I completed the eCensus tonight. I found it easy and straightforward to use. Some of the questions were a bit oddly worded which I find difficult to answer sometimes. This goes for other forms too. Last year I did the test eCensus which was held in our area. Myself and a friend gave feedback that there was no option for home education either in the census paper form or in the eCensus. That feedback wasn’t acted upon and once again there was nowhere to list home education. I gave feedback again when I’d completed the census.

Surely the government would like information on the prevalence of home education. I thought the whole point of the census was to gather statistics! The education department has these figures but other departments don’t because of the privacy act. I feel the option should be in the census then parents can choose whether they want to indicate that they home educate their children or not. What do others think? What government departments might benefit from stats on home education? Health Dept. Local Govt. etc

Australian census, Home Education, statistics

I think it’s a bit of fun to register with these counters 🙂

I’ve registered all my computers as well as the network at Teen Challenge.

Ubuntu Counter, Linux

This project didn’t end up being as successful as I’d hoped. The school didn’t allow enough time for the students to complete it. The students worked very well when they were at Teen Challenge and there were good learning outcomes for them and they had a very positive first experience of Linux. They both installed Ubuntu on their own computers at home too. 🙂 But there weren’t any completed boxes, at the end of the project, to be given away. I won’t drop the project altogether there may be others I can get involved in it.

Linux, recycling, Xubuntu

house cleaning

We went to Victor Harbor yesterday for a funeral while we were there we had lunch at a lovely little deli and walked out to Granite Island to look for whales. We didn’t see any whales but we did see some seals and penguins. We all took turns taking heaps of photos.

Victor Harbor Whale Watch Centre

The Southern Right Whales come to South Australia to have their calves because it’s too cold around Antartica where they are from. I’ll put the photos up as soon as I’ve downloaded them from my camera.

whales, seals, whale watching, Southern Right Whales

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