It's been a super crazy week at work. Book sale, teaching classes, and desperately attempting to get enough sleep to function (or substituting caffeine). Sadly there was much caffeine substitution. But it's Friday night and I'm still kickin' so that's a good sign. Tonight I'm babysitting 2 little boys and an iPad. So clearly it is my civic duty to test out the iPad while I listen to the boys giggle while supposedly asleep in the next room. So without further adieu, the things I loved this week.
Ok, so using a bulleted list on the iPad is going to be way too much work as I would have to hand code it (using a keyboard split up into 3 sections: letters, numbers and frequent symbols, and lesser used symbols) and I'll be honest I'm just not that dedicated to them to go through that. ;) I mean the apostrophes are a pain enough. Though with time I'm sure I could get used to it. Or find a browser or app that supports the compose mode on blogger.
By now I bet you can guess what the first thing on my list will be this week, an iPad!!! Seriously when I saw Kerri pull it out, I wanted to tell her to put it away. I mean, I just got my smart phone last week. No more electronics purchases for a while. I hope. Crap. I was sort of banking on my hatred of the keyboard to keep me from buying one of these. As you can see it's not slowing me down much. It's faster than using the flip out keyboard on my phone and I use that all the time.I still sort of feel like I'm cheating on my Macbook. But the iPad and my phone are so much more mobile than the laptop. OMG how spoiled do I sound? I mean just a few years ago when I was a freshman in college I was so freaking excited to have a laptop so i could drag it to the library to do homework on. And now I'm complaining that my ridiculously amazing MacBook is too bulky to pack??? Wow, how things have changed. So despite really not needing one, or really needing to spend any more money on electronics for a while, I want an iPad super bad. Arg. Oh, and the kids have fallen asleep BTW.
Second thing I loved this week is sharing my lave of reading with people. As you may have seen on Facebook or gmail this week, we had our first meeting of the YA book club this week. Sadly only one person made the meeting, but Diana and I and our lone student to show had a fabulous time talking all about books and reading. Not just the books we read, but also the way we read, and how we select books, and whether or not we buy books, or read them once we buy them. Sometimes it takes something like that to make me remember that my love of books is so much bigger than just my voracious reading habits. And it wasn't just that conversation. It was reading Mo Willems Pigeon books to the boys tonight. (They are 4 and 5.) they hadn't seen them yet and to watch them just light up listening to me read them was amazing. The wonder and excitement a good book can produce is one of the best things in the world. I'm glad I had 2 such good reminders of that this week.
Thirdly, I loved teaching the 60's class this week for much the same reason. This history and music class is often full of music students. The university I teach at doesn't have a history major. So as someone with a history degree, I feel it is my academic duty to instill that love in some of my students. In the past, the class has not always been totally receptive to this lice I am sort of forcing on them. But this year, some thing was different. I mean, I had non-history major undergrads excited about ephemera and really thinking about preservation of data and artifacts so that future historians may know what we're like. My expressed goal for the class was to introduce them to primary sources that might be useful for the paper they have to write, but my implicit goal was to introduce them to possible history (as opposed to straight music) topics. Due to the nature of the students, there tends to be a lot of Beatles and Elvis papers in the class because they have to pick topics so early in the semester. Thanks to the digital archives I've found and cultivated over the last 2 years, i think one of the students is doing the Kent State shootings despite having never heard of them before walking into class. And if you could only have seen one student's eyes light up as he explained what he learned in just 10 minutes of playing around in the Montgomery bus boycott archive. It was so inspiring. This is why I do what I do. To see students light up like that. I can't say if they reacted the way they did was because they knew from the trip or it was just this group of students, but either way I am seriously stoked to see what they come up with when we look for secondary sources on Tuesday!!
There were so many other things I loved about the week, like the Twins securing a spot in the playoffs, and playing the "in your pants" game at the book sale, and hanging out with Diana while selling books, but I've spent enough time typing this post up. It's time for me to finish the book I brought along to read...and explore a little more on this iPad!!
Ok, so using a bulleted list on the iPad is going to be way too much work as I would have to hand code it (using a keyboard split up into 3 sections: letters, numbers and frequent symbols, and lesser used symbols) and I'll be honest I'm just not that dedicated to them to go through that. ;) I mean the apostrophes are a pain enough. Though with time I'm sure I could get used to it. Or find a browser or app that supports the compose mode on blogger.
By now I bet you can guess what the first thing on my list will be this week, an iPad!!! Seriously when I saw Kerri pull it out, I wanted to tell her to put it away. I mean, I just got my smart phone last week. No more electronics purchases for a while. I hope. Crap. I was sort of banking on my hatred of the keyboard to keep me from buying one of these. As you can see it's not slowing me down much. It's faster than using the flip out keyboard on my phone and I use that all the time.I still sort of feel like I'm cheating on my Macbook. But the iPad and my phone are so much more mobile than the laptop. OMG how spoiled do I sound? I mean just a few years ago when I was a freshman in college I was so freaking excited to have a laptop so i could drag it to the library to do homework on. And now I'm complaining that my ridiculously amazing MacBook is too bulky to pack??? Wow, how things have changed. So despite really not needing one, or really needing to spend any more money on electronics for a while, I want an iPad super bad. Arg. Oh, and the kids have fallen asleep BTW.
Second thing I loved this week is sharing my lave of reading with people. As you may have seen on Facebook or gmail this week, we had our first meeting of the YA book club this week. Sadly only one person made the meeting, but Diana and I and our lone student to show had a fabulous time talking all about books and reading. Not just the books we read, but also the way we read, and how we select books, and whether or not we buy books, or read them once we buy them. Sometimes it takes something like that to make me remember that my love of books is so much bigger than just my voracious reading habits. And it wasn't just that conversation. It was reading Mo Willems Pigeon books to the boys tonight. (They are 4 and 5.) they hadn't seen them yet and to watch them just light up listening to me read them was amazing. The wonder and excitement a good book can produce is one of the best things in the world. I'm glad I had 2 such good reminders of that this week.
Thirdly, I loved teaching the 60's class this week for much the same reason. This history and music class is often full of music students. The university I teach at doesn't have a history major. So as someone with a history degree, I feel it is my academic duty to instill that love in some of my students. In the past, the class has not always been totally receptive to this lice I am sort of forcing on them. But this year, some thing was different. I mean, I had non-history major undergrads excited about ephemera and really thinking about preservation of data and artifacts so that future historians may know what we're like. My expressed goal for the class was to introduce them to primary sources that might be useful for the paper they have to write, but my implicit goal was to introduce them to possible history (as opposed to straight music) topics. Due to the nature of the students, there tends to be a lot of Beatles and Elvis papers in the class because they have to pick topics so early in the semester. Thanks to the digital archives I've found and cultivated over the last 2 years, i think one of the students is doing the Kent State shootings despite having never heard of them before walking into class. And if you could only have seen one student's eyes light up as he explained what he learned in just 10 minutes of playing around in the Montgomery bus boycott archive. It was so inspiring. This is why I do what I do. To see students light up like that. I can't say if they reacted the way they did was because they knew from the trip or it was just this group of students, but either way I am seriously stoked to see what they come up with when we look for secondary sources on Tuesday!!
There were so many other things I loved about the week, like the Twins securing a spot in the playoffs, and playing the "in your pants" game at the book sale, and hanging out with Diana while selling books, but I've spent enough time typing this post up. It's time for me to finish the book I brought along to read...and explore a little more on this iPad!!
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