Stuff About Joel Personal by Joel Wagner - April 23, 2008July 2, 201012 Matthew tagged me. Blame it all on him! With round 3 of TAKS testing coming up next week, we all could use a little break. The rules: The rules of the game get posted at the beginning. Each player answers the questions about themselves. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5-6 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they've been tagged and asking them to read your blog. Let the person who tagged you know when you've posted your answer. Got it. 1) What was I doing 10 years ago? 1998. Wow, I don't really know! Ha. I was finishing up my sophomore
Mark Your Calendars, The Blog Revolution Project Is Coming… Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - April 19, 2008July 2, 201010 They say that April showers bring May flowers South Texas doesn't experience nearly as much rain as the Dallas/Fort Worth area does. I almost miss the weekly tornado warnings and lightning shows we had up there. But I like being able to see stars at night, it's a crazy cool trade-off. Nevertheless, April is the traditional month, at least according to the old adage, for rain. There have been quite a few links to So You Want To teach? coming in recently. I want to highlight them, as well as focus on a few other things as I look ahead to May. You see, May will be a record-breaking month for So You Want To teach? and you can join
Test Drive SYWTT Forums Today Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - April 7, 2008July 2, 20102 I said I wasn't going to post again this week. The thought of having forums on here really got me excited. So I decided to invite you to go start testing it out. I have currently only one topic and one forum, but I want you to play around with it. Over the course of time (particularly over the summer), I will begin to really dig into editing and making the theme look better. I may experiment with a few different forum setups before deciding on one that I want to keep. For now, you can point your browser to http://forums.soyouwanttoteach.com/ and explore. Also, April 9th is CSS Naked Day. Check out So You Want To Teach that day to
Whitespace General by Joel Wagner - March 15, 2008July 2, 20106 Have you noticed that People really don't like As I prepare my bands for the UIL Concert & Sight Reading contest that is now less than a month away, I have noticed that they seem to have a big problem with rests. For the uninitiated, rests in music represent silence. If I reduce the amount of noise that I make, my students will be more likely to hear the important things I tell them As I was talking with one of the classes on Friday about the incredible importance of the rests, I made a correlation about how we don't like rests because people really don't like silence. In the visual arts, typography, and graphic
Hyper-Focus Fosters Higher Quality Output Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - February 11, 2008July 2, 20107 Get your commenting skills ready, there's lots of material to be discussed here. I will be offline for most of this coming week and would love to hear the thoughts of my readers on these subjects. This week, I will be traveling to San Antonio for the annual Texas Music Educators Association clinic and convention. I'm excited. That convention marks the beginning of the heavy push as we prepare for the UIL Concert & Sight Reading contest, which will be held in early April. It also signifies the end of my relaxed life. The next two months will be extremely hectic and crowded for me as I focus on making sure that everything is taken care of as I prepare
100 MusEduBloggers by 2009 Music Education by Joel Wagner - January 29, 2008July 2, 20102 I have been blogging about teaching for a while. I came across a post by Joseph Pisano (the original post is here) where he is trying to get at least 100 Music Education Bloggers blogging about music education or music technology. Part of me has been wanting to jump into the MusEduBlogging world, but it wasn’t until this morning that I decided to take the plunge. I have learned a whole lot about blogging over the last year and so I hope to be able to use the knowledge I have gained to try to make this site one of the premier sites in the MusEduBlogging world. Yes, I just created that term. A Google search for both MusEduBlog returns
New Horizons Looming…Feedback Requested Personal by Joel Wagner - January 28, 2008July 2, 20106 I will begin setting up and writing in a Music Education blog soon. The idea was to include Music Education content on this blog, but I think that might alienate a handful of the readers and that is the last thing I want to do. So when it gets up and running, I will link to there from here and link from here to there. It's exciting! When that happens, the posting frequency over here may dip a little bit, but I will continue to add great content regularly. I have noticed a change in my posting habits lately as well. It seems that I have begun to find myself on a mission to create more edubloggers. I love what
Loving My Job; Hating My Work Personal by Joel Wagner - January 18, 2008July 2, 20108 Even if you ignore the majority of this article, check out the last sentence. I am absolutely loving school since coming back from Christmas Break. Even so, I am beginning to get burned out. If you want to know why, go read this. He's still not back yet and it's all but certain that he will not be coming back next week either. Still no clue when I can expect him.I wrote an email to my principal today, some edited excerpts follow: I love teaching and I love rehearsing the bands, but I am very tired. The students suffer as a result. More than anything else, that is what breaks my heart about the whole situation. It’s not that I
