Paisley is 6 weeks old - More Pictures

My granddaughter, Paisley Nicole Kayser, is now six weeks old and weighs almost 10 pounds. She is definitely a cutie. Here are pictures of Paisley, Her father Ross(my son), Me and her Great Grandmother Kayser (my mother) - 4 generations of the Kayser family.

Paisley with her mother Lindsey and with her father Ross and her Uncle Scott.

Please view my February 9 - My thoughts on Breast Cancer Video article

Please skip to my February 9th blog entry entitled 'My thoughts on the Breast Cancer Video' and read this entry.

My Granddaughter - Paisley Nicole kayser !

What and amazing event has happened in my life. On May 26th at 6:10pm I bacame a grandfather for the first time when my son Ross and his wife Lindsey had a beautiful baby girl. Paisley Nicole Kayser was born in Louisville, KY. She weighed in at 6 pounds 11 oz. She is just perfect. I had the good fortune to be there for the birth. What a great day for me!! Here are some pictures from her birth ( of course they are all of Grandpa holding her !)

FYI - Free Programming Animation Tool - ALICE

I attended the itWorks Conference last year in Columbus and sat in on a session where they talked about a FREE programming language for teaching in High School that is revolutionizing the industry. I thought I would share this with you. It's name is Alice and you can get to what you need at this link: Alice . It is a pretty neat tool. Developed at a university and now wholly supported by an entire users group and Carnegie Mellon University. If you would like the Alice Newsletter please email me at rkayser@greeneccco.com and I will email you the February edition.

A direct quote from the front of the book on Alice states: "Our approach allows students to author on-screen movies and games, in which the concept of an 'object' is made tangible and visible. In Alice, on-screen objects populate a 3D micro world. Students create programs by dragging and dropping program elements (if/then statements, loops, variables, etc) in a mouse bases editor that prohibits syntax errors".

Does this sound too good to be true or what. I have used Alice just a little bit. It does look good, but having been a professional computer programmer for 28+ years I am still skeptical. Will be until I dig in and actually use it. I am trying to figure out how to make this a part of my class curriculum.

Thought I would throw this out for anyone that might be interested. Free is definitely the right price. Let me know what you think!

Blogs I have commented on Week 9

I commented on Lexi's Blog # 8 today.

Commented on Herb's blog.

Commented on Mary Barry's blog

Blog # 9 - Changes I Notice in my Understanding and Skill with Technical Resources used in class.

I have noticed a very large change in my understanding and use of technical resources and concepts we have covered in this class. This past month I have incorporated the making of a video into an assignment for my senior IT Students. This was a terrific break in the monotony of the Network+ textbook. We actually spent almost two full weeks of class/lab working on these videos. I felt very comfortable in guiding students into Photoshop to manipulate jpeg images that they had created or found for use in their videos. Same for using the Windows Moviemaker tool and the Sony Vegas 7.0 software. Within an hour I had students working furiously on editing video clips and putting still pictures they had touched up via Photoshop into their storyboard in Moviemaker. My only real drawback was tyhe contention for the equipment (vido cameras and especially the usb microphone for narrating). I will have to address the hardware issues this summer in my budget.

I have even taken a stab at putting the vdieo tapes of my basketball teams games into DVD movies to hand out to my players as keepsakes as well as putting together highlight clips to send to college coaches that contact me looking to recruit my players for college. I will probably spend my spare time now that basketball is over converting all my games from the camera tapes into a moviemaker format and adding text to them - putting them into a movie format. Beginning - movie - trailer with score and other info. I actually spent my own hard earned dollars and bought AVITools to help in the import and conversion of the movies from my Sony Handycam to the PC in a format for Moviemaker. Very worthwhile tool.
Photoshop and movie editing no longer scare me the way they did at the start of thiss class.

Blog # 8 - How I Plan To Use Video Production Professionally

Video Production in the classroom is a very powerful tool. I plan to make tremendous use of it by turning my classroom and Information Technology program into one that uses the IPASS system. IPASS is a program that was designed and developed by one of our very own Greene County Career Center teachers. Bill Poe has taught drafting at GCCC for almost 30 years. He has had many national winners in his CTSO competitions. Years ago Bill saw the need to be able to have a curriculum that would allow students of all abilities to work at their max pace. He developed IPASS to do this. The teacher becomes more of a facilitator and a tutor under the IPASS program.

I plan to turn my A+ PC Repair and Troubleshooting, my Network +, my Visual Basic Programming, and my Visual C++ programming strands all into individual IPASS strands. This will take a couple of years to complete. I will video every lesson I present and turn these videos into DVDs that student may check out and do. The concept of IPASS is that a student does not move on to a new concept or lesson until he/she has sufficiently mastered the current one. It is entirely up to each student as to how much or how little they do. It is spelled out in black and white on a chart what their grade for the period will be.

