Picture of the Week

Woe to the Babysitter!

Down for a week

So, the Blackboard site went down with a bang this week. All of my classes were cancelled and virtually no emails could get back and forth from faculty to students. While it was a nice week to get homework done (the stuff that didn't require a blackboard page) and get caught up on classes, it makes me wonder just how much stalk we put into a single server. Whatever would we do if the power went out for more than a week? Whatever would we do if the internet was hacked and all sites sent bugs to our computers? This was just a small outage that required a small percentage of very perseverant IT souls to work around the clock. They managed to fix the problem in less than a week. But, a whole school week was totally cut off for several classes. No homework was turned in and no classes could be held via online Elive sessions.

I propose that we have a back up system that we can go to. It doesn't have to be perfect, just an older system kept in the online vaults for outages such as these. What do you think? Could it be possible?

Board on Money

I didn't have much success looking through the blogs I'm following for any new educational tidbits, but I did attend a Club Ed meeting at UAA last night that I think you all would be interested in hearing about:

Mrs. Sunny Hilts from the Alaska Association of School Boards came and spoke to some UAA Elementary Educations students all the way from the Kenai! She came as an ambassador to tell us soon to be teachers what a school board is and does. I won't go into specifics here, but she had an interesting comment that we all need to be aware of. One of the points Mrs. Sunny made was concerning the budget for schools. She said that right now the school systems are sitting in a large pool of cash. The oil industry has done well and has pumped lots of cash into education as well as the government stimulus packages. The school budgets are rather flush at the moment. Consequently great bounds in technology, resources, and training is available like never before.

The bad news is, this education funding bubble will not likely last forever according to Mrs. Sunny. What she calls 'The Gap' is coming. 'The Gap' is what she estimates as a 5 year period where funding will dry up from the oil and the government and schools will be left with very little money for technology and other perks. She wanted to prepare all of us teachers for a drought in educational opportunities.

I say this for two reasons: 1) to ask if you think her information is correct according to your outlook and 2) to ellicite ideas of what we should do if she is correct?