Wade Gibson

On Target

Georgia On My Mind

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Earlier this December a group of us from ESU 11 had the privilege to present at the AESA (Association of Educational Service Agencies) annual conference in Savannah, Georgia. This was the second time I’ve presented at AESA so it was nice to make a return at the national level.

Our team presented on ESU 11’s implementation of Professional Learning Communities which began in the fall of 2015. Our presentation went great and I’m proud of my colleagues for the outstanding job they did.

One of the most enjoyable parts of preparing for this presentation was drafting the title and description for our session proposal. I’m a huge fan of coming up with something creative and clever to intrigue conference attendees and lure them into our session. Plus, if you can get a chuckle out of the folks who review session proposals it drastically increases your odds of being accepted to present!

The theme of this year’s AESA conference was “The Future Depends on Their Future”. Naturally, our first inclination was “How can we incorporate Back to the Future into this?” Ergo the title of our session ended up being “Roads…Where Our PLCs Are Going We Don’t Need Roads”. Then we sprinkled in a handful of other quotes and movie references in the description to bring it all together. Of course our presentation was filled with loads of useful content, but we like to have fun too!

All in all it was a great conference. We had a chance to meet and visit with folks from other service agencies across the country. It’s great to hear the work others are doing and learn how we can improve our own organization. The southern cuisine was pretty good too!

The Crazy Switch

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Every year there is a magical time toward the end of July or beginning of August during which the phenomenon occurs I like to call, “The Crazy Switch” day. While not an officially recognized holiday due to its inherent fluctuation from year to year, it’s one most of us in educational technology experience. It’s that one particular day when enough teachers and staff are back in the district(s) and it seems like a tidal wave of emails, phone calls, and other random requests come flooding in.

No matter how valiant the effort or advanced preparations taken, we all become engulfed by this wave and feel overcome with angst and sometimes frustration. For ESU technology staff our crazy switch is usually flipped a week or two earlier than our school-based counterparts. At ESU 11 I called it as being July 19 this year, which always seems to creep up by a few days each year.

But we work in education, so we have summers off, right? I have often said that we spend nine months planning so we can cram an entire year’s worth of projects in over the summer!

Learning the Phonetic Alphabet

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One of my goals for this year was to commit the phonetic alphabet to memory. You know, when you’re spelling out a word and you say stuff like “C as in Charlie”. Yeah, that’s the phonetic alphabet. However, I found myself increasingly having difficulty coming up with names, and awkward pauses would ensue while my brain was churning to come up with a word.

Alas, I have learned the true NATO version of the phonetic alphabet. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I would say if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right! Not only is this an incredibly effective way to rattle off serial numbers to some unknown tech support person, but it really seems to command authority, as if you were authenticating a nuclear missile launch. I find that this technique will often get you past the first level support asking if you’ve tried rebooting the device. They know you’re not messing around when you’re calling in a level three strike on that failed hard drive.

Within a matter of a couple days reciting I had it down pat. Thanks to my wife for putting up with me that first night while she verified my accuracy. I quizzed her as well to see if she was retaining any of this high-quality intel.

Here’s a quiz for you. I once had a colleague refer to a malfunctioning router as “Tango Uniform”. Now the phrase is a common part of my equipment diagnosis vocabulary. I’ll let you think that one over. Until next time, this is Whiskey Golf, over and out.

Why You Should use the ISO Date Format

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You’re familiar with the ISO 8601 standard, right?  The one that standardizes date and time formatting internationally? Of course you’re not!  That’s why I’m here to explain what the heck it is, and why you should be using it.

Firstly, ISO is the abbreviation for International Organization for Standardization. I know, it should be IOS, but do we really need to be competing with Cisco and Apple for yet another IOS acronym…I digress. The ISO group sets all kinds of standards for various things and their standards are recognized internationally, so it’s always a safe bet to follow them.

ISO 8601 is the particular standard the defines how we represent date and time data. Pop quiz! When you’re entering something in your checkbook register (do people still write checks?), how do you write the date?  Month/Day, Month/Day/Year, something else? There is a whole realm of possible ways to write a date, thus the need for a standard.

ISO 8601 states that dates should be expressed in the format of “YYYY-MM-DD”. This means that you will always use a four-digit year, a two-digit month, and a two-digit day. You will never drop the leading zeros. So, for instance, today is February 28, 2016. In the ISO format it would be “2016-02-28”.  Makes perfect sense, right?

So why should you be using this format? One of the main advantages of using the ISO date format is when naming and saving digital files. Computer file systems have a unique way of sorting files. If your files are all prefixed with an ISO date, they will automatically sort oldest to newest under the default alphabetical sort, which can be really convenient. Any other date-based naming convention would yield different results.

I have been using the ISO date format for naming any file that has a date associated with it. Bank statements, digital photos, home videos, letters, backups, you name it. Just about every digital file can benefit from being prefixed with an ISO date. I’m also a big advocate of substituting underscores where you would normally use spaces in a file name. This makes it much easier once you enter the web world, where spaces are substituted with the nasty “%20” character string.

Feel free to go back through your entire digital archives and begin adopting this standard. Don’t worry; most of my digital photos are still named DSC00001.jpg, but at least my folder structure honors the standard!