And to all a good night!

My family had its first Christmas celebration this weekend.  I will see more of my extended family later in the month and, unfortunately, because of distance, there are some family members who I will not see this holiday season.  And of course there is my mom who gets to celebrate Christmas in heaven - that must be quite the celebration!

I, like many others, really miss my family over the holidays.  I get rather nostalgic and think about Christmases past and how we would finish our chores early on Christmas eve, go to church, open gifts, enjoy lots of food and lots of time to just be together.  There were many games, lots of play and time to praise the Lord in our house.

 I know that there are lots of ways that technology still allows us to stay connected and, yes, we could and we have, opened presents together even though we are over 3000 km apart but it isn't the same as actually being there.  A visual hug on the computer can't possibly match a real hug from my nephews and nieces, or my brothers and sisters.  

Technology, in all of the ways that I use it, I believe, still falls quite short in being able to truly stay connected. 

One of the best things I like about teaching is the ability to connect with students and colleagues.  Being able to see my classes, on a regular basis, really helps me to find purpose, because lets be honest, how many of us truly remember the lessons that we had in school.  There may be a couple of key lessons or topics in high school that you remember, for good or for bad, but it is more likely that you remember the people of your schooling experience.  There is much talk of online learning, which I support, but I will reserve that topic for another day! In a similar manner, how many of use remember the presents that we received as kids?  There might be a few gifts that have stayed in the archives of our mind or that we remember through the assistance of pictures, however, we can likely recall the experiences, the events and the people more readily. It is these interactions that stay with us!  

This Christmas season I hope you all have a chance to enjoy time spent with family and friends in celebration!

Grade 9 Computers - BTT 1O

The grade 9 class continues to work through a series of tutorials as we discover how to edit digital pictures in Paint.net.  It has been fun and enjoyable to listen to the students when they have their "aha" moments.  It is also exciting to see certain students become the "goto" person as they discover new things and share and learn from each other. One of the tutorials the students have been able to do, starts with a picture of dried mud and ends with an exploding planet.  

Grade 11 Computers - ICS 3U
In this class we are finishing our assignments for Chapter 7 in Java programming.  This is the chapter for which I have create video tutorial examples for the different types of methods used in Java.  These tutorials can be found on our school YouTube site http://www.youtube.com/user/HDCHtube.  Later this week we will begin chapter 10 and introduce our final summative project which we will start when school commences again in January.