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A fresh start

So, I'm trying to avoid thinking about the disaster waiting to happen show on Tuesday. I think I should have realized that I was paddling up the river when more than three people asked me if I was cancelling the show...

What better way to get your mind off your troubles than to redesign your blog and completely screw it up, thus taking at least 6 hours of work to fix, restore and redesign. I am the master of wasting time.

In the meantime, please note the Twitter box on the side. I heard about it on the radio the other day and had to check it out. It fascinates me - and because I'm testing new functionality for use in our school, I can access it all day long. I haven't figured out a good school use for it - yet! - but I'm still working on it. Especially fascinating is that Barak Obama and Christ Dodd are using it. CNN is too, but I can see the use of instant news updates, but notes from the campaign trail? Interesting to read, but does it bring any value?

So far, the most frustrating thing is that there is hidden search function, so it's little hard to navigate. TwitterVision (connected to GoogleMaps) is cool to watch, but needs a lot of work in the usability arena - cannot figure out how to add people from that page. I'm sure it's just hidden somewhere that I can't spot.

I'm also working on a new website for my classes - last fall the school district migrated to a new website program that did not offer very much along the lines of functionality. It's main positive feature is that it melded well with other programs and offered viewable grades to parents. It's more than a little clunky, but apparently barely five teachers in the district used the previous website program for anything except grades... and with those numbers it's hard to justify spending money on anything else. The tech people really did try to get me to use what functionality there was, but I usually gave up after an hour or so. It's built for the technologically inept who see little use in posting much more than grades and announcements.

The new site - which is being piloted - has been blocked for the past three days. Since I'm not going to pay for a new domain or use this one, I used freewebs.com. Once of my more tech savvy kids recommended it... but as with anything that is free, it's easily used by the nefarious. Any have any other free website recommendations?

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