Dixon Middle / Jr High School

Well the first thing we noticed as we pulled up to the school was that the sign out on the road read "Dixon Middle School" and the sign above the entrance read "Dixon Junior High School" - an interesting discrepancy. Age - this school was old and the sign above the entrance was obviously over 30 years old. Great, I thought, this place is as trashy as the Junior High I went to - gonna be a whole lot of technology here. . .

We entered Mr. Warble's Manufacturing class and were simply told that we could, watch, participate, or do whatever else we wanted to. The class was given 15 minutes of very basic instruction on how to make paper rockets and attach the fins and then they were turned loose. We circled around helping the kids who weren't listening to attach their fins the right way.

It was fun - honestly - it was. I was surprised at how quickly the time went, and how good some of the kids were at the assignment. I think it would be a fun class to teach - a very 'hands on' class. Oh yeah, and about the whole technology bit - the shop was only half of Mr. Warble's room - the other half was a computer lab with about 40 brand new mac's. Looks can be deceiving.

Mind Tools

Personally I thought that the mind tool that I presented in class was pretty sweet. Will I use it, probably not in the long run, but at the moment I am using it and I think it is interesting to see where all my time goes. My favorite mind tool that was presented was Illustrator - what a sweet program that is. I am noticing more and more the mind tools that we use everywhere - it's all about just doing things for us (not because we can't do them, but because there are more effective things we could do) so that we can use our time/tools to be more productive. I was thinking about it the other day - even little things like the kronos I use to clock in at work is a mindtool - not that I can't keep track of my own hours or anything because I can - but, it's so much more effective for a computer to keep track of those things then all I need to do is learn what codes to type in so that I can see the totals. As I've gotten more and more into corporate identities for people I have tried to set up more and more mindtools that will make it easier for me to do them. I used Illustrator to set up a contract that I can simply change for each client, I use bridge to help me keep track of all my pictures, etc.