Time for my traditional November posting. I am loving the smells and tastes of Thanksgiving! Turkey, stuffing, pies, cranberries, and eggnog. Too many to mention! Everyone is busy cooking, preparing, arranging, and getting hungry. Four of our children are at home now; Laura just got in very early this morning from Bob Jones University in Greenville, SC. John is married now, and he and Paulette are expecting their first child in May of 2012. Very exciting! John and Paulette will be bringing their friend Byron from SC to our house as well this year. A few years have passed since Lisa made our first Thanksgiving turkey, and our children now range in age from age 23 down to 10. Time goes by. We are doing well, and we have a lot to be thankful for. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving with your family and friends!

We have been talking about music and sound effects for our Digital Stories recently at Cedar Lane ES. Students have enjoyed sampling sound files and creating their own musical accompaniments for slideshows. It reminded me of how sound has become very important in our world today. I saw an interesting advertisement for Acura’s Active Sound Control. In Acura vehicles, the speakers can create an interesting sound – SILENCE! Active Sound Control listens to engine noise in the car interior and broadcasts sound canceling signals to eliminate that extra noise. This technology works whether the stereo is in use or not. Here’s a link to Acura that describes this high tech Sound Control system. Pretty amazing what technology we enjoy in the 21st century! My two youngest sons think this is totally cool. How about you? If this is in an Acura today, how long until we see the technology in economy cars of the future? Time will tell, or Tim will tell you soon.

]]> http://www.timolinda.com/2011/11/14/the-sound-of-silence/feed/ 0 http://www.timolinda.com/2011/11/09/back-up/ http://www.timolinda.com/2011/11/09/back-up/#comments Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:09:49 +0000 tolinda http://www.olindaservices.com/osblog/archives/4

An old Mac system from years ago...

Do you back up your computer system at home? Most people don’t usually take backup seriously until they lose a REALLY important file, or perhaps an entire hard drive all at once. I have lost some important files, and last year, I lost many home video files stored on a single hard drive. I was actually in the middle of backing up the video files when the drive was lost. Frustrating.

Since then, I am more careful about keeping backups current and redundant. My main machine at home is an Apple iMac, so I use Apple’s Time Machine software. Very easy to set up and maintain. The worst problems have been the power supply to the external hard drive coming unplugged, or the USB connection being disconnected. Once things are hooked up correctly again, Time Machine picks up right where it left off with incremental backups until the hard drive is full. Then the oldest backups are deleted and replaced with newer backups. Nice software!

My wife works mainly with Windows systems and uses a little different scheme, since she is also backing up client and business files. The moral of her story is always, always, always have a current backup of your system.  She now rotates her backups with using CD/DVD backup one time and an external hard drive another time. Her latest backup routine includes an internal hard drive, and external hard drive, and an online service, then Dropbox on top of those as well. That way if one backup fails another will be available. Backing up is much cheaper and easier to do than it ever was in the past, so BACK UP!

This blog post was made almost three years ago in 2008.

My daughter Laura works at Friendly’s. She follows in the footsteps of her two older brothers. John started soon after this restaurant opened here in the MOT area. He worked the fountain, dealing mainly with ice cream. James started next, also working in the fountain area. John went off to college, and James continued working at Friendly’s. While still age 16, James became an assistant manager, and did a great job. He worked there about 2 years and learned a lot about managing and working with people. He has also gone off to college with John, and Laura continues working there. She has been a Hostess, and recently began as a Server, making great tips. 3/5 of our children have worked there, so we know Friendly’s pretty well.

If a pig loses its voice, is it Disgruntled?  (Just a little vocabulary joke.) We just had a great session on Building Amazing Vocabularies at my school. 4th and 5th grade teachers got together to hear about “Making Words Their Own” and sharing ideas on this topic. Lots of great ideas; a whole packet of strategies and sample activities. Should be helpful, especially for the classroom teachers. A number of ideas I can use in the Computer Lab and support classroom instruction as well.

Wow! Hard to believe this post has been up for almost three years. Seems like forever since we did this at Cedar Lane Elementary. The title and first sentence caught my attention; thought it was worth posting again. Have a great weekend!

