Monday, October 27, 2008

Family pictures

We went to Priest Point Park with some friends of ours and took each others pictures in order to save a little money. So here they are!!!










Run for Fun

A couple of teachers from school and myself decided we wanted to race. So what did we do? We entered the Tenino GhostMuster Fun Run. We ran the 5k and all set goals. The race was more of a lets see if we can all make our goals rather than who's going to be the fastest (at least that's how I looked at it). I finished 54th overall and had a time of about 30 minutes. My goal was to complete 3 miles in under 30 minutes and I did that since 5k is 3.1 miles. My first two mile were each 9 minute miles and then the cold I've been getting over told me I was to be on WOO (WithOut Oxygen). I had to stop and clear the system before continuing the race. I felt good about the race and it was a lot of fun to hang out with other faculty members outside of school.

We didn't get a picture of me crossing the finish line so just believe me that it did happen.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

State In-Service

Yesterday I went to a workshop on technology in the classroom and was bored out of my mind because the people giving the workshop were so disorganized and anti-pc that it was hard to find something that I could take back to my own classroom.

I don't think that people realize that you can do anything for music you need to on a pc and do it just as well as a mac. Everything I have used for the pc has been pretty much plug and play and very simple. They kept saying things like use Itunes to convert it to an mp3, it's really easy on a mac, but a pc is really different and more complicated to do this process on. THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE!!!!! My favorite Mac plug of the day was when the main lecturer said his laptop came with a free remote if he spent over $1700 on his new mac laptop. If that is your main reason for getting a mac is you get a free remote your wasting your money. you could spend have the amount on a dell and add a remote for as little at $30. That seems way more worth it than having to spend close to $2000 on a laptop.

By the end of the workshop I had corrected a few things about sibelius and finale for some people and put a huge plug in for google apps and using google calender. Their comment before I talked about google was "I've never used it, and I don't see how it is going to help me so I'm not going to use it." I showed them the schools calender in google as well as google docs, sites, picassa, and igoogle. Many of them were pretty impressed that google does so much.

One piece of equipment I might but for my classroom was the tuneview for the ipod. It's a pretty sweet docking station and remote for the ipod that runs on radio frequency instead of IR. I also made some good contact with two other choir teachers from Tenino and Rochester.

After the workshop I went home ate some dinner, took some exederin for a tension headache I had and went to a really cold football game to play sax with the pep band. I didn't see my family at all that day and it was really depressing.

Only two more home football games.

Well, I think that is enough venting.