Is it Really February?

Lots of thoughts these past few days as I'm laid up with a brutal case of pneumonia, drinking fluids like an OJ, Vitamin Water, La Croix junkie. Sleeping in what I can snatch between painful coughing bouts and binging alternately on Beatles vinyl and foreign films. I thought to myself, "Self, why aren't you blogging?"

It's true, I'm at one of those stages in my blogging path where I'm tied up in work and family and a major writing project that may only be published posthumously (though this illness bout is putting a little imaginary pressure on that timetable). I haven't done it, but I likely could search "sorry" on this blog and timeline-out the intervals where I have let slide my self-imposed responsibility to share. This has been one of them.

I do better at my school blog, Mister Merrick's Falcons Tech, but that's geared toward school parents and students. Actually, I owe them a weekly post as well. I'll get to that this week. You're more than welcome to check that out.

This blogging is an interesting animal. My dear sis-in-law calls it my book. "It's your book." Well, actually the book is Lives, available at Lulu.com. This is my odd attempt to communicate with you. I don't have to tell you who you are: You know that. If you are reading this it's for you. I have lots of colleagues, if not many close friends, but you can read some of the why of that in Lives, and certainly in my thinly veiled memoirs tentatively entitled "and before that... (memories of a lucky life lived). No link for that one--you thought I'd slip up, didn't you?

One bit of good news if you do enjoy scottmerrickdotnet, the ISTE planning season is gearing up for ISTE2018. The online program came out today and you can see all the offerings at
https://conference.iste.org/2018/program/search/. I'm but one of 1900 presenters and if you are interested in education there is no other conference over the year that will reward your time better.

Time for a little personal opining:

So, lately I've been immersed a bit in the politics that are not politic. I've been incensed, bewildered, and sometimes oddly amused by the state our nation has found itself in. Most recently, it is the school shootings issue that twists my soul into pretzels. The students' uprising--and make no mistake, it is blossoming into that--may just be the ray of hope that we need in order to sucker slap the country back into its senses. I have a rifle, but it is not an AR-15, and I have only recently acquired it for target shooting. I don't even hunt. I do think that it would be a good thing to have for the zombie apocalypse, especially if my target practice pays off in the form of solid headshots. Isn't that as good a reason as any to have a weapon in the home?

All that said, we need to look at the way other countries have made their laws support in some cases almost nearly absolute reduction in gun deaths. Something must be done and I applaud our students for gathering into a like-minded group dedicated to showing our greed-driven politicians what needs to be done. It is not a travel ban, y'all, as the Judiciary repeatedly reminds us.

It's a long read, but please, please take the time to absorb this recent post by "theindependentthinker,' Michael Sparks. The 12 Most Common Fallacies in the Gun Arguments (and How to Refute Them).

There's this:

From http://theweek.com/cartoons?sort=publish_date&page=5 with thanks

If we cannot keep our children safe at school, and we cannot, given the current ease of purchasing guns, we are worthless. I speak as a teacher who may one day at this rate be called upon to be a hero and is not sure he's up to it.

Do you know companies are now peddling bulletproof panels for school backpacks? What!?
What?!!!

I have more to say about other thoughts and I will get back to saying them. For now, be safe, love your neighbor, and cast off your paranoia but keep your wits about ya. Remember, "Just because you're paranoid does not mean They are not out to get you.

Peace out,
Scott

From usnlstech.blogspot.com

Dearest Parents of my dearest Students,

It is with a heavy heart and a firm sense of hope for the future that I bid University School of Nashville goodbye. Last week, I was interviewed for and accepted a position with Metro Nashville Public Schools to join a small team of educators who will craft the new Metro Nashville Virtual School into a model of its kind. Over the coming years, tens of thousands of children who for whatever reason cannot or will not attend a traditional school for a traditional learning experience will have an opportunity to become excited about learning, to learn, and to earn a high school diploma through our efforts.

Accepting the job, the "call" really, was not an easy decision. Most of all I will miss the daily interaction with your children. Over the last decade and a half, they have been at the center of my personal fulfillment, joyfully filling my days with challenges and successes. The announced plan for filling my position is to hire a capable substitute to work in the lab until a capable full-time replacement can be found.

