Busy

A lot has been going on lately.  I’ve just begun a Master in Educational Technology from the University of Alaska Southeast.  The program is all online except for one summer class held in Juneau.  I’m currently taking 3 classes totaling 9 credits.  This all on top of teaching and continuing my efforts with BWCACAST.

On the BWCACAST front, I’m still kicking out episodes from the summer trips.  I’m currently releasing episodes from the trip we took in July with my parents.  I have one ready to release this coming Tuesday, so be sure to drop by the site and check it out.  I’ve also got a couple of really fun episodes in the works.  First I did an interview with a man named Joe Priatle from Ely.  He’s 91 years old and has been making snowshoes for 70 of them.  He was kind enough to allow me to film him re-rawhiding a pair of snowshoes my Uncle Zac gave me.  It was a lot of fun watching him start out with the rawhide straps in what seemed to be a haphazard criss-cross and evolve into an amazing web.  I’ve also had the good fortune to team up with www.blackriversleds.com.  They make a very nice toboggan sled for winter camping.  They sell the sleds completed or you can buy a kit from them.  I’ve partnered up with them to do an episode on putting one of their kits together.  I’ve got all the parts and hope to shoot putting it together this coming weekend.  With the sled finished up we are planning a winter camping trip in the middle of February.  I don’t think we’ll go very far back into the BWCA, because we’ll be leaving after school on Friday and have to be back by Monday.  It should be a good time though.

School has been going well.  Our student broadcasts seem to fluctuate from week to week with more and less professional shows.  For whatever reason some of my students feel that everything needs to be funny and joking around takes precedence over just about anything else in their lives.  I continue to work with them to provide a quality news program once a week.  My web design students are great to work with.  We keep plugging away at a variety of php mysql open source cms’s, blogs, galleries, and soon wiki’s.  On a side not I’m really hoping for a snow day tomorrow.  Its been snowing since last evening and doesn’t plan to stop until tomorrow at 4:00 PM.  The National Weather Service says we shouldn’t drive unless we really need to and yet our school district hasn’t made the decision to close school for tomorrow.

Erin and I spent yesterday making venison snack sticks.  We kind of got a late start on things.  But we took 10 lbs of venison, 8 lbs of lean burger, and 2 lbs of pork.  Ground them all up together.  Split into two 10 lbs batches we added in the seasonings for a pepper batch, and a hot batch.  It then took us about an hour to stuff the first batch into collagen casings.  Once stuffed we hung the snack sticks in a smoker and smoked them for 3 hours.  During that time we stuffed the second batch.  When the first batch was done smoking we put them in the oven at 200 degrees to finish them off.  The second batch went into the smoker.  This all went down around 9:00 PM.  It took over 3 hours for the first batch to reach the recommended 160 degree internal temperature.  Sot it was 12:15 AM before I was able to take them out of the oven and put the second batch in for their cooking time.  I ended up having to get up at 2 Am, 3 AM, 4 AM, and finally 4:30 AM before the second batch was done and I could turn off the stove and get some good sleep.  Needless to say I took a nap today.

Fast Fall

It seems as the fall has just flown by.  I can’t believe its already Christmas break this coming week.  Erin and really enjoyed our time a week ago when we went up to Canada.  It was great to get away just the two of us and spend some time together.  Thunder Bay was nice, and our time on the shore of Lake Superior was nice and relaxing.

This past week seemed to go pretty quick.  I think when your down in the trenches it can seem like its moving awfully slow, but when you look back you seem to forget those times.  Anyway it was a good week.  I went to a wrestling meet on Tuesday night and watched a few of my students who are on the Virginia high school wrestling team.  It was fun to see them compete.  They did a very nice job winning both of their dual meets.  I went to the meet after our weekly curling match.  Tony our high school art teacher, Chuck our superintendent, Tom one of our P.E. teachers and myself all curl in the early league.  We’ve competed three times so far and are sitting at 2 for 3.  I played pretty well our last game getting most of my rocks in the general area they were supposed to be, so that was good.

On Friday I was signed up to take tickets at the hockey game.  Since I was tied up with this Erin spent the evening making lefsa.  It turned out really well and I think she ended up getting about 70 pieces.  The hockey game was fun to watch.  Virginia beat International Falls after a bit of a shaky start.

Saturday night Erin and I went to her schools Christmas party at the wooden table.  It was fun spending time with the people she works with on a daily basis.  After dinner we headed to Hibbing to pick up Katie who was just finishing up about 28 hours of travel getting down here from St. Michael for her Christmas break.