Sound is an important part of media presentations old and new. Think how much sound adds to video clips, movies, and even slide presentations. Here’s a TCM link online to Wired for Sound (from Singin’ in the Rain.) Just imagine what it was like in the early days of sound becoming part of the movies. What used to take a movie studio to produce can now be done using a powerful computer workstation. Think of those incredible PIXAR productions done entirely on computer, like Cars 2 (2011.) This post was first seen back in 2008, so more updates will be added soon. We will be exploring sound effects, adding music to presentations, and soundtracks as we continue learning about Digital Storytelling with 4th and 5th graders at Cedar Lane. “Sounds” great!

This is a posting I made recently in a Digital Citizenship course, with this week’s topic being Digital Safety. Thought you might enjoy seeing some of the resource links.

“Be Responsible, Be Respectful, Be Safe” is our CLE School-wide expectation for positive behavior. I am planning on arranging my Digital Citizenship lessons around our PBS expectations. Our students have become much more familiar with these ideas since we have reviewed them regularly for several years now. It is nice being able to jump from school positive behavior directly to responsible behavior online, and digital safety. The students have certainly been prepped for thinking this way, and have good understanding of their role as digital citizens, or netizens.

We have been using iSafe for a number of years, and will continue. The iSafe lessons are a little less engaging than some of the other resources available, but we do teach a unit on them. I plan on inserting key resources within the iSafe lessons as I teach them each marking period. BrainPop is another great resource,and I use that regularly with students for all grades (1-5) at Cedar Lane ES. NetSmartz is a resource that students really enjoy coming back to multiple times from year to year. We have used that for about 5 years. Very dynamic.

The resources I am most interested in adding to our “toolkit” include Infinite Learning Lab, Webonauts on PBS Kids, Cyber Security in Delaware, and Disney Safe Surfing. They seem to be the best fit with the sites we are already using, and should appeal to most of my students. I am looking forward to getting lots of these links in place on our school website in the near future. This course really has provided a wealth of new sites/resources in one place. Thank you, course designers!

The Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) in Berkley, California developed this list of the 7 Elements of Digital Storytelling which we will adapt for our use at Cedar Lane Elementary School.

1. Point of View – What is the main point of the story and what is the perspectve of the author?

2. A Dramatic Question – A key question that keeps the viewer’s attention and will be answered by the end of the story.

3. Emotional Content – Serious issues that come alive in a personal and powerful way and connects the story to the audience.

4. The Gift of Your Voice – A way to personalize the story to help the audience understand the context.

5. The Power of the Soundtrack – Music or other sounds that support and embellish the storyline.

6. Economy – Using just enough content to tell the story without overloading the viewer.

7. Pacing – The rhythm of the story and how slowly or quickly it progresses.

Grace and Ruth Wells

Digital Storytelling is an interesting topic. Some time ago, I did an eLearning course on Digital Storytelling. The discussions were very active, and the culminating project was fun to do and useful. I featured a book my sister Ella Marie had written as part of a children’s literature course she took in college. She called it “The Telephone Book.” It was about my Uncle Charlie back in the days when the telephone was not as common as it is today. Four teachers from Cedar Lane Elementary were in that course, and several more teachers from the Appoquinimink School District as well. Jason Ohler is an author and speaker, and he wrote a book about Digital Storytelling back in 2008. That was a very practical look at the topic with lots of great ideas for teachers and students to put into practice. He describes Digital Storytelling in the Classroom to be a set of new media pathways to Literacy, Learning, and Creativity. I will be reading this book again soon as students begin their unit on Digital Storytelling in Grades 4 and 5  in my CLE Computer Lab. I am looking forward to the great stories that we will design in the months to come. Stay tuned for more details and links to some great digital stories!

I recently posted some links to photos of FDR, and other individuals during The Great Depression here in the United States. My Mother lived through those years, and talked about how rough they were for many people. Hopefully, our economic downturn will not worsen here in the U.S.A. at this time. Those photos were linked from the Life.com site of online photos.

One picture is worth a thousand words, or so they say. In the past, America got its images in magazines such as “Life” and they could be amazing. Today we take images for granted, but once that media was the domain of the gifted photojournalist. Until Life magazine stopped weekly publication in 1972, it helped define American culture in photos for much of the 20th century. Now many of those photos are available online.

Teachers can use this online resource to give students an online window into another world. The archive and website were created in partnership with Getty Images, now the world’s largest photo agency. Check out the article in Edutopia by Owen Edwards to get more information and experience all that the website has to offer. Smile for the camera!