School starts one month from today. August 12. That is strangely and unfairly early.

I’ve looked up and down our calendar and can’t figure out how exactly we’re going back we’re going back so early, and yet our last day is only three days earlier than it was this past year. Yet supposedly we aren’t working any more days that we always do. I don’t see any major breaks scheduled in there…

So now we’re almost halfway through July. All my organizational issues remain untackled. I have, however, been somewhat productive. I signed up for a total of four online classes offered by my district this summer. The remaining two are:

• Web 2.0 for Teachers, a “live” online class
• Blogging in the Classroom, a self-paced class.

The Web 2.0 class has been great, although I’m allowing it to take up a little too much of my time. We are learning about all the sites, tools, and services offered by Web 2.0 that can help improve teaching and learning. We’ve covered social bookmarking, for example, and visual search engines, and this week, we’re discussing social networks, like Myspace and Facebook, and educator-created networks on Ning.

One of the tools we looked at is Voicethread, an audiovisual presentation maker that stores your projects online, where others can view and comment. I created a Voicethread about my autistic stepson, Caleb, attending the Rockies and Broncos ABILITYcamps:ABILITYcamp Voicethread

(don’t know if the embed below will work…)

Those camp days were one highlight of the past month; the other was attending a total of three Rockies games: a makeup game against my hometown Braves on June 16, and the Marlins on July 4 & 5. The Braves game featured the specter of black helicopters circling downtown and very close to the stadium.

Reports were that it was an Army counterterrorism exercise and it had “nothing to do” with the upcoming Democratic National Convention here. Hmmm… Apparently they didn’t bother to inform any civil authorities here, including the mayor, that these exercises would be occurring; thus many residents were a bit freaked out by the omnious presence.

Also on the subject of the DNC, there was a report that the official catering menu for the convention would not include “any fried foods.” I have one friend from back home in Atlanta who feels this is discrimination against Southerners, but hey, we can’t have our own local delicacy, Rocky Mountain oysters, available either. The official word is that it’s part of an overall effort to make this the “greenest” convention ever, but I think it’s just part of Howard Dean’s diet plan.

The July 4th game of course featured fireworks, but the explosion happened first on the field– the game final was 18-17, one of the highest-scoring games in baseball history, featuring a comeback by the Rockies, who were down 13-4 in the 4th inning. The nine-run deficit was the largest overcome in team history, and they won in dramatic walkoff fashion in the bottom of the 9th. When the game finally ended (after just short of 4 hours), we waited another 40 minutes for the fireworks show to begin, but it was well worth it!

Rockies July 4 fireworks

That game, we brought all the kids… the next day, it was just Maria & I, and we snagged our Matt Holliday bobbleheads. (Pic once I can get the bat properly attached).

Off to the Renaissance Festival tomorrow, so there will no doubt be entertaining stories to report.