Today we did a little bit of ice skating.  I don’t know how the rink will be tomorrow.  We got a little bit of snow this evening.  It seems the moment you get the ice cleared enough for skating mother nature decides to spoil the fun by dropping more of that white stuff.  There us rumored to be a pretty big storm that is supposed to hit us on Christmas eve.  If that’s the case we need to make sure we take advantage of the skating while its available.

Erin has two days of work this week and I have three, so our Christmas break is just around the corner.  I am really looking forward to relaxing and getting outside some over break.

I hope you all have a nice holiday season

Ja, das ist sehr gut

We have had a guest at our house for the last few days.  A group of German students accompanied by two of their teachers arrived in Virginia Minnesota last Saturday evening.  We have had Inkari (who is one of the teachers) staying with us.  It is fun to learn about life in Germany.  I am impressed with how well she can speak English.  I took two years of German in high school and don’t remember much.  She has been visiting classrooms both in Virginia schools and in Nett Lake school this week. Tomorrow they are visiting the underground mine.  I am jealous.  I have always wanted to take one of the tours there.  We hope she’s having a good time with us.  Its always scary being the representation for your country.  😉

Winding Down

Summer seems to be racing to an end.  I can’t believe how fast the summer months fly by, only to see the same amount of time in the winter drag on by.  I guess working does that to you.

I’ve had a jam packed summer.  Erin and my tirp to Australia was such a great time.  In fact the best part of this summer was being able to spend almost every day all day with Erin.  Not like we do a ton of crazy exciting stuff, but just being together is nice.  Aside from our trip over seas I’ve spent about 20 days in the Boundary Water Canoe Area filming for BWCACAST.  The weather wasn’t phenomenal but it wasn’t the worst either.  We had rain on every trip, and sure fought the wind on our longest trip where we covered 100 miles in 7 days.  We got some great video and had a blast spending time in the woods.  My parents came down for one trip where we paddled across pretty much the entire Crooked Lake.  We did it the right way paddling from west to east, so the wind was at our back the entire time.  Can’t complain about that. 🙂

Erin and I finally got some time in the lake at the end of the summer.  The weather was so cold, windy, and rainy that it wasn’t to appealing to jump in the lake.  This is pretty much crazy.  On a normal summer day we are in and out of the lake at least three times.  So with a few nice days in August we finally started jumping in and even did a little water skiing.  Josh (a friend of mine from Fairbanks) came down for a BWCA trip and he was the instigator for the skiing when we got back home.  I amazingly got up on one ski on my first try which was pretty cool.  The next time I tried a couple days later I wasn’t so successful and wasn’t able to get up on one at all.  After six or seven tries I opted for two skies and dinked around on them for a while.

Our first official days of inservice for school begin next week.  I’ll be heading in tomorrow for a bit, but hope to spend as much time playing as possible before work is thrust back into my life.  Dont’ get me wrong.  I like my job, but having the days to do whatever I want sure rank a bit higher then the old “9 – 5”.

I hope to be posting more in the future.  I know I fluctuate quite a bit with my posting.  With all the websites I manage it kinda play out with coming up with fun witty posts to entertain the masses. 😉  I’ll do my best though.  Don’t give up on me yet.

How do you install that?

My web design students are a lot of fun.  We have an ongoing humorous argument about wich operating system is better, Mac or PC.  Well… On Monday one of my students brought me the newest Windows operating system (Windows 7) which was released in beta a couple weeks ago.

So Monday night Jesse and I met up in Hibbing where he helped me pick up some linoleum for our kitchen and we used his truck to bring it back to the house.  Jesse was then kind enough to help me do the install.  Which turned out perfect.

Tuesday back in class, three of my students came up to me asking if I had installed Windows 7 on my Mac the night before.  I told them I hadn’t, because I was too busy installing linoleum.  All three got a very confused look, and then almost at the same time one said “How do you install that?”, while another said “Is that an operating system?”.  I said no, its my new kitchen floor.

It was pretty funny how the terminology was the same, and they were mulling over in their mind how one might install linoleum on their computer.

Labor Day Weekend

This was our last real weekend of freedom before heading back to school with kids.  I have been working for the last three weeks trying to rebuild all of the district websites… Its quite a task.   The list runs something like this…

• District Website
• High School
• Roosevelt Elementary
• Parkview Elementary
• Nurses Website
• Each staff member has a site. (roughly 250)
• All the sports (basketball, track, football, tennis, etc.)
• All the student activites (chior, band, orchestra, etc.)
• Community Ed

Im sure there are more that I am either not thinking about, or haven’t even been made aware of.  So that has kept me pretty busy.