Getting the videos together will be the biggest challenge. What I have learned the last few weeks with photoshop and moviemaker and the other tools I have played with has made me even more eager to get started on this. I have been putting it off because it seems like a huge undertaking (it is) and I could not decide where to begin. No I have an idea.

The videos under IPASS will allow me to let students work at their own speed. No longer will I hold anyone back while waiting on slower students to catch up or catch on.

Powerful tools we have these days!

My IT Classroom at Greene County

Here are some pictures of my classroom / lab at the Greene County Career Center. I designed and had built the counter tops for the lab area. Made them high so the students can stand coppmfortably at them - with the intent they would not pursue playing video games if they had to stand up the whole time. I WAS WRONG !!!

My classrom desks where we have a computer connected to the GCCC Network and do our programming in Visual basic and Visual C++.


The LAB area where the counters are high and filled with Lab PC's connected in our own little in-classroom Network. The juniors are Windows XP Peer-to-peer and the Seniors are using a Windows 2003 server. Guess who runs faster when playing their Counterstrike game?

My Students Working on Their Movies

As I stated in an earlier blog, I made my Final Video project into a project for my Senior IT class. So far we have spent 8 complete class/lab periods on this. They selected their own groups of 5, with some choosing to work alone, and of course two or three stuck working together because they are left and no one selected them for a group. Funny how this worked out - I was sure I would use my "A" groups video, but in fact one group I didn't expect much out of turned in perhaps the best movie and best effort during this project. They had "WAY TOO MUCH FUN" doing this assignment. I had a ball working with them. Their video is entitled "The Pill" and is about "the affects of video games on the human brain" and the pill they created to cure this.

The group I thought would be my best is Team Awesome. Some very talented young men from four different high schools. They have not finished their video as yet. They are still working on the final touches. With this group I constantly worry about the cleanliness of their work. They love the bad words, the hip / vulgar music, and the innuendo type plot. I think I am getting credit as the "technical scrooge" from this group because I made them bleep out the F word in their favorite song and they had to clean up the plot a bit.

Max Fueger is one of my "work-alone" guys. He doesn't like to depend on others for his grade. He is doing a movie on building with plastic bricks. I had to figure out how to set the movie to use a 2 second clip of each picture instead of the 5-6 seconds it defaults to. His movie is going to be pretty cool when finished. This idea I think is stolen (as is some of his video clip ) from a project he did at his home school (Beavercreek High School). I know this because I remember my son doing something similar when he went to Beavercreek and had one particular teacher. Oh well, I didn't require that they be original.

One group of two is doing a movie titled "The Chronicles of Wimp-Man" and it is based on one student who is very large in size - and I don't mean fat. He is the one in the silly hat.
The rest of the group is shown below. Sean is large and clumsy so they decided to take advantage of that trait and make him a movie star.











.
My last group is also a solo in the form of Dennis Cobb.Dennis is the one in class that NOBODY wants to be stuck working with. He is very (sometimes overly) personable. In other words he never shuts up and drives everyone nuts. I kinda like Dennis. I have to ask him to lower his voice a zillion times a day, but he is a very nice young man once you get past that. I am not sure what his movie is going to be about.

Now I have to select only one to turn in for my Final. What to do ????

Blog # 7 - The Video I Plan To Make

I am still trying to find the Video I plan to make for my Final. My first video was of my JV basketball team. I don't want to be a total jock and continue that theme. I may still run with my original idea of making an Infomercial for my program (Information technology ) at the Greene County Career Center. I have had my Senior class working on my movie assignment for 4 days now. Originally they were to make my infomercial, but I relaxed my rigid standards and told them to have fun - come up with their own movie topic. I showed them a couple of the youtube movies (and of course they showed me a couple more I should not have seen in school). They have kept me extremely busy. I had them choose groups of 4-5 and each develop their own storyboards. My BPA Web Sight Design Team stayed together and are doing a movie taking their Counterstrike game characters and adapting them to the Back to The Future movie. This group has required close watching due to their willingness to slip bad language into the music tracks. They are using VideoVegas as their "Moviemaker" tool. I thought they would be the group that I would use, but a second group has just taken off and run with this. Their storyboard consists of "What Video Games Do To People". They are having so much fun doing this that all the other groups have gathered around them. They have been shooting their own video and still clips. I am very impressed with their teamwork and what they have put together so far. They need to sync in the music.
I have three other groups and one solo entrant in this class. I am anxiously awaiting the storyboards on these groups. Their projects escape me right now. I know Mr. Kayser's head is on the Incredible Hulk for one group.
This has been a great assignment so far for my seniors. They have really run with the assignment. I plan to do it again. It has intrigued me to the point that I purchased a software package to download and convert my Camcorder DVD's .VOB in mpeg or avi files for Moviemaker. I have spent the week researching different Moviemaker tools. Haven't found anything I am impressed with as yet, but will keep looking. If anyone knows of a good one leave me a comment - PLEASE......

