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

Google Earth Tour of M6 Return +

OK, I know its been a while, but I have been working on this post in between my other activities in Del Mar, CA (Eating, Sleeping and a little Jacuzzi time). Also, the more I worked on it, the more I thought about adding, so it just grew and grew. (no surprise from me)

I spent the last week or so working on putting together a Google Earth Tour; although it takes a little practice its pretty easy once you get the hang of it. I'm sure I will use it in my class this year and will probably have students make some tours as well.

Here is a picture overview from Google Earth of the trip home I made from Duluth earlier this month after the COPA M6 convention. This was the basis for setting up my tour.

How to experience this tour:
After putting the tour together, I had to think of a way to show it off in my blog. As it turns out, that was a bit more difficult to accomplish than actually making the tour. After some serious thinking (in the jacuzzi of course) I finally came up with 3 approaches

1. Download the Google Tour and run it on Google Earth yourself
2. Post a screencapture video using programs like Jing or iShow and post
   
3. Take pictures of the tour using screenshots and use iPhoto to make a sideshow and post.

The rest of this entry gives you opportunities to experience all three methods and a little bit on how I did them. Feel free to leave me some feedback on which you like best or contact me if you want more details on how to do any of these.

Watch the Google Earth Tour directly
Certainly, one great way to experience the tour is to view my trip directly in Google Earth. Download this KMZ (Google Earth tour file) and then play it directly in Google Earth. Click on Google Earth to go and get the program if you don't have it. Its free and lots of fun to play with. There is so much you can do , its amazing. The new Google Sky is even cooler. Its like having your own planetarium. (sorry for the digression)

A few hints to get the most out of the tour:

Be sure and set the tour preferences (go to Preferences) to include the pop-up balloons- they have some nice pictures and links to explore.

When you get to a stop you want to know more about, click the pause button, then just click the icon on the map, the balloon pop-up will appear and you can read my comments or click on any active links to learn more.

Here is a link to a Google Earth help section on tours and preferences if you need it. You can adjust the speed and pause time in the tour preferences as well.

Enjoy the trip, it takes only ~ 2 minutes this way, instead of the 2 days I spent flying. Of course I had the fun of flying, but that might not be for all of you.

Watch a video screen capture of the tour as it plays:
Another approach was for me to run the tour and use a screen capture program such as Jing or iShowU to make a movie of it as it plays, although you will not be able to pause and check out the links I put at each stop. In addition, the terrain does not show up as well due to needing to compress the details in order to post the file. The good part is when you click on the movie below, it will play quickly and smooth, even with a slower connection.

Some of the downsides caused by need to "shrink" the video so I can insert it in the blog and have you see it can be avoided by using a direct link to the file. If you have a very fast connection or are patient, and want to see it in more detail then shown above, you can use the link at the end of the paragraph to play the full version . This file is ~ 80 MB so even with a very fast connection, you may have to wait up to 3 minutes to get a smooth play. A slower connection might take as much as 20 minutes to retrieve the file.
Google Earth trip home with iShowU

How I captured the video:

I first tried to do the capture with Jing (my new favorite screen capture tool), however after playing with it for 2 days, I was generating files that were 150MB to 450MB with only 1 minute and 30 seconds of video. Much too large to post and view from my blog. I contacted Jing. and they told me that their program doesn't work well with real time video content like a Google Earth Tour. Wish I knew that before I started.

I finally found a tool called iShowU that allows more options for saving and using the files, but it was $20 to get rid of the watermark on the video. I guess I was feeling cheap, so that's why there is a big green iShowU label in the middle of the video. (If you send me a donation, I'll buy iShowU and get rid of it- JK).

Use iPhoto to make a slideshow of the tour.
After discussing this project with my Auntie Lynn (of Saint George fame), it seemed like another approach would be to just take some screen captures of the tour using the Grab utility in OS X, keyboard shortcuts (command-shift-4) or the image capture in Jing. (I used Jing, but all will work). This approach still does not have the full effect of Google Earth, and the downsides of the video capture above still exist, such as lower resolution, and inability to read the balloon pop-ups, but like the one above, the video below plays fairly well. If you started the one above, you may have to wait for it to finish to see this one unless you have a fast connection. You will know its queuing up as it will display a buffering pop-up notice.

