The passing of a friend

Today I attended and spoke at the Celebration of Life for a friend and former fellow employee in our School District.

Vicki spent about 2 1/2 of the last three years in the hospital.

She had a great love of painting her toenails and some of us painted ours. Each person sent me a photo and I put this collage together for a get well card for Vicki back in 2008.

Though I never was in a role to work directly with Vicki, I did work with her often (tech wise) in her role as an Admin. Assistant. We also golfed on the same team in the annual SD46 tournament, told each other lots of jokes ... before getting sick, she worked upstairs from my office. I've looked for some of the fun golf photos, but can't seem to locate them. If I do find them, I'll update this page.

She was good fun, and passed away much too early. She was an amazing artist but within the school system one of the things she was most relished for was her famous cookies. At the event today there were a couple of hundred people and everyone was given a cookie and a recipe card.

I was most proud to have known her and shared time with her over the past 15 years.

Elphi Students work on iMacs and MacBooks

Elphistudents
Originally uploaded by bobsd46

I worked with some Elphi students today, teaching them how to create a blog using Blogspot. I also visited another class where the students were using the computers to do research about universities, colleges, and other post secondary institutions to attend in the coming years.

The other day, a teacher had asked me how to get a jpeg from Pages for Mac. So, I decided to create this collage using Pages. Pages won't export as a jpg, but it will as a pdf. I then opened the PDF in Apple's preview program which allows files to be exported to jpg. Once I did that, I opened it in iPhoto, trimmed off the white margins, header and footer, and voila. Good practice for me, and now to post this on my blog for the teacher to see.

Morning

Morning
Originally uploaded by bobsd46

Left early this morning to go to a school where I was delivering a blogging workshop. It is a non instructional day in our district and I was looking forward to introducing blogspot to the teachers. On the way, I was captured by the way this foggy morning appeared.

The workshop was a lot of fun for me, and valuable, I think, for the participants. At least they gave me some nice comments about how the morning went. There were about 8 attendees and that made for a nice class size. We explored lots of options for them to use their blogs both personally and as a classroom / teaching tool. Good day!

Back to School

I know that for some of you, back to school has already happened. For us on the British Columbia Sunshine Coast it all gets back in gear on September 8, next Tuesday. What an exciting day.

For me, there is some nostalgia as for yet another year, I will not have a specific school to go to. Imagine... I think back 35 years to this first school day in September, 1974, as I was starting my career in this school district. Yes, I had already taught for three years, but this was a new, wonderful experience to come. Wow, 35 years ago. And today, I occasionally see some of my students from back in the early 70s and I have even taught, or been a principal, for some of their children.

I hope this is a good year for you and your children/students. And, I'll even try to write more this school year. Yes, I know, I've said that before, but maybe this year will be different.