to get some audio books from the library and possibly download some for us to listen to. I can put some on my laptop for the kids to listen to when I’m working.

audio books, LibriVox, home schooling