New Teaching Career!

Hi everyone!

I just wanted to give you a quick update on what has been happening the past few weeks and what my plans are for the near future. So, I am finishing my student teaching in Keizer, Oregon. I only have one final project and two weeks to go!!! I can't believe it! Then I will be preparing for a summer program for gifted students for three weeks in July called Awesome Academic Adventures (A3). It will be at Willamette and I get to teach three week-long sessions on ceramics, flight and printmaking. The weeks are themed earth, wind and water and I pretty much got to choose exactly what I wanted to teach! That doesn't happen very often in the teaching field, so I am taking full advantage of it and packing my lessons full of things I find interesting.

After A3 I will be getting ready for.....(drum roll please...) my REAL JOB! Yes, I got a job in the real world! It is the perfect position...I will be teaching kindergarten in a dual immersion program...which pretty much means English speakers learn Spanish and Spanish speakers learn English. The program is set up so 50% of the instruction is given in Spanish and 50% in English. I will be doing all of my instruction in Spanish, because my students will get the English portion of their day during pullouts like PE, Music and so on.

I am so excited to teach kindergarten and to be able to keep up my Spanish language skills. This school puts all of my interests into one position!!! Not to mention the school is located about 2 miles from James' apartment and about 4 miles from where he works. We actually might get to see each other once in a while :)

Here is a link to the school web site...if you want to read more about it!

http://www.csd509j.net/lincoln/

I will be posting pictures from summer school and my new school when I get them! Enjoy!

~Jessi

My First Apartment

I made this video to show off how I'm doing and what I've been up to. Enjoy.

IX Web Hosting

For those of you looking for a place to hold your web presence, I've got a great suggestion for you. I have found a company called IX Web Hosting. I base my endorsement on three criteria:

1) Price: They are one of the most affordable business around. At their prices ANYONE can start up their own website.

2) Features: Their service includes all the features you could want. They support all the different web languages, have all the databases you could ever want to use and many more tools. I'm not sure about their tracking tools because I use Google Analytics.

3) Speed: Though I would say content in the number 1 criteria for a good website, speed of downloading the site is at least top 3. IX's location of their servers allows users to download your site information at great speeds.

Based on my experience with Yahoo! and Go Daddy, IX is a much better product for web developers.

Real Life

It's official! I'm out on my own living in the "real" world. I graduated on Sunday and it was quite the event. My whole family showed up and made sure to cheer extra loud. Afterwards most of the time was spent hanging out and packing up my stuff. Now I'm in an apartment with absolutely zero furniture. I'm sitting on the floor up again the wall right now. Thankfully, I have a mattress or life would be really tough. The best part about where I live is that it's only a mile away from work. Today I jogged to work and I think I'm going to make a habit out of that. That should give me an excuse to eat as much Mac and Cheese as I want.

Jessi also graduated on Mother's Day and is finishing up her student teaching. So she still has AC, heat, wireless internet and furniture. She is also still interviewing with schools and is very hopeful to land an excellent job. I know she'll be a great catch.

Digg.com - Worth Checking Out

Have you heard of Digg.com? It is worth checking out. Basically, it's a news aggregation website. Here's how it works: people surf the web and find interesting news articles. Then, they submit the URL along with a short description to Digg. Then users can view the site. They can also add comments about the article. Finally, users can "digg" (this cool, as in, "I dig it") the article or bury (This is lame) it. If the article gets Dugg enough, it will make it to the front page as something popular.

Why is it Digg instead of Dig? Well, according to an interview with the founders it's simply because Dig.com was already taken. Personally, I think they lucked out by spelling it weird because in some ways it makes it easier to remember.

Here's how I use it: I have Google Desktop with the Google Sidebar. One of my gadgets is a website feeder (RSS basically) with Digg on the list. As articles make it to the front page (again, only the popular ones), they pop up on my sidebar. I can then pick and choose what I want to read. I have actually found that these articles make it to my sidebar faster than if I only go with regular news sources because of the speed at which people see and vote on these. It also naturally screens out items that are unimportant or poorly done.

So, give Digg a big thumbs up. You should check it out and then we can become friends and share articles we find.