Appropriately, this will be the final post at this blog. Whether my replacement will choose to communicate in this manner is anybody's guess. I plan to leave it up as a resource for her or him and an archive and resource for anyone in the world. That's the way the world works now, and I do hope it's helpful in some way.

If you wish to keep up with our progress in MNPS, I'll be posting, of course at http://scottmerrick.net and I will be setting up new channels of communication on the internet. I'm on Twitter and Facebook as well, and  feel free to friend/follow me there.

I wish you and your children all the best, and I leave them in the care of some of the most dedicated and capable educators I know. I'll be around, of course, only not as much. If you are in the neighborhood of the Martin Professional Development Center on Fairfax Avenue, next to Dragon Park, please feel welcome to drop in to say hi.

I just got word from NAIS that I'll still be welcome in their "Teacher of the Future" cohort for the year 2010-2011, so I'll be contributing to the resources there over the coming year as well.

Take care, and as I always told your children, "be good and have fun."

Sincerely,
Scott Merrick
Virtual Learning Curriculum Specialist,
Metro Nashville Public Schools
scott@scottmerrick.net

Virtual Environments Playground Walkthrough

Hola, ya'll,

I'm cleaning up my laptop after travel to Denver for ISTE10 and my wonderful experience with friends and colleagues from all over the country, nay, all over the world.

I'm also preparing for my trip to Boston Wednesday for Thursday and Friday's Apple Summer Learning Institute for teachers. I'll certainly be sharing from there.

In the course of my cleanup, I discovered a number of fun little video snippets that I will store and share as I find useful. Here's the first, a walkthrough of the Virtual Environments Playground on Tuesday. I'd just finished sharing what was going on there with Jan Zanetis of ISTE Live, videoconferencing out to several locations nationally, and at one point in this video you can see Jan continuing to interview one of our attendees for the remote audiences. I think this does a pretty good job of capturing the feel of the event, which lasted for three days, beginning Monday morning, June 28, at 8 a.m. and wrapping up at 1 p.m. Wednesday. Walk through with me...

Invitation to Participate and to Learn!

Hello, ya'll,

I'm spending this day packing for ISTE 2010 and the surrounding two weeks in Denver and helping to prep the house for our house sitter, typing out "away lists" for our good close neighbors, and checking in and out of various online platforms to make sure none of the elements in our complex planning for the SIGVE Virtual Environments Playground have gone derailed. I'm keeping light on my virtual feet, dancin' like a butterfly and stingin' like a bee.

I want to invite any and everyone to keep abreast of our work in Denver by frequenting the links below, especially between June 26 and June 30. After that I'll be laying around and having family fun in Denver 'til the 7th of July, when we return home. I'll be off out to Boston July 21 by myself for the Apple Learning Institute, and I'm sure that by then I'll have a great deal more to share.

To put things in perspective, we have put together 35 live presentations over 3 days, mostly a half hour each, back to back, the entire run of the Playground, starting Mountain time 8 a.m. Monday morning, June 28 and running up to Playground closure Wednesday, June 30, at 1 pm. In the playground is a small presentation stage, a table station with 8 hardwired-to-a-dedicated-subnetwork Macbooks, and there are 4 hardwired Earthlink PCs stationed at tables around the room. At any given time there's likely to be a Playground Poobah or other helper at one of these machines to help you learn about how the 3D internet and 3D virtual worlds can make your teaching and your learning more effective, more relevant, and more...fun. There. I said the "f" word. An LCD projector will be displaying presenter slides, inworld tours and demonstrations of (and from) various worlds on a Promethean Board, and casual seating will allow visitors to plop down and login to anywhere they wish via conference wireless.

Here are the key places to check for ISTE SIGVE fun and learning:

The SIGVE Wiki
is the official nucleus for the International Society for Technology in Education and it includes schedules, updates, links, and resources surrounding our growing community's work in the arena of learning and teaching in virtual worlds. If you're an educator, even if you are not an ISTE member, I invite you to join this wiki and to add to its exponentially increasing value. The global community of educators (and students) involved in this work can use your expertise, and ISTE's wiki platform makes it easy to share.

