What was that all about?
At our children’s Christian school, they have bi-weekly “workshops” that are offered to the kids at the junior-high level. These are offered by parents and teachers and cover a wide range of topics and interests. Angela did one this year on banner-making and they created several banners (check out some examples here and here.)
Before the beginning of the year, I felt that God was challenging me to offer a workshop on “worship”. This was not to be a “music” workshop where we simply sang songs. I really wanted to lay a foundation as to what “worship” really is; how it is defined in the Bible; what is the range of what could be called “worship”. I wanted to break down stereo-types of worship and try to “let God out of the box”.
Well, I cranked up my courage and proposed the workshop.
Only 1 student signed up…;(
I was a bit disappointed and even blogged about it.
I was also relieved and thought that it was “over” for this year…I was wrong!
It turns out that at the beginning of the year students sign up for all 3 trimesters in the year. What was not clear to me was that 6 students had signed up for the 3rd trimester! So, when I found out about that, I had to crank up my courage again and prepare. This has been hard, as I don’t enjoy preparing for teaching. I have a “teaching” motivational gift but actually giving teachings is not my greatest joy in life…and it still isn’t!
At the beginning of the year, I had the idea that I could easily fill a whole year with a “Worship Workshop”…about 15 sessions of 2 hours each. I still think that an in-depth course on worship with lots of practical hands-on would easily be able to fill up that time…and then some! After all, what will we be doing for eternity!?
Well, only 5 sessions (just the 3rd trimester) presents a different picture. What are the 5 essential themes of worship? Good question! Hard question!
Other wrenches in the works:
So, I ended up with 6 students who didn’t really have a good idea of what they signed up for and were not, perhaps, even in a workshop they wanted to be in…and a couple may not have even been Christians.
Needless to say, this was not easy. In fact, it was downright hard and unpleasant! I have basically zero experience with teaching junior high kids and these were on the younger end of the spectrum as well. I obviously need work on my teaching skills because the response I got while teaching was not too enthusiastic. I think there were 7 of us who were glad that this workshop had finally run its course!
At the end of the 5 sessions, I have very little evidence of positive impact other than the always-helpful “learning the hard way” for me. I realized, probably above everything else, that kids of the 6-7th grade age think too concretely for my style of thinking and teaching. I’m mostly focused on adults when I’m teaching or trying to get across a concept…and even then I can have a problem! ;c) So, it was good for me to better understand the way the kids received teaching and just how important concrete, hands-on activities will be in exploring the world of worship.
Anyway, this was a difficult experience for me and I’m asking the Lord, “Just how can I help foster a lifestyle of worship in these kids?” and “Do I do this again?” (I don’t really want to right now!)
Basically…”What was that all about?”
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Blogging Frontiers…
Well, I’ve been blogging now (very sporadically) for around 9 months. When I set out, I didn’t want to simply toss my hat in the myriad of hosted blogging rings (blogger, xanga, wordpress, typepad, etc.). We have a very nice web hosting package with POWWEB…that we pay for…and we’re nowhere near exhausting its limits. I’m not a big fan of multiplying the URLs with which I’m associated. I pay for a domain and a web hosting package, so I’d like to use it! ;c)
When I started, I didn’t really have any experience with the various blogging packages that could be installed on your web site (the plethora of PHP-based open-source offerings, etc.) So, I sought a client blogging tool (always looking for freeware/open source) that simply generated and uploaded static pages from the local database of blog entries that it manages. I don’t know how many of those software tools exist (very few) but I found Blog and began to use it.
In the meantime, I began to work on building www.intouchcamps.com in the open-source CMS called Limbo (lite-Mambo…now Joomla). I looked at using Limbo for the last re-write of our site but I felt like I was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole and I could also tell that I was not “getting it” with respect to the CMS nomenclature of how to structure the content. I finally threw in the towel on that. I also started to help my daughter with two sites: http://fireproofsite.free.fr/ and http://cblalsace.free.fr/ that she was building. POWWEB began offering some auto-installers of some of these open-source applications and I thought I’d take advantage of that and try some out. I installed phpBB and, in searching for the ultimate mailing list tool, tried phplist and phpLedMailer (none of which I use currently on our site).
All that to say that I began to get familiar with PHP-based apps and, more importantly, comfortable with them.
I also saw that as I continued to blog and with how I wanted to arrange/archive my categories, that the Blog tool was going to get more and more cumbersome as time went on. It’s a good tool but its biggest drawback is that it’s not being aggressively developed. It’s last non-beta release is pretty old and so one follows the slowly-released beta builds that have varying degrees of bugginess and feature release in them.
So, I finally bit the bullet and decided that I would install an open-source blog application on my site (specifically for my personal blog…not to run the whole site…yet). I had several to choose from with the auto-installers at POWWEB and finally settled on WordPress.
I managed to get WordPress sufficiently customized to our site’s look and feel and my blog’s look and feel…which I like and am not ready to change.
In working with the other open-source applications, I’ve come to the conclusion that TEXTAREA WYSIWYG editors are a pain in the rear! They are a necessary evil and can be helpful for “update-your-site-from-Timbuktu” reasons, but otherwise, I desperately wanted to avoid one of those editors as my primary blog editor.
So, I went on a search for client-side blogging tools for the PC platform that would work with a privately-hosted WordPress installation. There are several out there, but after installing (or trying to) several of them, it became obvious to me that the only real choices at this stage are Qumana and Zoundry. At the moment, I’ve chosen Zoundry though I think the two apps will both evolve quickly and I’m open to changing if there becomes a great difference that interests me.
I used Zoundry to re-load my 22 blog entries from the Blog database into WordPress. If it had been more than that, it might have been pretty painful. As it was, it was a bit of work. Try as I might to do a database-to-database copy from the DBISAM database to MySQL, I never succeeded. I would have had to write too much code to actually make it worth the while for 22 posts.
So, this is the first entry to be actually done totally on my Zoundry/WordPress solution. There is more customization and exploitation of WordPress features to come I hope. I also hope that it will be easier to maintain and to blog…
…so hopefully you’ll see a few more posts in the future!
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