Yellowstone with Mitch & Sonnie

Last Thursday through Sunday, we visited Yellowstone for a last get-away before school started.  Mitch & Sonnie came with us.  We camped at madison campground in Yellowstone for two nights then at Jackson Lake for one night.  It was beautiful as usual.  We did a few hikes, saw the hot spots, but the favorite was when we soaked in the Boiling River up near Mammoth one evening.  I'm going to be teaching science this year instead of math so I was especially interested in all the information about microorganisms in the hot pools--I've never noticed those before!

A whole ecosystem of microbes!

In their own little ecosystem.

Yep, it's hot.

Here we are at the falls after the hike around Jackson Lake.

Lots of cooool microorganism stuff!

Mitch & Sonnie around the Canyon area.

Finally some new stuff

I know I've been a slacker on the blogging lately. Please excuse (and ignore) all the boring stuff previous to this entry. It was required for my class this summer. My family all just left me this morning and I'm reminiscing my summer fun. I'll go back to school in a week--wow, what a fast summer it's been. We've spent time with the Clarkes, Mitch and Sonnie, and Pences have been here for about three weeks. It's been great. The Pences are fun house guests. We've played games, gone places, and just hung out.

Grandma and Emma on the trail around Tony's Grove Lake

Grandpa and the Clarkes on Tony's Grove Lake

Emma's favorite way to wade in Logan River

Pences on Tony's Grove Lake

Grandpa and Addie on a little hike

Gavin and Grandpa on a bridge over Logan River

Emma, the 3 year old princess with her castle cake Marianne made

"Wait for me Daddy" on a hike up Logan Canyon

Krissy and Livvy on the hike up Logan Canyon

Check out Apture!

I've just put a new feature on my blog...it's called "Apture". It allows me to make a rollover for certain words that I want people to be able to automatically link to. It's cool...try some of my links on my previous blog entries.

Last Day 5520

Today Julie shared some information about Skype, a free source for internet to internet calls for Skype users.  If a call is made from a Skype user to a non Skype user there is a small fee.  The advantage being not only cost but the ability for video as well as audio.

Rob showed us Picasa, a free photo sharing and editing site.  You can also order prints and make slide shows from your albums.  Iphoto is a mac based free program that allows you to (among other cool things), make and order photo books.  Windows Photo Story is a free quick slide show program limited to only photos.

We discussed current issues in DE including accreditation questions from university to university.  We also talked about the difference between making individual accommodations on a university level compared to the public schools.  

This has been a very enlightening course, making me feel more confident in incorporating a few of the vast amount of tech tools into my teaching. 

More 5520

Wow, today we started off experiencing Second Life. It was amazing. Anyone can join. You create a character with any attributes and do anything you want. People can build, sell, buy services or products. I am very hesitant about introducing my students to this site for the fact that second life characters have no real life identity and can do some really crazy and illegal acts.

Our class discussed DE evaluation and assessment involving three aspects: students, faculty, and administration. It was concluded that DE is progressing and is just as rigorous and effective as F2F. Christie had a nice presentation about Web 2.0 and MySpace. I looked up Kellen on MySpace and found that he's got a huge Disney pic that I need to get off cause of the copyright scare we got this week. I guess I'll have to get his password from Argentina! Janet helped us explore Instructional Archetect, a program allowing teachers to create a webpage directly linking them to educational online resources.

Sample Movie 5520

Wednesday we learned how to make a simple movie with imovie. We then reformatted it as a podcast and uploaded it to our blog. Vwa-la! Here it is...