Tag Archives: MAC Common Assessment Development project

2014/07/25 (F) Assessing The Situation

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We finally got a letter yesterday from Consumer’s Energy requesting payment of the $200 fee for hanging the natural gas meter.  The letter included a rough drawing showing where the meter will be located (south end of the east side of the house where the propane currently enters).  It also shows the route the gas line will take to get there from the opposite side of the street.  The drawing did not correctly show our pull-through driveway in relation to the house, so the actual path will be different.  This was also the first indication we’ve had that the main line will be run down the opposite side of the street, which we prefer over running down our side of the street.

At 9:15 AM we still did not have any landscape workers on site so I went to my office to continue working on assessment items.  No one from Village Landscape Development showed up today and we never got a phone call.  It’s a way of doing business that I simply do not understand.

I finally got around to making my annual appointment with my dermatologist only to find out he is still on medical leave.  I didn’t know he was on medical leave in the first place.  They scheduled me with someone else in the same clinic.

After lunch I had a nice chat with our financial advisor / stock broker at Stifel-Nicholas even though we just saw him three weeks ago.  We got a post card a few days ago indicating that he and his assistant were moving to a different S-N office.  He had not mentioned this when we met in person so we wanted to see what the reason was for the move, which he gladly explained.  No cause for concern on our part, which left me free to worry about other things instead.

As long as I was making phone calls I called Butch to see how things were coming along following the sale of a large portion of their business assets to a company in Nevada.  They still have a lot of loose ends to tie up and a bus conversion to finish, so they are not sitting on their hands.  When the buyers were there a week ago they loaded up as many parts and as much material as they could transport in the vehicles they had, but by Butch’s estimate it wasn’t 20% of the total.

I also had a series of TXT messages with Joe Cannarozzi, the mobile mechanic who has taken care of our bus the last four years.  Joe is relocating from Chicago, Illinois to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and giving up the mobile aspect of his bus repair business.  Apparently his new place has a garage where he will continue to work on rigs, but they will have to come to him.  I hope that works out for him, but it leaves us having to find a mechanic closer to home or willing to travel here.

I finished writing the assessment items for the three remaining Michigan Assessment Consortium Common Assessment Development modules and got all seven sets of items e-mailed to the team.  With that task checked off, at least until I get some feedback, I was free to go to Lowe’s after dinner and pick up some of the materials I need for the HVAC projects in the garage.  There’s a better than even chance that we will not go to our ham radio club breakfast tomorrow in favor of an early start on the garage work.

 

2014/07/24 (R) Back To Work

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We were up earlier than normal.  Linda went into the bakery today and likes to be on the road ahead of the worst of the morning traffic rush.  Since she was working I figured it was a good day for me to also do some paid work (plus a couple of loads of laundry).  Earlier in the summer I agreed to write assessment items for some of the modules in the Michigan Assessment Consortium professional development series on Common Assessment Development.  The items are needed for use with the Lectora platform, which Bill Heldmyer at Wayne RESA is using to re-package the modules.  These are modules that other team members developed, so I have to spend some time with the content before I can write the items.

I did some work on this in June and then got busy with contractors and out-of-town trips.  I am still tied up with construction, contractors, and other projects but a timely completion for this work would be early August so I spent much of today working on it.  I already had one module done and hoped to finish the other six but only managed to complete three of them.  I am anxious to get back to work on the HVAC prep in the garage but I plan to continue working on the assessment items tomorrow as I would like to e-mail them to the team for feedback before the end of the day.

I have a lot going on at the moment.  I like being busy, but this is starting to feel like “work.”  I have a growing list of “must do” bus projects that I have yet to start:  1) fogged window replacement; 2) auxiliary air filter / water separator replacement; 3) Aqua-Hot expansion reservoir replacement; 4) Aqua-Hot exhaust leak repair; 5) motorized windshield shade repair; 6) finishing the installation of the ZENA power generator (for charging the house battery bank while driving), and; 7) redoing the water bay (that’s a big one).  I have an optional project to replace the rear view camera system.

Butch is building new ride height linkages for his bus and wants to build some for me as well, so that makes nine “bus projects” I would like to accomplish before the weather turns too cold to work outside.  Some of these are projects I can do with the bus in front of the house once I can move it back into its normal parking spot.  The rest are things I will work on once I get it down to Butch and Fonda’s place in Twelve Mile, Indiana, probably this September.

