Depave Project at Lewis Elementary

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On Saturday, September 14, 2013 over 75 volunteers converged on the Lewis Elementary School playground to remove 1800 square feet of pavement to make way for a rain garden. With the help of a local organization, Depave, our team worked to remove a portion of our paved playground to set the stage for the creation of a rain garden. The rain garden will help to solve a rain water runoff problem that results in the formation of a small lake near rooms 10 and 12. It will also create a habitat for birds and insects and will provide a space for science activities for our primary classrooms.

We thank our community and the volunteers from Depave (depave.org) for their help making this project possible.

We would also like to thank Otto's Sausage Kitchen, Franz Bread, and Trader Joe's for their generous donations of food to help feed our crew.

Our own Mr. Colvin set up his camera and created a time lapse photo of the work that took place on Saturday.
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Lewis Elementary Depave Project Timelapse--9-14-2013 from Paul Colvin on Vimeo.

From Depave's http://depave.org mission statement: Depave promotes the removal of unnecessary pavement from urban areas to create community green spaces and mitigate stormwater runoff. Through community partnerships and volunteer engagement, Depave strives to overcome the social and environmental impacts of pavement with the use of action-oriented educational events, community stewardship, and advocacy to reconnect people with nature and inspire others. Depave is a nonprofit organization based in Portland, Oregon.

Retail Spaces, Learning Spaces...

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A podcast that I enjoy and learn from is Out of School, hosted by Fraser Speirs and Bradley Chambers. On a recent episode, Frasier talked with Don Orth of Hillbrook School. The conversation turned to learning spaces and a discussion about the research they are doing as they observe students and teachers interact and create a classroom space from what was once a computer lab. They speculated on possible software that could be used in that analysis. This morning I saw an interesting video over at the New York Times which highlighted and discussed similar software being used by retail businesses to track and anaylyse customer behavior. I hadn’t considered that businesses use the wi-fi signals from customers phones to track customers in the store. Have always wanted to do something like this to track my movements throughout the school during the course of a school day. Maybe something to look into. Of course I would first have to gain access to our access points.

Using 'Day One'

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I have been using a journaling app called Day One for a bit over a year (Mac and iOS.) Day One allows you to keep a journal on your Mac or iOS device. The entries are saved in iCloud so basically any entries you make on one device, appear on the others.

I have mainly been using it to jot down notes and reflections about my day at school. For example I might add a note during or after a phone conversation, or after a classroom visit, and I try to jot down each evening reflections on events and activities that have taken place at school. Over the course of the time I have been using it, it has undergone a number of upgrades that have really made it one of my favorite and most useful apps. Day One can grab meta data associated with the time and location of your entries. For example it can grab the location information associated with where you are at the time of the post, and also grab weather information for the time and location. One feature that is nice is that if you import an image into an entry, you are given the option of using the date and location data associated with that image as the date and location stamp on your entry. It also allows for tagging of entries.

Recently I have been experimenting with a tool called Slogger that integrates with my Day One journal. Slogger is an app devleoped by Brett Terpstrat (@ttscoff) that can pull data from various social media posts and makes entries in your Day One journal. For example it can be set up to pull images one has posted to sites such as Instagram or Flickr as entries into your Day One journal. In addition articles and posts saved on read later services such as Pocket and Instapaper can also be noted. Foursquare checkins, RSS feeds, and Twitter posts and favorites are also options.

Check the Slogger link for a list of services supported. Also note that the app runs in Terminal, so it involves getting under the hood a bit with the command line. Also note that for it to work properly, it needs to run once a day, every day. Brent explains how to do this in his very well detailed installation notes.

I am finding that I like being able to mix my social media posts along side of my journal posts. I also like having an archive of arranged by date.

Finally I wanted to point out a great series of posts by Tulio Jarocki, @tuliojarockicom about using Day One as a journaling tool. Lots of great suggestions for getting started and organized.

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PopClip: Productivity tool for Mac OS

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PopClip is a Mac OS X extension that “appears when you select text with your mouse on your Mac.” You can then select from several options including copy & paste, and actions like search, spelling, dictionary from a little popup that appears over the selected text. It is kind of like what happens when you select text in iOS.

It is extendable and PopClip extensions have been created for many common tasks and services. For example select some text that has a URL and you will be presented with the option of opening that link you your browser.

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There are many extensions already written to incorporate PopClip with many common apps and tools. There is also extensive documentation for those that wish to create their own extensions. For example I am thinking a nice summer project would be to create an extension that searches a specific Bento database. A use case might be to be able to select a student’s name from an email, then pull up the parent contact information from within a Bento database. Will see if I can get to playing with this this summer.

You can read an exensive write up of the tool over at AppStorm. I have been using it for a while and find it quite helpful.