Once again, the downsides are due to the need to "shrink" the video so it will play with minimal delay in the blog. If you have a very fast connection or are patient, you can use the following link to play the full version (sorry this one has narration, but not music). This file is even larger than the previous one at ~ 100 MB so even with a very fast connection, you might have to wait over 3 minutes or more to get a smooth play. Google Earth Tour Slideshow of M6 return

How I created the slideshow:
I played the Google Earth Tour on my computer, paused it whenever I felt it was good for a picture (of course I captured all the pop-up balloons), snapped a screenshot and then imported them into iPhoto and made a slideshow. I used the Ken Burns effect (manual mode) to adjust the pan and zoom of the image to simulate real motion. This actually worked even better than I thought it would. It was easy enough to do that I am confident I could teach my students this process. I think having the students create a Google Earth Tour based on something we are doing in class, creating a slideshow of it and posting it to a class website or wiki will be a great project during the year. Take a look and see what you think. I added the titles and narration in iMovie, because it was quick and easy. I am pretty pleased with this version, give me some feedback.

M6 Was AWESOME- Thanks COPA/Cirrus

The last 10 days have been super hectic with all the fun in Duluth, my dash back across the country with Tony, packing for Del Mar and then driving here. I am finally in Del Mar, CA. (here is the view from my window)

With some peace and quiet I plan to catch up on my summer blog. My first update is on my experiences in Duluth, more to follow in the next week as I get my "relax" on good and tight.






M6 was the best yet.
After dodging a few storm cells on the way up (no big deal with NEXRAD on board), I arrived in Duluth for the COPA event (M6). This was my 5th Migration and probably the best yet for me. I met up with lots of COPA friends including Sanjay, Rick, Mike, Curt, and Jim, and made a lot of new ones. I also ran into someone I worked with 30 years ago at Intel (Steve Dominick). Isn't it a small world. Not sure how many planes came this year, but you can see for yourself, its a lot.

Rather than relay all the details, here, for anyone interested, I will provide a couple of links. Fellow COPA member Gil Williamson put up some pictures and captions on his website. Just click here if you want to take a look. (since I wrote this Gil has attended the Dayton Airshow, so you need to scroll down and move to the second page to find the pictures.

Just added today- Aero News Video about the COPA Migration. Its about 8 minutes but check out my 5 seconds of fame at the 3:43 mark




One of the other great improvements this year was the publication of the Migration Daily News. I put up the files on this website for anyone to read. I tried using a new on-line program called Scribd to allow easier viewing. [note: sometimes it takes a few seconds to download, be patient] Let me know what you think. If you want to download the files, click the Scribd logo and then download. Use the + sign to make it larger. I think this will be great for putting things on my class website for parents to read.

For those that don't want to delve into the details, here is my "15 minutes of fame" picture in Saturday's Daily Update. No surprise, the picture is of me standing in line for some food. Eating fish and shrimp while walking around at the Duluth Aquarium was sure a bit weird, although tasty. It was a nice change from the trains at all the previous events.

My best memories from this year's Migration were Rod Machado's great speeches and just having the chance to "shmooz" with a bunch of great people. Of course being across the street from Dairy Queen didn't hurt either. I also had a chance to see "the -jet" in its hanger as they were doing some maintenance, as they prepared it for Oshkosh. Thoughts of purchase are still dancing through my head, if someone can get the stock market to go up instead of down, I might be tempted. For now, its just drool and watch.

Duluth put on a great weather show with nice days mixed in with a wonderful lightening storm on Friday night- what a show. As always, everyone in Duluth was nice, and the people at Currus, IOLS and Monarch Aviation were all wonderful. Thanks to all the hard working volunteers of COPA that put this event together. I'll certainly be back next year.

Traveling to Chicago

As previously reported, I had a long trip ahead of me to the Midwest. Tony and I had a long day enroute from Saint George to Ann Arbor (outside of Detroit), but we made it.

Our first stop was in Denver after a beautiful crossing of the great divide. We had an awesome breakfast at the Perfect Landing- I need to find more excuses to go to Denver, it was fantastic. (Of course I had a Denver Omelet)

After spending the night at Tony's son's house outside of Detroit. I decided to proceed to Chicago along the lakefront. I have never done this before, what a beautiful view of the city. Take a look for yourself:


For those that know me, the second most important reason I come to Chicago is to get my taste of Luke's Italian Beef Sandwich. (First is seeing everyone). If you ever see this sign, you MUST STOP and try one. Tell them Stuart sent you:


Tomorrow I'm off to Duluth for the Cirrus get together. I can't wait to go and I'm sure I will have lots of new cool aviation toys to discuss next week.