Beyond School

You know that cotton-headed feeling after you’ve updated your way-behind grade-book? That’s where I am right now.

Luckily, it was a good experience. I love the discussion on our AP Lit Ning about Laurence Olivier in King Lear. The forum was 12 pages long since being assigned on Thursday, and I hadn’t looked at it. Nice to see the seniors get into it. Nice to see they discovered Sir Laurence, too. (That Ning is open to the public, remember. If you like Lear, you’re welcome to pop in. “Where is God?” and “Was Shakespeare an atheist?” are two questions that are beautifully flogged.)

I also skimmed the 28 new student blogs. A handful were already compelling enough for me to add to the Young Writers 07 wiki I started with Chrissy in New Zealand last week.

Anyway, that semi-lobotomic post-gradebook daze prompted me to share with you Mac-owners this little gift:

My Six Favorite Mac Shortcuts

1. Forward delete: FN + DEL
2. Zoom desktop: CTRL + 2-finger scroll up and down on trackpad
3. Zoom browser text, but browser and website container sizes don’t change: CTRL + APPLE + 2-finger scroll on trackpad (this one’s fantastic - you have to try it to really appreciate it)
4. Spacebar: next section down on webpage
5. Spacebar + Shift: next section up on webpage
6. Apple + Shift + r : refresh cache (useful for plugin dinking)

Have any you’d like to share? Add ‘em.

For more language arts lessons, see:

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S’rite. I be stylin’ my thang.

I’ve been adding plugins to my new self-hosted WordPress site like a drunk three-year old. Some work, some don’t, some gum up the whole works and inspire flights of colorful cursing. But it’s all fun, and very powerful, what the WordPress open development community enables with their many plugins (and if you’re using 2.3, this list of compatible plugins for it is a life-saver). I’m loving it.

So here’s an update of new features: an “archives by tags” page (see top navigation bar) that lists every post I’ve written (including all of the old Blogger posts, which I imported with a single button-push on WordPress 2.3) and, get this: organizes them by tags, in ascending order. That’s powerful. (You can get the plugin yourself via the link at the bottom of that page.)

I’ve also added a page called “hosting wordpress” that has four screencast tutorials that drag any masochists out there down the brambly path of my own trial-and-error (but ultimately successful) install of WordPress 2.3 on Powweb. You can do it too, for a few dollars a month. Then you’re free to add your own plugins, new themes (and see this list of 2.3-compatible WP themes to save yourself heartache), and all that to your heart’s content. It feels incredibly creative. Beware addiction.

The last page, so far, is a “Teaching Gallery” page. It has short descriptions, movies, and links to my own attempts to create 21st century projects in my school. So far, an overview of Project Global Cooling, the 1001 Flat World Tales wiki and blog, the Broken World wiki history textbook (student-created) and blog, and our current modern translation of King Lear, mafia style, on a wiki at King Lear Street Talk.

I’ll be adding more. Hope some of you feed-readers will drop in and poke around, leave comments and suggestions, questions, whatever.

Thanks to all who have stuck with me as I’ve switched horses.

For more posts on creativity, see

Photo Credit: “Pink is his color” by stgermh

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