Her comes Kona ...

Kona went to Pelican Narrows today to visit students. She filled a borrowed vehicle full of goodies for the students to enjoy. Drive safe Kona!

Being Successful Online

What does it take to be successful in an online class - this statement from an online student really sums it up!

"I really like the online school. I think it is the best option for me. I am a bit behind, but I know I will catch up and finish in time. Edcentre.ca is a really good school and I am glad I tried it. It teaches you independence and drive. You have to make your own schedule and motivate yourself to get the work done."

Engish A30 poem by Ronald Linklater

I’m a Saskatchewanian

I’m a trapper
I’m a commercial fisherman
I’m a hunter
I’m a bed to rest after a hard days work
I’m a northern Pike
I’m a boat ride across the lake
I’m a farmer
I’m a daughter’s homemade bread
I’m a moose
I’m a trout
I’m a double at Jan Lake Bar
And I’m a bridge across the Saskatchewan.
I’m a bird
I’m a butterfly
I’m the wind under a cool Northern sky
I’m an ice sculpture
I’m a dog musher
I’m a square dancer
I’m the Prince Albert Winter Festival
I’m Tommy Douglas
I’m Poundmaker
I’m from the Northeast
I’m from the Southwest
I am Dene
I am Cree
I am First Nation
But most of all
I am a Saskatchewanian and proud to be one.

By Ronald Linklater

Nortep EPS class

December 10, 2008 the edcentre online teachers will be visiting a face to face class to share experience and a variety of web 2.0 tools they have stumbled across recently.
They have put together an outline of where they hope to go with the session.
It is a google docs published link: NORTEP CLASS VISIT.

Stay tuned for more on this adventure.

Behind the Scenes

This is a video produced by Communication Production Technology student, Martina Carriere. Martina is working on her high school credits online through edcentre.ca.
A film crew visited their camp this fall and she thought it would be" a neat project to film the crew and see what they do." These are behind the scene shots that illustrate some of the machinations that take place just to get those clean well composed video sequences we have all become accustomed to viewing on the tube. Thanks Martina.........and stay tuned everyone else for more feature footage and projects.

Chrome

What will they think of next? Google developers have come up with a new browser called CHROME.  
I downloaded the new browser this morning and have been using it for about three hours.  I'm not sure if this is love at first sight, but I suspect this may become my new default browser. The uncluttered intuitive approach is very attractive to me. 

They say that because the browswer is so clean, it is extremely fast and more resistant to spyware. I love the way it shows you where you have been when you click on a new tab.

They are working on a mac version but it has not yet arrived....stay tuned mac users.

They have made the code open source as much 0f it has been built through other open source projects. (Apple's WebKit Mozilla's Firefox and others.)

So there you go......Chrome. 

Good YouTube post re Online Learning Community

Hi everyone,
I watched a few videos about online learning and liked this one best. Lots of great visuals. Enjoy! http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=a32eDsxDfjY
Donna

New feature: Reactions

Two new features have been added to this blog.

1. Look for the quotes window at the bottom of the page. This is a google widget that doesn't want to fit in the sidebar of this blog layout. The quote changes each time you reload this page.

2.Look for reaction boxes at the bottom of each post. This feature allows you to react to a blog posting so that people posting to the blog have some feedback.


Please leave a comment if you have a suggestion.

School Website Changes

It is easy to forget the joys of designing a website from scratch, right from reviewing what HTML code looks like to navigation issues. This weekend a beta version of the edcentre.ca website began to take shape. The software tool used to do this was Dreamweaver. Being able to move back and forth between a code view and design view really helped to isolate problems with content areas that won't move where you want them to move.
One thing I recognized while moving back and forth between pages to make changes to the navigation bar is that this excercise shouldn't be necessary for web sites that will be changed by more than one person. Free content management systems like Joomla and Drupal provide all that is needed to create an easy interface for multiple users to make contributions.

Now after all of that Gobbldegook, here is a preview of the changed edcentre.ca website: http://www.nlsd113.org/masina