Aside from that I’ve been helping Rudy (the network admin for the district) set up polyvision boards, install projectors, set up airports, which doesn’t really fall under my job description, but its a lot of work for one guy.  I have also been helping teachers get their classroom websites up and running, and working with a few of them on how they can start to implement some technology into their classroom.

Needless to say, I’m wicked behind and have decided I’ll work as hard as I can, but at the moment I have more tasks then can be completed before school starts.

So back to school starting tomorrow morning.  Amidts all that I haven’t really had time to plan for the two classes I’ll be teaching.  One being web design and the other broadcasting.  I’ve worked of the last couple of days hammering out a syllabus for each class, and lesson plans for the first week.  Those are finally under my belt, which feels good.  We’ll see how those plans play out in the classroom this week.

So to take a little break from the actual computer we headed out on Donny’s new pontoon boat yesterday with April, Trisha, Tonya, Cindy, Erin, myself, and of course Donny.  It was a great day to be out on the lake.  Very very warm, and just enough of a breeze to keep us somewhat cool, and throw the occasional wave up over the bow splashing everyone from the front of the boat to the stern.

I was reading up on CSS (cascading style sheets) while we were out and about.  I haven’t had time to do any reading lately, so it was a perfect time to relax on the boat and listen to everyone chit chat and catch up on all that fun xhtml/CSS goodness.

Although summer feels like it has come to an end, the days are still warm, and the lake is still swimable.  We went out a couple times today.  Its nolonger like bath water, but it sure helps cool you off from the hot sun.

Home

Well, I’m back in Minnesota again…  The funny thing is I recall three weeks ago when Erin and I were getting ready to leave she told me that when I came back from my trip it would be spring.  Well let me tell you…  Right now we are in the middle of a pretty healthy winter storm.  Forecasts say we should be getting up to 13 inches of snow by Saturday morning.  Excellent spring weather don’t you think?

I’ve been trying to get caught up on sleep.  When traveling around rural Alaska its pretty tough on your sleep patterns.  If you stay in the school, your sleeping on a classroom floor in which case you need to be up and packed up before the teachers come in the next morning.  Regardless you usually are flying the next day and have to be packed up anyway…

I was weathered in Breivg Mission for a few days, so I was able to visit with the Rudstroms..  I guess my last post kind of summed up that experience.

Anyway its nice to be back at home.  Nice to hang out with Erin again.  She’s been sick the last couple days 🙁  poor girl.  I hope that the district here decides to close school for tomorrow so she can rest up.  The downside to that is they have already canceled a couple of times and that in turn pushes the last day of school later into June.

So now that I’m back I will be hitting the video editing super hard.  I’d like to have all of it done before summer break.  I’ll keep you posted and will put finished pieces up for you to ridicule and critique.  🙂

Presentation at EduComm2006

So there I was sitting on a balcony over looking the Florida coastline.  I look at my watch 1:45 AM…. Ouch, I present in 7 hours.  Back to the computer I send my concentration.  Flipping between a keynote presentation and google earth.  What a great way to show everyone where we actually live.  Here is what I ended up with.

[QUICKTIME http://www.bbryson.com/movies/fla_bssd.mp4 320 260]

After heading to bed at a little after 2:00 A.M., Chick began to snore. I was already a bit wired, and was having difficulties falling asleep.  So I got up and went back out on the balcony and fell sound asleep on the swing out there listening to the waves crash on the beach.

At 5:00 AM, chick got up and came out to check email.  I got up and took a shower hoping to be revived for the day to come.  John, Chick, Mia, and myself piled into the car at 7:00 and headed to the convention center just outside of Orlando.  We were of course in the middle of rush hour traffic, so it took us quite some time to get there.

Mia and I presented at 9:00 A.M.  The presentation went really well.  Mia counted 30 participants in the session.  We talked about our student broadcasting team, and all the hard work they do.  Then talked about audio and video podcasting how it can be done in the classroom as an alternate assessment incorporating differentiated instruction.  We then talked about how podcasting could be used as a powerful staff development tool to push out pdf documents, or examples on how things should be taught, filled out, or interpreted.

