G-Town Talks

Our third annual G-Town Show Down was another huge success today, showcasing our kids in a big way. This is a great opportunity for our kids to shine, especially for those students who excel in something other than school sports and activities. A couple of terrific bands, a great teacher band–they ROCKED–and Kelly D. stole the show with her 1st place winning song.

Once again, I love the G-Town Show Down! And I love the guts and the talent of every kid who got up there.

I am about to be completely unplugged, disconnected, not even a phone to my name. Early Saturday morning, we leave for a G-Town trip to London, Paris, and Madrid. Eighteen students and four adults, three countries in 10 days, non-stop action, little sleep, and see as much as we can possibly fit in.

When I was a teacher, I was the group leader for two tours. I’m still extremely fond of the students who traveled with me and I proudly display the group photos in my office, one in Florence and one in Versailles. My daughter and my mom were on those tours with me and it was unforgettable. Well, at least for me, the two of them tend to blur some of the details. (Sorry Mom, it’s true, Madrid can’t be your favorite city, we never toured there.)

This time around I’m going as a chaperone who’s also the principal and I’m hoping it doesn’t make a difference, that the kids aren’t worried I’ll be a drag. Honestly, everyone’s so completely exhausted by the end of each day, there’s little worry that someone’s going to do anything wrong.

My son’s going this time, so I get to see part of the world through his eyes. Very cool. I’ll sign on and blog about the trip if at all possible–I’ll be looking for an internet cafe or for our tour guide to have access she’ll share. But I won’t miss seeing anything wonderful to sit on a computer, I promise. 

Here are a few interesting things coming out of this blogging gig. . .

1. One of our BOE members reads the blog and was kind enough to tell me at last night’s Board meeting that we are getting our desks after all–it’s a planned expenditure for this budget year. WOO HOO! I’m glad he read the blog post from the other day and shared the great news.

2. There’s an article by Will Richardson in the April, 2007 DistrictAdministration magazine, p. 89, called “Administrators Who Blog”, in which Will talks about G-Town Talks–feels very cool.

3. I mentioned in a post the other day that Jeff Archer is writing an article about blogging for Education Week. He’s reviewing my stats with his tech expert, Jeanne, and I’m hoping to really understand what my “referers” information, my daily hits, means. In edublogs, there’s a referers list and this is where I’ve seen my counts grow over the past nine months. For example, so far today my referers hit number is at 1217. What does that mean? Is it that my blog has been accessed 1217 times today? My high number was 1800+ and I’ve hit it twice. How does that differ from page views? Techie friends, an explanation please. . .