Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Pecha Kucha

Pecha Kucha is speed dating for architects. Designed as a means of managing presentation times, participants are limited to showing 20 slides for a maximum of 20 seconds each. That's a total of 6 minutes, 40 seconds for an entire presentation.

This concept provides a venue for many people to present their designs, instead of a select few. This approach is being met with enthusiasm in 171 cities all over the world. It will be interesting to see if it spreads beyond the field of architecture.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Gina


Meet Gina, short for Regina, which means queen in Italian and she truly is the queen of the house!
She's also kept me sane this week while I've had a stomach virus that totally flattened me.
And, she keeps me sane and listens to me complain when I get stumped with the technology here. Not being a digital native, I find I really need to play with this stuff to get comfortable with it. I'm trying, but this photo, for instance, was supposed to be a trading card. I managed to make the card but haven't figured out how to upload it. It tells me the file may be corrupted-don't want to go there as I'm still reconfiguring a corrupted profile. So... having fun, wish there was more time to play with these things now, but will definitely play more in the future, and feeling overwhelmed!

Flickr

This is a test post from flickr, a fancy photo sharing thing.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Success!

Finally, after 2 years of craziness and frustration, we were able to open the library in the 4-5 grade school today! Not bad considering we started with a bare room, no shelves, no furniture, nada, and now we are out of shelf space! The kids have been anxious. It feels good to finally get some books into their hands.

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Sunday, Super Bowl, and Sick Kid

What is it about the mere mention of the possibility of snow which makes one yearn for a day off, even though it's Sunday and the weekend is winding down? Super Bowl in the background, my son's been sick since the wee hours of the morning and I've been staying close in case he needed me. Just finished listening to the first section of Learning 2.0 - a few thoughts.

I have always seen myself as a student and a teacher, be it formally or informally. I have been blessed by the example set by my father who welcomed every day with its challenges and my sister who meets challenges head on and runs with them. Every day brings new experiences, new opportunities to learn, often from your own children or students. Being naturally curious and stubborn, I hope that I will soon be as comfortable with Web 2.0 as digital natives.

There was one statement that really rang true for me, more so than others. #4,being confident, encourages us to "Don't say it or think it unless you want it to be true." This, I feel, is very true if one is to achieve one's goal!