As an Instructional Technology Specialist at KS, I service teachers & students. So what on earth do I do in the summer? Hmm…. good question! Ha, ha. Well, let me start by saying that I am blessed to have one of the best jobs around. I work at a great school with great people & awesome kids. I also belong to a wonderful team whom I consider “family.” Another enjoyable aspect of my job is the wide variety of activities and experiences that I encounter each day. A typical day is pretty much…. atypical. Here was my schedule today:

5:00 Rise & shine. (I wake up at 4:30 during the school year.)
5:30 Done showering. Start devotions.
6:00 Read email, Twitter, & online newspapers.
6:30 Feed dad breakfast. (Usually leave at this time during the school year.)
7:00 Tris arrives for ride to school (only for volleyball tryout week.)
7:30 Starbucks. Yeah! Pike’s coffee-of-the-day is da bomb….
7:45 Drop off Tris at Keku, then go to Toshi’s to pick up a box of cone sushi.
8:00 Design & develop a wiki to host handouts & resources for teachers.
8:30 Planned visit to a co-worker’s home is cancelled.
9:00 Burn audio books to CD and meet w/ team members in my office. Coach Pono shares about his club volleyball team’s national championship. (Cool!)
10:00 Record a videotaped message to a co-worker. Played a song on my guitar, but messed up.
10:30 Start production on updated version of KES parent orientation DVD.
11:30 Lunch at Meg’s w/ Cy & Tim. Thursday’s special, the “miso-paka” (opakapaka fish.)
12:30 Assist grade 4 teacher w/ data backup, installation of fonts, & setup of Apple store account.
1:30 Started 2.0 upgrade of my iPod Touch (took forever.)
2:00 Examined new del.icio.us website, now known as “delicious” (social bookmarking site.)
2:30 Continued work on wiki site and Ning site (mashup.)
3:00 Discovered that IT has now blocked MySpace on the admin. network. How’s that??
3:30 Emailed letter to one of the organizers of the upcoming PodCamp conference.
3:45 Learned to embed different types of widgets on our particular wiki. Continued work on wiki.
4:15 Yaba-daba-doo….
5:00 Grocery shopping. Filled gas ($65 for three-quarter tank….)
6:00 Dinner of canned spaghetti. Pretty gross.
6:30 Twittered: “why does canned spaghetti taste so nasty? what on earth are they putting in it?”
7:00 Bo-cha.
7:30 Read and/or get back on the computer. Maybe check out Waikele Borders/Starbucks, which is only a block away…. (Thursday night’s minichurch now moved to Wednesday.)
11:00 Sleep.

Looking forward to a “Happy Aloha Friday” tomorrow….

“ukucheck” is made up of two words, uku & check. “Uku” is Hawaiian for “cootie” or “head lice.” I remember back-in-the-day while attending Ala Wai Elementary School that we had a monthly ritual of uku checks. We would all go down to the health room where the nurse would comb through our hair with two pencils in search of nits, or “uku eggs.” After much anxiety, then relief of passing the uku check, we would go out to recess. The playground would be filled with the chanting of “Billy got the ukus,” or “Sally got the ukus!” (We didn’t have Nintendo back then, so we had to entertain ourselves.) Of course if it were a big dude, we’d all be silent and avoid eye contact at all cost.

Later in my adult life, I taught out on the Leeward Coast. Once during recess duty, I heard a chorus of “Keoni got da ukus, Keoni got da ukus!” After cracking a smile and resisting the temptation of joining in, I quickly composed myself. I subsequently began to reprimand those “cruel” children….