Blog Lafayette

Are you ready to sink your fingers into some good dark loamy soil and plant some of your favorite vegetables and flowers? If so there will be a great event happening Saturday April 30, 2011 at the Tippecanoe County Fairgrounds. It is the Garden Expo, a garden show featuring plants, growing supplies, garden decor, lectures and information. The event will take place from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. and will be a great place for you to learn a little bit more about what makes for a good green thumb. Come on out to 1010 Teal Road ready to learn a thing or two!

For further information contact the Tippecanoe County Extension Office at 765-474-0793.

I have spent the last several days redesigning another WordPress site and I am just about done. It is amazing how much time working through learning new bits and pieces of technologies can take but I am grateful for the knowledge I have gained through this process. Over the next few weeks I will intersperse articles about the steps I took to install and configure the new plug-ins and such. I hope that I will be able to cut the time short for the next person who comes along trying to figure out how to get their WordPress site to do more than it does out of the box so to speak.

In a story today in Lafayette’s Journal and Courier newspaper, I was glad to hear that the rate of foreign students enrolling in Indiana colleges took a big jump this last year. That is good news for us locally because of Purdue University. Purdue enrolled 6900 foreign students to take the lead in the state in enrollments. That is good for our local economy. In this present time of a down economy and fewer jobs, anything that brings up the money coming into our community is a plus. I am also grateful for Purdue University and it’s reputation. We have one of the best Universities in the United States right here in our own city. Just one more reason why I like living in Lafayette Indiana.

In today’s Journal and Courier there was a story, LSC prepares to replace its outdated computers, about our local school district’s need to replace old computers that were slowing down and not working as they should. The very young students in the story were using their computers to learn math skills and to study for an upcoming state wide test. The computers were having a very hard time loading pictures and other graphics and as a result, the students were having a hard time completing their studies.

Things have surely changed since I was a student! I remember having a class on computer programming that consisted of writing code that was punched onto computer cards and then when you wanted to run the program you would feed your rather large deck of computer cards into a reader. Then you would get a long printout of information and data if you were successful with your writing. We did not get a computer with an actual screen that you could look at until I was almost out of High School. The only time my calculator got slow was when I had to take the time to sharpen it in the pencil sharpener!

Don’t get my nostalgic ramblings wrong. I am not saying it was better then. The tools and methods are vastly improved from my time in school. I am glad that the students of today have the technological tools that they have to use. Even a slow computer is better than no computer if it is being used correctly as a teaching tool. The use of technology allows today’s students the ability to take in more information at a quicker pace. If I had to have a concern about today as compared to earlier times, it would be this. There almost seems to be a state of overload or too much information too quickly for these young minds to take in. The basics are suffering and are getting lost in the complex. If we ever had a time where our technology failed us and we were forced to use our minds and simpler tools, we would find ourselves in a place of disadvantage.

Albert Einstein, one of the smartest men of our time, once said, and I am paraphrasing, “Primitive man is able to build a bow and arrow and hunt for his food and survives, while modern man no longer even understands the working of our simple everyday machines.” He was right. I cannot tell you how a power plant works to generate electricity with any depth or detail. If the power stopped today, I would have no ability or knowledge to make it come back on. Here’s hoping that with the technology that is becoming common in our everyday world, we do not neglect to learn the building blocks that make the technology possible. A cook can make a great pie from a recipe, but a chef makes a masterpiece from a pile of spices and such, and never looks at the recipe because they know cooking inside and out. They know the basics.

Recently I joined a group called Virtual Online Learning. “Who is Virtual Online Learning and what do they do?” you might ask. VOL is a group of people who get together to learn about social networking, eBay selling, blogging, and just about any other Internet related selling and social networking topic you can think of. The training consists of Webinars and other teaching methods to show people not just “what” to do to succeed in networking, blogging, and selling, but “how” to do it as well. Danna Crawford from Ocala, Florida is the creator and main moderator/teacher of the group. She has been helping people learn their way around the world of networking and eBay selling for several years now. She does a wonderful job and it is obvious that she cares about people.

I know. I can hear you saying it in your head right now. “Another networking/marketing gimmick!” All I can say to that thought is this. I don’t know all of those other multitudes of coaches we see on Facebook and Twitter. I only know Danna, and to know her is to realize that she is the real thing. She is not just trying to make money, although that is a part of what she does. She delivers real value for the time that is spent learning what she has to teach. We are all very busy. We don’t have the time to do everything, learn everything, or be everything we want to. That is why we need to focus our learning. That is what Virtual Online Learning is doing for me.

Another thing I can say for sure is this. I am glad I am part of VOL and like anything else in life, I will get from it what I decide to put back into it. Give it a try and you may find yourself much further down the road to success as a hard working, social networking, eBay selling standout!

I read an article by Taya Flores in the Journal and Courier this evening that asked a question. Can the violin help children to read? The story is about first grade students in Attica Indiana that are being taught to play the violin by their teacher, Kasia Bugaj as part of the Attica String Project. An associate professor of music education at Indiana University in Bloomington Indiana developed the curriculum being used by the school in Attica. The curriculum was developed in order to test on the effects of learning violin on the reading ability of the students in the program. The study, which began in 2008, shows that reading ability was improved for the test students.

I am not surprised by the findings of the study so far. Learning to play music is a wonderful way to bring direction and structure to a mind, young or old. I would actually be more surprised if learning to play violin did not improve reading. It seems intuitive that any activity that required dedication, perseverance, and thought would improve reading and writing abilities.

It is nice to know that the Attica school corporation is using these methods to awaken the hearts and minds of these young students. We live in a time when the news continually brings stories about how American schools are losing the battle to adequately teach our young people. This story about one of our local area schools bringing the gifts of music and reading to its students gives me new confidence. We are learning new ways to teach our young people skills that will lead them to richer and more productive lives, and to me, that brings hope in the era of 2 + 2 = 5.

To see the article, follow this link: www.jconline.com/article