The FMCA education committee work is ramping up and I have three websites I am trying to launch, one of which has an August 11 target date, plus our own website/blog to maintain (as of this writing I am over two weeks behind on blog posts).  I am also supposed to be writing a “featured bus” article for Bus Conversion Magazine on Marty and Pat Caverly’s MCI MC-5B conversion “Scooby Doo & Bookworm.”  It’s a great conversion that has taken 20 + years to build and will be the cover/centerfold story when it is published.  I have 1,500 photos from Marty and the only way I will make sense of the project is to sit down with Marty, select images, and make notes.  Once I have a sense of the chronology of the work, and the images to illustrate it, I can weave the words together to tell the story.

Kyle and Spencer were here working on the landscaping for most of the day.  Steve stopped by in the morning to go over the work from yesterday and outline the work for today.  It’s coming along, albeit much more slowly than I think it should.  For a job that requires a lot of manual labor we normally only have two guys on site, sometimes three and sometimes only one.  And, sad to say, they simply do not work as hard and as persistently when Steve is not here.

Linda got home ahead of the afternoon traffic.  We had leftover potato and lentil curry and naan for dinner and both the dish and the bread were still excellent.  A few black grapes and dark, sweet cherries for desert and we were off to bed early.

 

2014/05/06 (T) RESA Redux

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While we were in Florida I spent a little time working on an extension of a project I was deeply involved in the couple of years prior to my retirement.  The Michigan Assessment Consortium (MAC), of which I was a founding board member, sponsored the development of a series of modules for educators on how to develop and use “common assessments.”  “Common” in this case meant “shared across multiple classrooms/teachers,” as opposed to other meanings, such as “ordinary” or “numerous.”  The 24 modules were developed as scripted PowerPoint presentations with learning activities and supporting materials.  They were field tested in a workshop setting and revised based on participant feedback and the experience of the presenters.  The modules were then videotaped at Wayne RESA, with each of the development team members narrating the modules on which they were the lead author.  The videotaped modules, along with the PowerPoint files and supporting materials were made available online through MI-StreamNet free of charge.

There has been a continuing interest in this professional development series but recent changes in the rules for continuing education units (CEUs) required that the modules be repackaged in order to qualify.  Wayne RESA made a decision a few years ago to train some staff members in the Lectora software for creating online courses.  Some staff time became available and RESA approached the MAC and suggested the use of Lectora to repackage the assessment modules to meet the new CEU requirements.  One of those requirements was for assessments that validate the learner’s engagement with the content.  The existing modules did not include such assessments so the original authors were contacted to see if they would develop test items for their modules.  That is how I came to spend some time this winter writing test items.

Kathy Dewsbury-White, the President of the MAC, had arranged to meet today with Ken Schramm (Manager of TV & Media Production) and Bill Heldmyer, TV Producer/Director extraordinaire) to discuss the project.  She asked me to come along, and that is how I came to spend the day at Wayne RESA, from which I retired in June 2012.  There was a MAC sponsored video conference at 10 AM so while Kathy attended to that I roamed the halls of my former place of employment to see who was around.  All told I was able to visit briefly with a dozen or more people and with another half dozen a little longer.  When the video conference was over we grabbed lunch with Ken.  When we got back to RESA we worked with Bill in his editing suite on how we wanted certain aspects of the modules to work.  Kathy and I then worked our way back to Brighton through the afternoon rush hour traffic.

I talked to Butch (W9MCI) on the phone in the evening.  He had spoken directly to International Thermal Research about their Oasis brand hydronic heating systems and gotten some pricing.  There is a real possibility that our rebuilt Aqua-Hot hydronic heating unit in our motorcoach may have a coolant leak and that the leak is in the combustion chamber.  The evidence for this is an excessive amount of white smoke when the units fires up, if it fires up.  If so, it cannot be field repaired and we would have to get a rebuilt unit to replace the failed rebuilt unit, or get a new unit.  At this point my inclination would be to get a new unit from a different company, like maybe ITR.  I have a low tolerance for the repeated failure of expensive engineered systems.