My first photo has been approved by Shutterstock and is now available online for anyone in the world to buy! Admittedly, the odds of me giving up my day job and living off royalities is infinitesimally small but, hey, small steps. 🙂
A Celebration
On the 20th of March, I was invited to the main campus of the University for an awards ceremony as I had been nominated and shortlisted by the students for a teaching award in the category of Most Innovative Teacher. It was certainly a surprise to have been nominated and more of a surprise to be shortlisted!
It was a good celebration of all the hard work many people do at the university, even more so as the nominations came from the students.
For once, I was speechless as my name was read out as the winner for my category.
Thank you to those who nominated me. It is much appreciated.
Graduation 2014
The graduation of our MA Primary Education students here at the Dumfries Campus of the University of Glasgow has just finished and all the students have gone their separate ways with their families and friends.
… and I’m back in my office feeling a bit melancholy.
You see, these graduates came to this campus at the same time I did. (I previously worked in the main campus in Glasgow.) So I have a special affinity towards this particular group of students. I’m so proud of them and all their hard work. They have been a great group and it really has been such a pleasure teaching them.
So off they go, starting the next chapter of their lives. Full of promise. Bursting with enthusiasm — but still willing to listen and learn. I feel like a parent, happy to see them grow but a bit sad to see them leave the nest.
Overall, though, I feel such an immense sense of pride — and you know what? I’m not going to feel melancholy anymore. I’m going to be happy that, in my own small way, I helped to shape these students into the new teachers they now are. Frightening thought, that! 🙂
Sometimes you just need a good hug
It’s an interesting day, today. I’ve got about a thousand things to do but they’re all little, trivial things which take about 5 minutes each. I have a training session I’m running for students in about 20 minutes and teaching a Child Development class at 3. Looking forward to that; I love teaching! So it’s hectic but worthwhile.
As I was moving around my office, I accidentally knocked one of my puppets onto the floor. (Hey, I train primary school teachers so I have an excuse to have puppets…not that I need an excuse). And as I picked him up, he was so squishy and cuddly that I surreptitiously gave him a hug.
And I realised that sometimes what we all really need is a good hug. Just because.
So here. Have a hug. On me.
Hunting for MO
I admit it. I’m feeling rather pleased with myself. I shouldn’t—but I am. Why? Because I got a new follower today. Someone who looks remarkably like Mark Wahlberg and who lives in a town in “MO”.
Now this intrigued me. MO? So in my head I started running through what it could be. Monaco? Nope. Mexico? Also no. Morocco. Nuh-uh.
At this point, I could have just thrown the name into Google maps but what’s the fun in that?
So the next step was to think about states in the USA. Well, MI is Michigan (and I know that after living in Ontario for 20 years. Ah, Michigan. I love Frankenmüth! 🙂
Okay, reminiscing over … MO. Okay, let’s think of the states beginning with M. Missouri, Mississippi, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Maine, Montana, Michigan and Maryland. Well, that doesn’t help. None of them end in O. It’s got to be Montana. It’s only logical.
Let’s check on Google.
Missouri? Seriously Missouri? How does that work? What?!?!
Oh well. At least now I know. And, hey, it could be helpful during a pub quiz; you never know …
(So hello to my latest follower. You kept me entertained for a good 15 minutes … and now I’m going to watch Boogy Nights …)
Shifting to Twitter & creating multiple Twitter accounts
Last week my students suggested we should move away from TodaysMeet and try Twitter. Today was the 2nd week of using it and it’s interesting to compare the two programmes, particularly in light of observing and interacting with my students.
Personally, I quite like TodaysMeet. I’ve explained why in previous blogs (here and here) so I won’t bore you with the details again. Suffice to stay I wasn’t particularly keen on the move to Twitter as I felt we were in a good ‘groove’ with TodaysMeet. However, the students wanted to give it a go so fair enough.
The first issue was ensuring all students created a professional twitter account using their university email address. I needed to reiterate that this was linked with their professional persona and that comments needed to reflect this.
The students decided the easiest thing to do would be to follow me (and…
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Apple’s New Pages 5.0 — This is a joke, right?
Last night Apple launched some new products—new laptops, new iPads a new version of the operating system (OS X Mavericks) plus a long-overdue update for iWork, Apple’s office suite of applications which hasn’t had a decent overhaul since 2009.
As an avid Pages and Keynote user, I was excited about getting a decent update for these two applications. Pages is Apple’s answer to Microsoft’s Word; Keynote is Apple’s answer to Microsoft’s Powerpoint. So I wasted no time downloading these two applications straight away.
I can say, hand on heart, that I have never—ever—been so disappointed by an Apple product. I can’t help but wonder if the people who redesigned Pages (which is the worse of the two) actually tried using what they’ve created. They certainly don’t word-process for a living, that’s for sure.
