I am just coming up on the halfway point of my semester and things are reaching a peak in terms of busy.  I have papers, midterms, and presentations all coming up in the next couple of weeks, but I've got my eye on the prize. June 20 - the Summer Solstice.  And the last day of the semester/the last day of University classes for me.  For a while anyway.  My first presentation is coming up on Monday and I was in charge of creating some sort of visual presentation to organize our information.  I chose to use Prezi for this.

I was first introduced to Prezi in my second year of education during my ECI 302 - Environmental Education - course.  My instructor used it to create a presentation introducing herself to the class.  I have tried to use it a few times since then, and each time I learn something new.  The possibilities are really endless for creating eye catching presentations.  For example, you can assmble really intricate drawings using the shapes buttons. I figured this out when I was trying to delete some of the elements from the template I used to create the Prezi below.  I had to delete each line separately (or maybe I didn't, but I did anyway) and there were a lot of them used to form things like cartoon people, clouds with lightening bolts, a telescope, ants, and other fun creatures.  Normally, I would create a Prezi from scratch, but time is just not on  my side these days.  This one still does the job though:
What are your favourite programs for creating presentations?
 
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The Birthday Boy
Today was my nephew's 4th birthday.  Both of my sisters live in British Columbia, so I don't get to see them as often as I would like, especially these days while I am living on my student salary.  My mom is there visiting right now and I feel slight pangs of jealousy as I flip through pictures my older sister has posted on Facebook.  Last night while Austin was sleeping, the crew blew up a bunch of balloons and covered his bedroom floor with them.  Needless to say he was delighted to find the sea of balloons in his room this morning.  The day went on to include lots of fun such as multiple bike rides on his sweet new bike, a visit to the bug zoo, a trip to the children's farm, and a walk around the park.

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Millipede Mustache
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Like Father, Like Son
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Can I have a bite?
After my night class this evening, I called Austin to wish him a happy birthday.  He was busy playing when I phoned so my sister had to coax him into taking my call.  This is the special conversation that we had:

Miss W: "Hi Austin!"

A: "Who's dis?"

Miss W: "It's Auntie Michelle."

A: "Hi Annie Shell!"

Miss W: "Is it your birthday today, Austin?"

A: "No" (to my sister) "Is it my birthday?"

K: "Yes"

A: "It is my birthday!  It is!  It is!"

Miss W: "I thought so!  Happy birthday, buddy!  How old are you today?"

A: "I is 4.  I go play now."

I haven't been able to spend a birthday with him yet, but am very thankful that technology allows me to still be a part of his day.  Because without it my sister would not have been able to post pictures to Facebook for me to creep, she would not have been able to email them to me to jazz up my blog, and I would not have been able to call my little buddy on his birthday from school before his bedtime.  High fives to technology! 
 
The last two days have been a bit hectic for me.  I travelled to Red Deer for the long weekend to spend time with my family and had lots to do to get ready to leave in addition to my regularly scheduled routine.  I am applying for a few scholarships this week that will hopefully pay for my last semester of school.  Two of them required a couple of reference letters, so I rushed to picked those up yesterday before my flight so I would have them to send away this weekend.  My professors wrote some of the kindest words about me and so I decided to create a tab on my blog to post my letters.  This spawned what would become an HTML nightmare.

It all started when I decided that my pages were starting to look a bit monotonous with the header, the white space below that and then the footer underneath.  I thought that since the letters I would be posting were on white paper, it would be much more aesthetically pleasing if the white box was instead the same blue colour as the background. I searched around Weebly's website for answers and figured out I needed to create and add another page type to my options.  Easy enough.  So I did that, but apparently you also have to format the HTML code as well, otherwise you end up with a blank page with little hyperlinks in the top corner for your tabs.  Not cool.  I created a website once in high school using HTML, but that was in the late 90s so I needed a bit of a refresher.  Two hours later I thought I had it figured out until I tried to change the header picture and the save options had been disabled.  I got the spinny wheel of death and then my laptop died.  I felt like throwing it across the room but instead threw in the towel.

That lasted about 10 minutes because all I could think about was that bland background and how horrible my little rays of sunshine were going to look on it.  So I fiddled and googled and fiddled some more, and I won.  That's right. I got my HTML code and my header too.  Take that Weebly - hi-ya!
 
My ECMP 355 class is an online course so instead of meeting in a classroom, we have a class blog that our professor uses to house our assignments and other vital information as it comes up.  The other day Dean posted a how-to video for subscribing to blogs.  When I initially saw the post I *gasp* cruised past it because I thought I already knew how.  I mean on most blogs the button is right there inviting you to subscribe, and so I deduced that the video must have been made for peeps with less technical savvy than myself.  When I clicked on that oh-so-obvious subscribe button on our class blog, the screen changed to show the same blog posts as the home page but with less pizazz.  So I decided that maybe subscribing wasn't for me and instead devised a schedule for checking my classmates' blogs manually on a rotating basis.  My plan was flawed in that there are 30 students in the class, and I found that I was checking three or four blogs before I would find one that had a new post or a post I felt compelled to comment on.  This was no good.  I needed a new plan.

So I went back to drawing board/the home page of our class blog and revisited Dean's how-to video.  And this time I watched it.  As it turns out, this guy really knows what he is talking about!  He had us subscribe to the blogs using Google Reader.  I can't even describe the awesomeness that is Google Reader; you will simply have to experience it for yourself.  You need a Google account and I had just created a fresh one to post my YouTube video below*.  So now all my blogs are neatly arranged in alphabetical order by last name (you say anal-retentive, I say organized) in an ECMP 355 folder. I scrolled through and read all the new posts of my classmates and made comments on a few that caught my eye.

Lesson learned - you win this round Mr. Shareski.  I will never again dismiss your blog posts as invaluable and instead will treasure them as potential nuggets of pure gold.

*When did Google and YouTube become an item?
 
I spend a fair bit of my day on my computer or iPad; sometimes doing homework but mostly googling recipes or browsing Used Regina ads (it's like an online garage sale you can browse from your home, and who doesn't love garage sales? No? Just me?). Both my computer and iPad automatically log me into Skype whenever they are signed on.  For those of you who aren't familiar with Skype, it is literally the best thing since the telephone.  It is free to use and allows you to call up your loved ones to have a face-to-face conversation through your respective  computers. I actually remember thinking about the invention of a phone that would allow people to see who they were talking to when I was 7 or 8.  It really creeped me out because for some reason I thought it would only be one sided and it would be without my knowledge.  Skype isn't like that. It has allowed me to watch my nephew and (much) younger sister and brother grow up, even though we don't live in the same province. In fact, my 5-year-old sister knows how to operate Skype on multiple devices and has been known to Skype me several times a week, pending my green check mark showing (a Skype feature that lets you know who is online). This reminds me how different my childhood was 20+ years ago from children today. Another example is going to the movie store to rent a video.  I used to love going with my parents, my friends, my boyfriend to pick out a movie and grab some snacks for an evening of cinema in the living room.  With the exception of small convenience stores and specialty shops, we are currently witnessing the death of physical movie rentals. It is actually on life support in Regina.  Big stores like Blockbuster and Rogers just couldn't compete with the likes of Netflix and on-demand services offered by cable companies and both have since closed all their mortar and brick locations and made the move to offer online rentals. My prediction is that music stores like hmv are next.  Technology is changing the way we offer a lot of services, including education.  I don't know how many times I have wondered how teachers lesson planned before the Internet. It's funny to think that one day children will wonder how we managed to live life with the little conveniences we have right now.
someecards.com - When I was your age, we had to dial to get online