A New Year

Happy New Year to you all. It has been an interesting year to say the least. That being said, I have returned hoping to add to the conversations through my blog. It took me a bit to get all the dust off and think about what direction to go now that I am here again.

The school semester has been one of attempting to get everything settled in as this summer we shifted from a Novell network to a Windows server based structure. With the switch to Windows, we also gave the students and faculty web based storage and eliminated some of the additional servers that were used to store student work. The students also have their own email accounts as well. Our students don't need to hit the servers at all. With web storage, our LMS and their email accounts our students can progress very well.

The faculty also has a couple of different ways to store their work. Our LMS has unlimited storage for our faculty and the faculty also has web storage with the same company the students are now using.

We still continue to work with the faculty and staff on the student use of their electronic textbooks as we are 95% all electronic textbooks. Many of the Diocesan schools have been meeting with us and looking for ways to move that direction as well. It is interesting to me to see some of the changes people look to make in their systems based on the direction we have moved to and progressed.

The New Year looks to be a good one and off to a great start, of course that is easy to say when you are only 3 days in to the New Year. My hope will be to talk about some of the things we have done to help make changes in our educational efforts as opposed to merely talking about what I think is wrong.

What changes have you made that are leading your students and faculty to educational success? I would enjoy hearing about them.

So much to learn and so little time.

Technology and elderly parents

Well needless to say I am already behind on the month of June daily challenge to blog which started here. But the good thing is I don't want to write if I really don't have anything to say or don't truly feel the need, so maybe I am not geared for these types of challenges. Anyway I do have some thoughts and questions.

I will be the first to admit that I am very fortunate to have both my parents still with us on this earth. Right before Christmas they moved back to Dallas and are only 1 mile from my house which is great. The other day my older brother went with them to meet one of my dad's younger sisters for lunch and she mentioned that she had an email address. This apparently got my dad's interest up as he mentioned to my older brother that he wouldn't mid learning some computer so as to be able to email. My mom on the other hand worked with technology for the public school system in Dallas and when she retired she said she never wanted to see another computer. Unfortunately at this stage she is suffering from the early stages of dementia.

This got me to thinking what kind of technologies could I help my dad obtain and use that would help us to help them and also to be something that my father would enjoy using? As I thought about it my dad tries not to spend any money at all so my first thought was I have an extra laptop. But then I thought about an iPad. Sure it is the latest thing on the market but I got to thinking that if we got him a 3G iPad, he could have a gmail account, a solid state drive, he could have apps to remind him of things he needed or wanted to do and he could email his younger sister.

Then I got to thinking, what other technologies would benefit an elderly couple and help their children to be a little more comfortable in some of the ways to monitor their aging parents. I hope you have some ideas to contribute. Let me know what you think.

So much to learn and so little time.