Countdown to Christmas Break
When the number of readers for any one of my Big Returns blog entries reaches between 80 & 100, I try to write something new. In fact two particularly distasteful interactions with my principal filled me with some 'last week of school' venom, and I was getting ready to spill it out into cyberspace. I would have started with a nice quote about the need for positive and effective school leadership and then go on to how it can be very demoralizing when said leadership is either absent or negative: i.e it is tainted by unevenness, inconsistency, and inequity. I was ready to pour more than little poison into your collective ear, but along the way I started looking for music to add to the Christmas video the students and I have been working on at school for the big dinner on Monday night, and fortunately for us all I got diverted into more pleasant territory.
Business first: let me introduce you to Adam.
I have been looking for a way to embed Teacher's Domain videos into Earth Science course materials and they have actually offered to write the embed code for me!!!!! It might actually work. I’ll be trying this over the holidays. I think these guys may be from my global neighbourhood because there's a reference to Vancouver Island. I'm wondering if one could integrate Glogster posters with Adam's pop-up functions? It might make a nice mash-up. (Is that today's euphemism for 'marriage'?)
If you have Freepath installed, there's been an update to some of the features. You can click the picture below for 4 short information videos or sign into myFreepath import the playlist entitled Freepath December Update which is on the main page. These links can also be found in my profile at the right.
What I really like is that Dave is working on ways to mash different free applications together with Freepath which will make me less dependent on online streaming. That's a real problem at our school where we suffer from strangulation by limited bandwidth. I need resources I can store on thumbdrives so I can avoid the internet altogether when the computers are sluggish and non-responsive. (Hmmmm . . . that sounds like many of our students especially after a weekend or a holiday . . . )
What I have to do this weekend:
(1) finish a video Christmas Card of the students to be shown at the school's annual Christmas Dinner on Monday night
(2) get enough of my new "fossils no more -- surrey's 23 things" blog finished so that I can issue an invitation to Surrey staff to work on the program with me starting in January
(3) write proposals for 2 different conferences: Learn BC which is for the e-learning world and our own STA convention day
(4) figure out who might want my services enough o give me a contract!!! I want to buy some new equipment -- a flip camera, a tablet, and possible a new computer -- and would love to be able to write them off against income!!!
What I'd like to be doing this weekend:
(1) buying a new flip cam -- but that will have to wait until Boxing Day just in case Best Buy puts them on sale
(2) working on a Voicethread for Christmas
(3) taking Thelma, the wonder dog, for a walk at the dike at Boundary Bay to watch the sandpipers dip and flash as they swoop by and to see if the snowy owls are back
(4) watcing the Geminid meteor shower
I was supposed to be snowbound this weekend which would have made the first list much easier to 'plough' through. Instead it has cleared and I have been shooting pictures this morning from my ice-coated deck. A full moon is setting into the trees in the northwest. Due north across about 30km across the Lower Mainland and the Fraser Valley are the pink, dawn-lit Coast Mountains fully laden with snow after yesterday's high elevation dump (I had rain!). My computer faces southeast where the sun has just cleared the cloud tops and is hitting me full in the eyes as I work.
In the spirit of Canadian Christmas, I offer 4 links:
(a) a haunting First Nations version of Canada's Huron Carol written by Jean Brébeuf a Jesuit priest who worked with various tribes in Canada in the 1600's; (b) a page written about the song and the priest; (c) an account of Brébeuf's time in Canada which reads just like the 'history of heroism' I was taught as a kid in Winnipeg, Manitoba (late 1950' & early 1960's). Written on 'History's Homepage' by an organization called AmericanHeritage.com, this is a terribly skewed version of events, but it offers enough geographical references than one can follow the progress of the priest's voyage from France all the way to where the Huron settlement would have been on what we now call Georgian Bay close to Point A on (d) this map.
CANADIAN CHRISTMAS GALLERY
(1 & 2) Illustrations of the Huron Carol
(3,4,5) Lake Huron in winter -- not far from the location of the native settlement Brébeuf visited
(6,7,8) South Coast Christmas images: *Raven eating the Sun (our school's spirit image is the raven); *Blue heron carrying the sun across the sky (see how low in the sky the sun is, and herons are a common sight here in the winter); *Santa riding Rudolf over a mountain that reminds me of the glacier covered peak of Mount Baker
ONE WEEK TO GO!!!!
[UPDATE: I had to repost this blog entry because the first one had too many non-working parts. Thanks to the patience of Sachin and Gary, the 2 fellows behind the scenes at Posterous, I have finally discovered that I was making a very simple process complicated and broken. In the meantime the clouds and snow and gusty cold winds have come to my area so there will be no meteor shower viewing for me.]
