 A little bit 'o humour, philosophy, and reflections to celebrate the end of another week of work and/or the upcoming weekend |
HISTORY
The concept of tgifs came about as an attempt to encourage my fellow staff members at St. Thomas of Villanova Catholic Secondary School in LaSalle, Ontario, Canada to become more comfortable using a computer.
We were a new school - built, at the time - 1994, with the latest in computer technology. Each classroom and teacher prep area had one or more networked computers. At the time, our staff was not composed entirely of 'computer-capable' and 'computer-comfortable' people - a few, but not many!
Our School Board - Essex County Separate School Board - organized many excellent workshops, seminars and PD activities to assist the staff in becoming computer-comfortable. However, as you know, the best way to learn to use - and become comfortable using - new technology is to USE IT!
I decided that I would try to do my share by using a lighter approach to assist my colleagues in getting comfortable with computers and willing to use them regularly - and so was born the tgifs (sometime during school year 94-95) - originally sent within our school network on Pegasus mail.
In 1998, our school board was amalgamated with the Windsor Separate School Board to form the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board. The new Board set up a BBS which we were, eventually - these things take time, hooked up to. At that point, I decided to continue, and expand, my tgif distribution on that BBS beginning in January 1999.
I also began to e-mail family and friends a copy of my tgifs (whether they asked for it or not! - you can do that with family and friends!)
In the summer of 1999, I attended a workshop for Claris Works Homepage and decided to take the leap to webpage distribution... official launch date - August 27/99... so here we are!
Unfortunately, in the changeover from the Pegasus Mail system to the new BBS system, I did not save the archives - who knew, at the time, that I would ever put them onto a website! Therefore, those tidbits are lost forever and my archive section begins much more recently. Oh well, such is life in this 'everything will change by tomorrow' time in which we live!
Update: November 1999:
M. Plaquet, my partner in crime here in the Library, has recently found a disk of Pegasus tgif archives that had been carefully tucked away - too carefully! - we've been looking for them for quite some time!
You will notice that the archival section has filled up some now that I have added in these back files. Unfortunately, there are still some holes to be filled in - individual weeks and a whole bunch from May '97 to April '99. However, bouyed by this most recent discovery, I will not give up hope - I know those tgifs are out there - and one day, they'll turn up.
These pages were designed with Claris Works Homepage software. The tgif logo was designed with my son's help in Paintbrush and additional clip art I have imported from http://www.mccannas.com/free/freeart.htm
Browsing the Net and keeping an ear and eye tuned for
humourous and/or inspirational tidbits has been very
relaxing for me - and my mom always said, "things are always
so much better when you share them with others."
So I hope you enjoy reading these pages as much as I
enjoy creating them,
Bruce
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