sudo reboot

There are a few things that I hold dear. Being awesome at my job is one of them. Sharing and open source is another. I need a medium where I can articulate my reflections and share the work I've done Making Science Not Suck™. I began work on coding my own blog and website in Python/Flask that would be a kind of Schoology, lessons and handouts would be encoded in latex and markdown and the end user can obtain it in their format of choice. This ended up being overkill. Our student management system has all of these features built in. We, on the technological edge of education, need to remove barriers to help parents and students keep up to date on their progress. Reducing the number of websites they have to visit is one way to do that.

School districts invest in one of four possible ecosystems:

• Apple, the historical winner in education back in the 1990's and a resurgence with iPads in the classroom.
• Microsoft, expanding into education using what they have learned from their highly successful government and business contracts. Office 365 is the main product here.
• Google, the newcomer to the party. They are also trying to get their Android tablets into the classroom to complete with Apple and Google Drive and Google Docs to compete with Microsoft.
• Buffet, Districts promote using Schoology and other online services.

My high school is invested into the Microsoft ecosystem, but I continued my workflow of Dropbox, Google Docs, and LibreOffice on my dualbooting Arch Linux and Windows laptop. I was hired mid hear, it was my first time using Interactive Student Notebooks,  and I was teaching in 4 classrooms a day from a cart. I kept to my existing digital habits.

Then I got a Surface Pro 3. That changed everything. All my lessons are now in some Microsoft format or another and stored on the district's OneDrive account. No need to have a hand crafted website that renders LaTeX documents.

That leaves blogging. I could spend tonight writing code or actually start blogging. Just over two weeks before students begin, so I choose blogging!