Instead of a bar (or bars) along the top or a floating window to make changes (such as sizing, styles, add weblink, etc.), there is now a window on the right hand side. You can’t move it around (not even to the left side) and it takes up a huge amount of real estate. The content of this window changes depending on what you have selected on your workspace, which isn’t so bad, but it takes up so much space! And it looks … well, cheap and clunky, to be honest.
But what I find most galling is Apple’s decision to have a 3-columned header and footer with no way of changing this.
I honestly don’t know what mind-alternating medication was taken when this idea was concocted but it severely limits the creation of decent headers or footers. I don’t want 3 columns in my header; I want one. I can’t help but think that Apple has done this to give newcomers to the world of Pages and word-processing a ‘helping hand’. Why While this may be a laudable viewpoint, the inability to change it alienates those who prefer to be a bit more imaginative, thank you very much.
You can’t even add an image into a header or a footer so if you want to use your company’s logo, you’re out of luck.
While there may be some new features such as ‘share’, which allows more than one person to work on a document at the same time, this feels like a massive backwards step.
I’m seriously considering going back to Microsoft Word (which I loathe) because of this ‘update’ and that’s a shame because I’ve been a faithful user of Pages since the beginning. But I have to be able to use it, and use it effectively, or else it’s just a waste of time.
Sorry, Apple, this is one of those very rare occasions when you’ve really let me down.
Bouncing spam emails back where they belong
My gmail account gets a lot (and I mean a lot) of spam these days. One site coming from Russia sends me about 4 emails every minute. Drives me crazy.
Apple used to have a way to bounce the emails back which (usually) stops them after a while. However, this feature disappeared a while back.
This link (http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_bounce_emails_mac_os_x_mail)Â will show you how to get it back. Works like a charm too.
A Complaints Culture – Are things going a bit too far?
Let me start by saying that I am not a particularly tolerant person when it comes to intolerance. I find it very difficult to understand how people can be so vitriolic about another person’s skin colour, religion, accent, interests and so on.
Digging deeper, there are intolerances within each of these examples I’ve used. Take religion. Not only are there divisions and intolerances between religions themselves, there are intolerances within, say, Christianity. Catholic or Protestant? Jeez, it’s the same religion, folks! Get a grip. The similarities far outweigh the differences but apparently it’s much easier to focus on the 5 or 10% of a difference.
So what has brought this particular rant on, you may ask? Well, here’s what happened. Today I told a joke. Here it is…
What time is it when an elephant sits on a fence?
A: Time to get a new fence
Yeah, really awful joke. And someone was offended by this. Seriously.
“Why would you force an elephant to sit on a fence? That’s animal cruelty. Not to mention that you are being derogatory towards workmen who put up the fence!”.
I laughed until I realised this person was serious. Really serious. Angry serious.
So it got me thinking …
Have we got the point in society where we believe we have the right to complain about anything which offends us or doesn’t match our own thinking? Is it really offensive to the point you have to complain about it? Is there not a place to sit back and look at it from different angles, trying to see if the person is clearly a racist, bigot, homophobe (or whatever) or has just said something which has upset us because of our own, personal experiences/attitudes?
Sir Alan Sugar seems to have been caught up in this as well (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-24421453). His tweet, one could argue, is helping to highlight the issues about low-wage production lines in some parts of the world. Or, according to one person in Liverpool (Nichola Szeto), it is a racist incident.
Is it? I suppose it’s how you perceive it. And therein lies the rub. Sir William MacPherson, in his report on The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, defined a racist incident as any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person’.
Perceived to be …
Perception is an interesting thing, though, and individuals’ perceptions may differ from others, either because they weren’t listening, have their own agenda, have experiences which have impacted on them or because they’re just plain nuts.
Here’s an example. A number of years ago I was giving a talk to about 300 people about various aspects of ICT and the impact on teaching and learning in the primary classroom. Near the end of my lecture, I was extolling the virtues of PDF files. PDF files are great. PDF files are helpful. PDF files should be embraced and ways should be found to make more use of PDF files … and so on. At the end of my talk, I was chatting to the organisers of the conference when a headteacher came storming up to us, shaking with righteous anger and with a face about to explode with rage. How dare I say those things. According to her, I was a disgusting maggot on the bottom of her shoe and she hoped I dropped dead from a disease. Woah! What?!?!? The organisers very abruptly stepped in and we soon got to the bottom of the issue. I imagine a mixture of insanity, deafness, stupidity and lack of context was an issue with this head teacher who thought I was talking about pædophiles rather than PDF files. Seriously.
(And this is why I now always refer to them as PDFs. It’s also why this story will flash into your mind the next time you hear someone else say PDF files and why you will probably now never use that term again.)
Perhaps it’s just too easy these days to react and complain rather than reflect and engage. When I speak, write, blog, tweet or otherwise engage in some form of communication, I should be aware of how what I say could be perceived–but it shouldn’t be at the cost of being afraid to say anything in case I offend someone. Perhaps we all need to be offended once in a while to make us think and reflect.
I wonder how many complaints I’ll get about this blog …
A.G. Pate 