The session ended up taking the whole hour.  We showed them some clips from a couple of the broadcast as well as some footage from the Iditarod coverage the kids worked on.  At the end of the presentation we had quite a few people come up and tell us how much they enjoyed the presentation.  So that was nice to hear.  We had some good questions about some of the procedures we have for creating the podcasts, and what we do about liability.  I think we may have even made a few contacts for next year.  Cross your fingers.  I am really hoping to start up a national student news broadcast next year.  It would be pretty revolutionary.

So after our session was finished we went down to the exhibit floor to wander around all the booths.  It looked like there were quite a bit more booths than were represented at MacWorld this year.  And the booths were huge. Everyone had gigantic projector screens and flat panel TVs and staff.  Vendors must have spent a fortune to be part of this conference.

We did find something really cool.  Tanburg is selling a “portable” dish system for video conferencing on the road.  We are interested in getting one we could use for next years Iditarod coverage.  It would allow us to do live broadcasting from the trail. This dish collapsed down into its own box, and can auto set up in 90 seconds.  If we find the money for this unit, we would ditch the trailer, because how many roads do we have around us any way, and put it on a sled system, so we could pull it behind a snowmachine, or a dog team.  We would really get the Iditarod Trail Committee excited if we were able to pull that off.  They were already not too impressed with what our students were able to produce this year.  They feel that is cuts into the profits they should be making off of the event.  Heaven forbid our students learn while attending an event that goes right though their villages.

After walking around the exhibit hall for a while, and talking to the different vendors, it was moving towards the time for John to present.  So we headed up to the room he would be presenting from.  He started up at around 3:40 and went for an hour.  His crew was a little more subdued than the ones Mia and I had.  He would ask if anyone had any questions, and they would just sit there.  Pretty lame.  I think John did a great job presenting, and the information was very valuable.  I hope they were able to see how relevant it is for what they are doing in their schools.

After he was finished up we decided to head back to the condo.  On the way out there was a new conference getting started that had reserved the same convention center for the evening.  There were some interesting people they were paying t great people at the door.  Chick shot this photo, and I figured I’d share it with you all so you can see how crazy these big cities can get.

That’s right a lycra body suite.  Who wares something like that?  Better yet, who picks that out and says hey we should get some girls to wear these at our next conference to be greeters at the doors.  Pretty crazy.

We were stuck in rush hour traffic on the way back to the condo as well.  So by the time we made it back it was almost 7:00 P.M.  We went out to a sea food restaurant for dinner.  The food was tasty, but wiped me out since I was short on sleep.

Sounds like tomorrow we will be doing some more work.  I fly back to MN on Saturday.  I don’t know if I’ll get to do anymore fishing before I leave.  I will have to take off before we would have the chance to get out, and I don’t want to stop a fishing trip in the middle of it so I can catch a plane.

All for now…. Time to hit the sack.

CASC

Today is the first day of CASC which stands for content area standing committee.  A few teachers from across the district are here in Unalakleet to help revise the standards that are the ground work of our instructional moodle.  I am in the Technology session.  The tech standards were created by one individual about four years ago.  They have not been modified, and need a little improvement.

Randy is running the show. We started by breaking down the basic usage and mechanics we thought were important in technology. We then broke that down into the tools that you would need to facilitate the technology use. We then broke down the tools into what they each consisted of. Darla is putting it all into the bssd wiki if you’d like to take a look.

Sounds like we are heading over to a barbecue with the Holts and the Johnsons and friends this evening. It should be a good time.

Stebbins Mission

After an evening at home, I am off on the road again.  This time to Stebbins which is one of our larger schools in the district.  Hopped on Doug Air (the BSSD plane) at 9:00 this morning.  A quick 40 minute flight over the crumbling ocean ice brought us to the little gravel strip just outside the village of Stebbins.  Randy and I spent the morning getting equipment and web space ready for working with the students after they finished up with their structured morning classes.  I worked with a couple of girls who promptly imported the vide from the last couple years of the Native Dance Festival.  They chopped the clips up in to roughly 5 minute pieces, and then got them ready to be compressed.  Since compression is really a sit and wait step in the process I let that run through the evening.  The girls will work with me tomorrow to get it up on the web.  Some of the clips are kind of big which will make it a slow download for dial up users, but those of you with high speed connections will be able to view them in a matter of minutes.

After we get done here I will be heading to Homer to go halibut fishing with Erin.  I still have to take a couple of days off to stay under contract, and Erin was going to Homer for work, so we decided to meet up down there for a little get away.  We signed up for a day long halibut charter.  We are hoping to be able to fill our freezer with tasty halibut for next year.  We’ll see how lucky we are that day.  I hope Erin gets one.  It is pretty fun to pull in those big fish.