As Thanksgiving drew near this year and we were getting excited about the family (Mark & Joyce, Daryl, Sheryl and Grandpa Bob) gathering at our house, we were also missing my Aunt and Uncle in Utah. Bonnie and I realized we hadn't seem them since July- just too long so on Friday afternoon, we decided to remedy the situation.
Friday evening Bonnie prepared a lasagna feast and I called my dad to prepare some of my Grandma Mary's famous Apple Slices, which he and my brother Mark had raised from an old recipe.
On Saturday at 1:00pm we headed to the airport, jumped in the plane and headed to Scottsdale to pick up my Dad.
As long as we were there we had dinner with Bonnie's brother Barry and our sister-in-law Diane. Our good friends Harry and Pat also joined us.
Sunday morning we packed up the Lasagna and Apple Slices, left Scottsdale, flew over the Grand Canyon and landed in St. George.
Bonnie Guarding the Food in the back of the plane
Over the Canyon
Pilot and Co-Pilot(?)
Once at Auntie Lynn and Uncle Tony's place, the feast began.
Veggies and fruit for an appetizer while the lasagna was heated, Caeser salad prepared and garlic toast was cooked to perfection. Yummmm. Some fudge, eclairs and of course the Apple slices were brought out for desert.
Just enough time for some catching up on the patio, a quick nap and then back to the airport to fly home into the sunset. We passed over the lights of Vegas, headed across the Sierra's and by 7pm Sunday night we were back on the ground in San Jose. You can see larger versions of the pictures by clicking on them or if you want to see all the pictures from the trip, check them out by clicking here.
Check out the Animoto (new favorite on-line toy) from our trip:
Can't believe it was only 30 hours since we had left, but what a great way to spend the weekend before Thanksgiving, visiting my favorite Aunt and Uncle in Utah. Bonnie and I vowed to never let 5 months pass again without seeing them.
WOW- The alliteration just rolls out. Nothing like a long 4-day weekend to charge up the brain, so I thought what better than to add another blog post about my busy last 6 weeks. Here goes... As many of my readers already know, in addition to teaching my wonderful 5th Grade students this year, I agreed to continue to be an advocate and resource for technology at our school. This is a continuation of a role I took on last year and I was so inspired with new ideas from my June classes I just had to find a way to introduce them to our staff. If you haven't read my posts from this summer showcasing some of the new technologies I learned about, just stroll back through the blog. In fact, this blog is one of my major opportunities to learn new ideas which I hope to introduce to my students this year. As I thought about what I wanted to achieve this year, two things really influenced me. The first were some of the inspirational videos I have seen on how our world has changed (and is changing) and that the pedagogy (teaching technique) needs to change along with it for our students to be successful. There are many I watched, but I thought I would put one here for you to get a flavor of what I mean.
The other was a series of conversations I had with my good friend Stacy (Red to those that read the comments on my blog). She helped me crystallize my thoughts on how to have our teachers and our school see technology in a new way. After talking with her it was clear to us that in order to have the teachers embrace the use of technology, it had to move from "cool stuff" to another tool for teachers to improve their lessons. Technology had to become part of the classroom activities, not an extra-curricular activity like PE & Music. Another important part of our discussion was that everyone is at a different place on the technology curve and delivering technology at only one level leaves some bored, some overwhelmed and only a few satisfied. With all that in mind, I took on a challenge to organize technology training at our Teacher Learning Day on October 27th. I first used Google Docs Survey's (what a cool tool- ha ha) to get input from the teachers on what they wanted to know more about in the area of technology. Next with the help of some teachers at our school I brainstormed a list of 9 possible classes to be taught. Another Google Survey (I suspect the teachers were getting tired of these) to see who wanted which class and ended up with 7 possibilities ranging from the basics of pictures on your computer, to building webquests with frames for student activities. Other classes included teaching lessons in the lab, digital storytelling, classroom websites, internet resources and using computer games and quizzes with your class. WOW ! I didn't realize what I had taken on.
The biggest job was finding instructors and designing each class to be at the right level, impart knowledge and lead teachers to think about using these ideas in their classroom. I ended up with a cadre of super instructors from Garden Gate and the District Office. Jamie, Stacy, Donna, Sandra, Cris, Laurel and I all put in tons of time getting the class material organized and prepared. Sandra even learned a new classroom website tool, just so she could teach it to our staff. Stacy taught two classes in addition to being a lead for the math portion of the day - what a trooper!
Not all our teachers have laptops, but to make the classes effective I had to borrow some from the district so as many of the classes as possible could be "hands on". Scott C let be borrow 5 laptops and the weekend before I had them all spread out in my dining room configuring thm and upgrading the software so teachers could use them. Bonnie was so understanding, she didn't even yell at me.
I must admit that organizing and executing this was probably one of the most exhausting things I have done in many years and without the help of all the other instructors, I would never have been able to pull it off. Bonnie will tell you that I was a maniac on the computer for nearly a month pulling together ideas and grouping the teachers to get the most out of the day. The weekend before the training we were in Orange visiting Sheryl and Del Mar for a Wavecrest owners board meeting and I spent hours and hours in the hotel room finishing all my presentations.
Was it worth it?
The feedback at the end of the day and since then has been fantastic. The teachers really appreciated that the material was designed for what they wanted, not just something someone was pushing on them. I have already seen many of the them starting to use ideas from the classes. The next step will be to do some follow-up activities and sessions to take the initial training into full blown classroom activities for as many teachers as possible. Our newly formed tech team will be our SWAT team to accomplish this.
I'll definitely do it again, but next time, I'll know what I am getting myself in for.
So much to catch up on as I have not blogged in over 6 weeks. Our trip to SoCal, Halloween, setting up tech training for the teachers and the recent drama with Dakota- no worries, he's fine now. I'll try and tackle all of these this week. First on the platter- Doggy Halloween.It was a dark and scary Halloween at our house this year. Sunset had come early, the skies were cloud-covered and an eerie breeze had started around 4 o'clock in the afternoon. It was strange that we had almost no trick-or-treaters this year. As the witching hour drew nearer (what is a witching hour anyway), a pumpkin suddenly appeared in my kitchen.
I had no idea where it might have come from, but it looked strangely like Dakota, the newest member of our household. He wandered around looking for children to join with him in his quest for candy, but alas, none were to be found. One in Hawaii and the other in SoCal left him alone and dejected. Poor Dakota.
As the evening progressed a few unsuspecting children arrived at our door for a helping of Almond Joy or Kit Kat (no healthy treats here, that's for sure), but they were certainly few and far between. Then a noise from the back yard startled us; lo and behold (I always wanted to write lo and behold) Marty, Dakota's mother, had arrived from next door, in full princess attire.
The evening turned out just fine and although we had very few children, our dressed up dogs entertained us well into the night,begging for candy and looking cute as ever.
Postscript : After using other tools the last 6 weeks such as Google Sites (a wiki) and Teacherweb blog, I am finding working with Blogger to be very limiting. Placing pictures, inserting tables for formatting, adding background colors and generally doing any formatting other than simple text seems very difficult. Even to insert the horizontal lines, I had to use HTML code. There must be a better way. Postscript 2. For anyone interested; in order to have the pictures of Dakota and Marty facing each other, I had to "flip" one of them horizontally. iPhoto does not allow you to do this, however if you open the picture in Preview, there is a flip command and you can use that instead. Sweet :)
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