For those not in the know, my son attends an online free public high school, and for a while now he has been struggleing with his courses. Everytime I would check his classes to see what his progress was he would become upset and defensive (he is a teenager you know). But he also wasn’t getting the work done. So after arguing with him quite a few times He finally tells me that he feels overwhelmed by them. So I’ve decided to take a new approach with his classes in order to help him get ahead.

Every Week his teachers post a weekly checklist of what assignments must be completed. I will be checking them and then throughout each school day I will give my son his assignments for each class one class at a time. So as not to overwhelm him with too much at one time. I tried this approach for the first time today and he has actually seemed quite receptive to it. I could hear the tone in his voice when he asked me what he needed to do and I responded by only giving him his Math assignements. When he asked if there was anything else I told him just to worry about the math and let me know when he was done with it. He was quite happy with that and argument free went on to take care of his work.

Hopefully this new method will help him to succeed.

Things like these are why I’m very thankful to have the online highschool option available to my son. I was able to see the problem, identify and fix it before he got too far behind, because I’m involved in his education on a daily basis. Had he went to a brick & mortar public school I’m affraid this issue would have gone un-noticed for quite some time. The reason I initially decided to enroll him in an online highschool was because he was struggling at school so much and not able to recieve any of the one & one attention he really needed. Not all children learn in the same manner and my son appears to need more one & one time then some others. With this option availbile I’m able to help provide that to him. But he can also call, email his teachers and counseler if he needs to. So if you have a child he might be struggling or seems to do better in a one on one enviroment virutal school should definitely be considered as an option.

Well I now have my first smart phone. It’s an LG Enlighten, the only reason I got it was because it was free with a 2yr contract renewal, and since the contract wasn’t but a few months old I said what the hell and got it. This phone has android on it and let me tell you I’m in geek heaven. I’m totally loving everything I can do with it. From reading kindle books to scanning barcodes for prices I’m seriously loving having it.

I think I’m going to have to get a better battery though the stock one that came with it doesn’t seem to last very long.This phone has completly spoiled me, so much so that I think the next time I get one, I’m going to “have” to get on of the more expensive versions….lol.

The enlighten is good for social networking and tweetdeck works great on it. The phone has a slide out qwerty keyboard, though I find the buttons kind of small, it does do the job. It also comes with a camera that’s good for taking both picturers and video. However there is no flash, I wish I would have realized that before I decided on it. But the phone itself is fast and responsive and even with all the apps I have installed so far I haven’t noticed in slow down.

Overall I would say it’s a good starter phone.

Last night, like many others I watched as thousands of people in New York protested. The live stream provided by TheOther99 was absolutly instense and the commentator Tim was amazing. He does a wonderful job at bringing the facts to the table without opinion.

No matter which side of the table you stand on with the politcal issues just seeing these protests is an amazing thing, because you are witnessing history in the making. Thirty years from now people will be watching the footage of these events with the same awe and wonder in which I have watched old newscasts of the vietnam protests in the sixties. I’m still not sure what change is going to come from all these events, but I am positive that change is coming. Event’s like these don’t happen without it.

Having dialoge with other people seems to be the main thing going on right now, and there are oh so many ways to do that in this day an age. We have email, twitter, facebook, chatrooms, text messages, video streams and then go old fashioned face to face conversations. I’m glad to see it happening, and am very glad to be a witness to it all….

I’ve starting working towards getting my G.E.D. thanks to the wonderful people over at free-ed.net. The website offers a host of free online courses, so I enrolled myself in the G.E.D.-College prep course they offer. I’m hoping to have my GED by next spring. At some point though I will be enrolling in Excel High School in order to get my high school equivalency certificate. I hear having both will make it much easier for me to get into College, which I would like to do as some point in the future.

I’m enjoying feeling productive that’s for sure, though my hand is taking quite a beating as I’m not used to all the writing any more…lol. I’m currently keeping a learning journal with hand written notes. They advise us to do so, and hand writing notes do help me with remembering what I’m learning. If anyone is intersted in persuing their G.E.D. I highly recommend signing up for free-ed’s course. It’s been very helpful to me so far.

Angel

So I just got back from my doctors office and the visit went well, we discussed the current state of my Graves Disease. My TSH levels are normal, but I’m still having

Recently I noticed my blog had become super laggy, so I went on the hunt to figure out what was causing it. Turns out it was the identi.ca tools plugin for wordpress. So I disabled it and switched to the twitter tools plugin. Bye bye lag!!

I’ve been using Google+ for a while now and I really do like it better than facebook. I love the way the games aren’t all up in my face and stay in their own corner of google+ This means if I’m in the mood to play a game I know where to else I don’t have to be bothered with knowing what that gamer-holic in my circles scored on their most recent game. Google+ recently has added the use of hashtags which I really have grown quite fond of using. Circles are very nicely done and easy to work with it’s super simple to decide who get’s to see what content I’m posting. Yes facebook recently added this feature, but I think it was only in response the release of Google+. I have been utilizing google picasa for quite a while now and I like that I can keep my photo’s in one spot and not have to worry about uploading them to multiple locations, because I also use picasa web for my blog. I do wish my youtube account was better integrated with google+. I shouldn’t have to use picasa web for my videos when I already have youtube holding my videos, even though I super fast internet it still takes a while to upload videos and not having to upload them in multiple places would be a huge+.

I still use my facebook page but mostly because I have people on there who are ingrained facebook that I keep up with but I have been really using google+ a lot and have been using it for sometimes.

Before I go I sould mention a couple of extensions I use to help make google+ even better.

G++ adds your FaceBook & Twitter feed in your G+ Stream. It also allows you to Post statuses to Facebook & Twitter directly from G+. You Like, Comment, Post to Facebook and Tweet & Retweet in G+! Download it HERE.

Also I have a couple of greasemonkey scripts which I run to make Google+’s interface even nicer looking. In firefox you’ll need download greasemonkey to run it, but you can just install it in chrome.

• Google+ Tweaks
• Tweaks to Google+ (Google “Plus”) – Toggle comments, image previews, mute button, favicon alerts, full width, fixed navigation, thumbnails only, etc.
• google plus reply+

• adds reply and reply-to-author buttons to Google+ comments

Adding Google+ to your desktop is simple for KDE users. Simply download and install the PhoneWebView Plasmoid and use the following url as your default url https://m.google.com/app/plus/?force=1 There you have it..a beautiful mobile view of G+ right on your KDE Desktop!