My Birthday Wishes

It is that time of year. The inbox overfloweth as do the laundry baskets! Too much to do and no time.

I have lots of things I could talk about: backchanneling at conferences, technology curriculum planning, and so many other things are knocking around in this hard head of mine.

But as my birthday present to myself, I'm going to make a few birthday wishes. And no, I'm not going to do 38 of them (one for each year I'm turning!)

Some of these are serious and some are random.

I wish that:

1. Kathy Sierra would start blogging again.
2. I had about 1 week to finish my book. Like they let me out a week before the kids got out!
3. Easier ways to grade!
4. That twitter had a feature that extracted all of the twitters that I missed that included links.
5. Intelligent agents were real.
6. That Google Presentations archived the backchannel chat and autoposted to google docs.
7. That fish weren't so nasty to clean.
8. That bloggers had an honest “humility” rating alongside their reader count. (I'd read the ones that stayed humble AND had readers.)
9. That spam filters actually WORKED!
10. That I could outsource my inbox to a clone or mindreader.
11. That I could help someone have a better day today.
12. That Microsoft VISTA had never been invented. I've got to figure out how to downgrade my Mom's computer that I recommended last summer. It has been nothing but a headache (and I hear that XP is being pulled from the shelves.) I'm ever the optimist and I don't say this lightly, but VISTA has been a total nightmare, and my mom used to teach computers. I could go on but won't. Note to self: Go to a happy place and this isn't one.

13. Oh, I want to go on a Mediterranean Cruise. (Had to put a happy place here.)

14. That I had a MAC and a PC lab at school.
15. That we had an elementary tech teacher too and could work together well.
16. That Verizon had the iPhone. (At&T service doesn't exist in rural GA.)

17. If I couldn't have #16 then I wish I had a smart phone w/ Google Android. (My cell phone is 4 years old and that is OK. I know what I want and see no reason to get a new one until I can find a phone that lets me “mash it up” and use it on the Internet.)

18. That there was a master list of all the cool free stuff going on in the blogosphere. (We could do this w/ a standard tag, guys.)
19. Someone would let a few of us put our heads together and spend about 4 days locked in a cabin in the woods to design an incredible digital citizenship program.
20. That people would TELL ME when I hurt their feelings. I'm always rushing from place to place and sometimes hurt people's feelings w/out knowing it. I guess that is why I married a very direct man. We both just tell each other how we feel.
21. That my children will have as incredible of a marriage as I have. I married my boyfriend. He is amazing.
22. That I could stay at home and write books AND teach.
23. That my ears wouldn't hurt so badly when I fly. (7 sets of tubes in my ears as a child didn't help.)
24. One day I would testify in Congress on technology & teachers as I saw my father do for farmers in DC. I've got something to say about how many teachers are being treated in the public schools in the USA and I guess b/c I'm a private school teacher now, I could say it. I believe strongly that global collaborative projects are essential to our future as a country and that overfiltration, micromanagement of teachers, and point and click teaching is choking not only the life out of education but the life out of our future as a country. We're making some mistakes.
26. That my whole life will honor my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and that I will know and do His will every day. (These are my wishes, remember! I saved the best for last.)