150 Subscribers Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - January 15, 2008July 2, 20102 Thank you so much to everyone who has subscribed. You people are awesome! I want to challenge you to invite one person you know who is either a great teacher or an aspiring great teacher to check out So You Want To Teach? for themselves. Email Updates Did you know that email subscriptions are available? Even if they aren't familiar with blogging, you can sign up to receive the updates via email. Could you sign up with your school address, and begin sending articles around to your colleagues? I want to see how quickly we can build our "class size" to 200. Will you help me by inviting one friend? :)
Overcoming Stress In A Stress-Filled Season Stress Reduction by Joel Wagner - December 19, 2007June 16, 20163 In this article, I’ll revisit 10 of my 25 Tips For Less Stress that I have found to be most helpful for me over the last two weeks or exponentially heightened stress. Christmas is coming, and with is seems to be incredible stress for a lot of people. Perhaps it’s because I am not married and have no children, but Christmastime has never brought a lot of stress into my life by itself. Health concerns have, however, brought about some immense stress into my life a couple of times in December. My college had a two semester student teaching process (one semester of extended observation, and one semester of down and dirty residency). I was fortunate enough to be able to conduct a
148th Carnival of Education Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - December 5, 2007July 2, 20109 Welcome to the 148th edition of the Carnival of Education! As is one of my signature styles, I want to present this carnival in list format. We'll begin with a Top 5 list... The Main Attraction Obviously the process of creating any "Top 5" list is subjective and open to argument and debate. With nearly50 submissions, I had a handful of options from which to choose. I narrowed it down to about 8 and did a little bit more weeding down to come up with my favorite five articles from this week. Some are from blogs that my readers and I read, others are brand new discoveries for me. Either way, I enjoyed these. #5 A 10% solution (Learn
25 WordPress Plugins Every Blog Should Have Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - November 6, 2007July 5, 20102 This post is outdated. Edit 06/06/2009 - I have recently written a much more current and similar article. Please check out 20 WordPress 2.7 Plugins You Can’t Live Without. Reader experience is the most important element of any site. Whether it be an entertainment site or an information portal, the ease of use for the reader is vital. I run this blog using WordPress because it gives me incredible control over the reader experience. I large part of that control comes in the way of plugins. What are plugins? Plugins are basically optional programs that run behind the scene. Some of them are never even seen by the reader. Technically, they aren't programs -- they are really scripts that run on
Weekend Wrapup 08/20/07 Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - August 20, 2007July 5, 20102 Happy Monday morning. I begin staff development this week. School begins in Texas next Monday. This spring, I began to make myself familiar with the Getting Things Done (GTD) approach to personal productivity. My views on effectiveness went into overdrive this summer as I read The 4-Hour Workweek. Timothy Ferriss has recently posted The Not-To-Do List, 9 things to make you more productive. Just a Substitute Teacher points us to an article in USA Today that has a great list of things that some school districts or schools do to get more subs. Check out How to Lure Substitute Teachers. Athena gives us a list called 10 Things I Learned In My First Year of Teaching. How many of us
Weekend Wrapup 08/13/07 Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - August 13, 2007July 5, 20102 Another week begins. Now that Summer Band is in full swing, I am reminded how difficult and full my schedule is during the fall. My blogging will come when it comes. :) Now on with the wrapup... CaliforniaTeacherGuy has accepted a position in Small Desert Town. He recently received a letter from the superintendent. One of the huge advantages to a small district is that the administration is more involved. I once interviewed in a district where the principal taught history, and the superintendent taught math. He actually came into the interview when he reached a break from mowing the football field! If you get in today or early tomorrow, My Education Junction has a contest. I realize that by
8 Steps To Building A Better Blog Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - July 15, 2007July 5, 20102 This really has nothing to do with education. I wanted to take a chance to stop and address some things that happened this week in my life and the life of this blog. Every day in the past week except for Tuesday, So You Want To Teach? saw more than 50 visitors. It's not like that constitutes a high-traffic blog or anything, but I see healthy, steady growth and want to look at some of the things that I have done to see this growth. Add content I started the blog in February, but only posted three articles a month until we got to the last week of May. Those articles are pretty good and help to form the