The ISTE SIGVE Playground ustream
will, bandwidth cooperating, be the place where live video from within the SIGVE Virtual Environments Playground can be found during scheduled Playground hours. That's (Mountain Time) 8:00 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday, and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Wednesday.

Time Zones made easy for ISTE SIGVE Pg
will help you translate our local Mountain Time into your own local time if you are not in Denver or in the Mountain Time Zone.

To my Playground co-facilitator Lisa Linn, to my inworld Grand Poobah Jane Wilde, to Marianne and to Rosie and to Julie and to Noreen and to Kelly and to the erstwhile Andy, to Terra and to Wanda and to everyone else who knows they've worked hard enough for the old guy to have had the wherewithal to remember to type their name here but didn't, and to all those other colleagues who are invested in SIGVE but haven't yet taken advantage of the opportunity to contribute (and I know that you will!) please, ya'll, please offer your congratulations and gratitude along with my own.

I hope you can find time to join us and to take advantage of the work that dozens of folks, all volunteers, all working from their divergent geographical locations over the past 9 months or so, have put into crafting our event for ISTE 2010. We gift, to you, the ISTE SIGVE Virtual Environments Playground!

Some Local Recognition!

WOW, a little local press! :) From my school's weekly newsletter, hot off the digital press (my shirt is tropical because the male teachers celebrate "Tropical Thursdays" at my school, when they can remember to do so):

Technology Coordinator Designated NAIS “Teacher of the Future”

USN Lower School Technology Coordinator Scott Merrick, 14 year faculty veteran, has been chosen as NAIS “Teacher of the Future” for 2010-11, along with 19 other innovative educators nationally.

The announcement was made via an email from the National Association of Independent Schools on May 11, 2010 and carries with it new responsibilities for Mr. Merrick, some of which are noted in the announcement. Here is a portion of that email:

“We had more than 200 nominations, and eight judges carefully reviewed them all and selected what we believe is an excellent, creative group. Your accomplishments as a teacher and innovator make you a perfect member of this community. As one of 20 NAIS Teachers of the Future, you are asked to seed and moderate an online discussion forum and post short educational videos in NAIS’s new teachers’ community and at NAIS on iTunes U…”

In addition to his curricular and teaching responsibilities for all students Kindergarten through grade 4 and his support roles for all USN teachers and staff, Mr. Merrick is a Core Volunteer at the 100,000+ member International Society for Technology in Education and chair of one of the 20 Special Interest Groups for that organization.

As he takes up the role of NAIS Teacher of the Future, Merrick will attend an Apple Summer Learning Institute in Boston in late July following his week of workshops and presentations at ISTE 2010 Conference and Exposition in Denver, Colorado. USN is thankful for his pioneering efforts and we look forward to learning from his experiences through his personal/professional blog at http://scottmerrick.net.

Prairie Home Companion at the Ryman!

We had a wonderful weekend I call our "Bro'deo" after a Kyle Gass and Train Wreck song by the same name. A guys' weekend of camaraderie, brotherhood, and beer. There were many high points (no pun intended), including hearing nephew Bryce's band FTFO (name unmentionable here) at Springwater Thursday night, taking in the Travelin' McCouries at Station Inn Friday, and honkytonking at Roberts, Legends, and up and down Lower Broad all weekend, and the 500+ photos from the invigorating but exhausting pics are up at Flickr for everyone to view; but the high point has to be the live Prairie Home Companion at the Ryman! Hey, I have an idea: I'll embed the show here, and you can fire it up while you watch a complete slideshow of the weekend here too! Snuggle up, grab a beverage, and enjoy. WARNING, SHIRTLESS MALE ROCKERS FROM THE SPRINGWATER AND A FEW TASTELESS SINGLE FINGERED HAND GESTURES FROM OVERENTHUSIASTIC LEONARDS!

Link to more information about the Down in Tennessee show!

Get a Clue

I'm a master of the .5 second cameo. First Digital Nation's 90-second-in 9 word audio appearance, now this: Don't blink! But do absorb the message AJ and team have so neatly and impressively delivered: