Meet My New Class

After the first week of school, I am so excited to have this group of students. They are all enthusiastic and anxious to try new things. Of course we (Ms. Alwell, Ms. Lawson and myself) have a few challenges up our sleeves for them, but I think they will be up to the task. Although you probably can't come and visit them, I thought I would show a quick video introducing all 60 of them. (It will take ~ 2 minutes to meet them all so be patient). Sorry about the fact that the pictures are a little fuzzy, it's due to the compression needed to fit on the blog. If you want to see a higher quality version, click here

Guess I forgot to mention that last week, we were in the computer lab and each of the students (including the teachers) created Avatars to use in our online activities. (Much safer than real pictures and a lot more fun). They did a great job, didn't they? All the students were able to make their Avatars in ~ 30-40 minutes and only a few of the 60 needed any help at all.

If you wan to create your own Avatar, here is a link to the website I made for them to help with this activity. Yes, I made the website in one weekend. It was fun, easy and did the trick. I'm pretty proud of it.

I used iWeb from Apple, it very easy to make the site and our district set up space on their Webserver to host it. Special thanks to Scott Conklin for doing this.

Time to be whimsical

I have been pondering a few topics I wan to blog about (pedagogy, inspiration, and starting the new school year), but I just don't have the mental energy at the moment. Maybe later in the week. For now, I thought I would just post an interesting video my dad sent me that was recently on News3; (Editors note:- the video site has been taken down since the election- sorry if you missed this cute video)

Del Mar Pictures 2

I had a few minutes tonight to goof off between watching gymnastics, swimming, volleyball and sleeping, so I played with computer stuff (what else). I tried to make a Flickr Badge, which seemed pretty cool until I realized I couldn't post it on my blog, just on the sidebar (look left) and it can only show up as a small item.

Of course I also did a Animoto show, its still one of my favorite ways to show pictues. Enjoy.

Finally, using the Ken Burns effect and some music I made a movie version of the slideshow in iPhoto Not too bad, but by now you are probably sick of these photos, so I'll move on to something else this weekend

As before, in order to fit the video onto the blog it had to be compressed (shrunk). If you want to see a higher quality version you can watch it by clicking here. (May take a little time depending on speed because the file is ~ 100MB)

My Del Mar Beach Time

It took me a while to think about how to write about my 3 weeks in Del Mar, CA this summer. Although we certainly did plenty of fun things including a Pops Concert in the park, venturing out to find Italian Beef Sandwiches (are you surprised?) and attending a San Diego Padres game, the more I thought about my time on the cliffs overlooking the beautiful beach, I realized the entire 3 weeks was about family and friends. We were able to spend time in a beautiful location AND have many of our favorite people come and visit. Just visiting, talking and laughing made it one of the best vacations Bonnie and I have ever taken.

Visitors included my Dad, Bonnie's Mom, my favorite Auntie Lynn and Uncle Tony of St. George fame (it was too bad that they left before Friday), my Uncle Harvey and Aunt Linda, cousin Becky, of course both of my wonderful children, Daryl and Sheryl, our Saratoga friends Laurie and David, Bonnie's brother Barry and sister-in-law Diane, our new family Debbie Mark and Madison and our wonderful friends from Phoenix, Harry, Pat and their kids.

As I get some time, I'll play around with some more creative ways to show off the pictures, but for now here is a slideshow of our visitors from my Picasa Web Albums. Just click to start the show.





If you want to link directly to the album, just follow this link