Blogs I commented on

I commented on Dendinger1's blog about him being an Eagle Scout. I too am an Eagle Scout from way-back.

I commented on Jon's blog. We are Visual Learners for sure. I agree

Blog # 6 - The process of Creating My Video

My original decision for a video was to take on the assignment by myself (not pairing with any one else in class) and to have my Senior IT students help me to create an infomercial for my IT class at Greene County Career Center. With the weather and our BPA Regional contest and Awards banquet I had to junk this idea because we have not been in school and in the classroom but 2 days in the last 8 school days. We did not get any video shot for the infomercial so I couln't do it.
I changed and decided to do a solo project on the High School basketball team that I coach. I have 18 games worth of video to work with. Last Monday I took a lot of digital still pictures of my team. A team shot that I added a text title to, and individual shots of each player at the foul line. Had I had more time I would have actually isolated some still shots from within the video tape for each player. I found after I had taken all these shots that the Freshman player that actually took the pictures had changed a setting on my Sony Handycam so that all of my still shots were out of focus somewhat. I did not catch this until I started on my movie. I did the best I could with the auto Level setting, but the pictures are still very out of focus and gariny. With Photoshop I added a layer or two putting the players name and number as well as his year in school and the position he plays.
I learned a great deal about making a movie with this assignment. Did a lot of swearing and slamming things on my desk early. Seems I did not know how to get the video from the DVD on my Handycam into MovieMaker. The .VOB file format the Handycam uses is not supported by MovieMaker. The DAZZLE unit I had for doing this worked only for Windows 98 (when I bought it) and they wanted more money than it was worth for an XP software update. I ended up using the extremely bad Imagemaker toolset that came with the HandyCam to get the video in and then using the Imagemaker storyboard to create a movie and save it in .mpeg format to be able to load that into MovieMaker.
One area I had very little success with ( and need to find out how to do ) is adding the second narrative track when there is a music track. It would not let me narrate with music in the background. Makes for a choppy sounding video.
I am relatively pleased with my movie considering at the very last minute I changed paths and I was able to create a decent movie in a couple of days. Thank heaven I had no school this week.

Blogs I commented on This Week

Commented on Mrs. C's blog today - Tuesday Feb. 13, 2007

Commented on Ron Tucker's blog today - Tuesday Feb. 13, 2007

Commented on Chef Mike's blog today - Tuesday Feb. 13, 2007

Reading in your Classroom

I would like to share something that has been very helpful to me this year in my classroom. One of the things I have struggled with is getting mys students to read from the textbooks and to comprehend what they have read. The A+ PC Repair and Troubleshooting textbook I use with my Juniors is about 3 inches thick. There are a lot of pictures and charts, but there is also a great deal of text. For the year and a half I have been back in teaching I have found that Juniors and Seniors in my high school have very poor reading and comprehension skills. Worst than that is they just hate reading.
Greene County sent me to an in-service taught by Mark A. Forget, Ph.D. (pronounced 4-jay not forget) on Max Teaching with Reading and Writing. The MAX teaching Framework (Motivate, Acquisition, and eXtension covered a great deal of material. One of the classroom activities I gleaned from this in-service has worked pretty well for me. I use Anticipation Guides now in my class. These anticipation Guides are used to motivate the students as readers by getting them to react to a series of statements that are related to the content of the reading materials and also to the student's prior knowledge. Students are able to anticipate or react to what the reading material will be about because of the anticipation guide statements.
I received a 260 page manual by Dr. Forget in this in-service. It goes into great detail on his MAX reading / Writing strategies. There is an entire chapter on 'How to Construct Effective Anticipation Guides". A book worth getting. An in-service worth attending.
I am just really getting into using the Anticipation Guides. They do take some time to construct, but they are well worth it. One side note. Be prepared to have to stop students from straying off the topic and going down paths where you should not go. Teenagers - they do that to you.

My Video is hurting!

I am now in complete PANIC mode for my first movie assignment due this Thursday. I had planned on my senior IT students doing this as a classroom assignment. We have not been in school but three days since and one of those days I had to take sophomore students that may join my program to a Tech prep Awareness Day at Sinclair College in Dayton. We missed Monday with our re-scheduled BPA Awards ceremony where we traveled to Sidney High School. I missed that as well taking my wife to have a medical procedure done where she was knocked out.

I think I will be switching to doing one on my Basketball team since I have a ton of video already shot for the games we have played.

My Thoughts on the Breast Cancer Video

The video that Fawn showed us by Lindsey Cooper titled "Surviving the Journey" really hit home for me. Brought tears to my eyes. I have survived this scenario twice in my life with two loved ones that are very, very close to me. First, My mother (Viola Berger Kayser - see picture at right) had a radical mastectomy almost 28 years ago. At that time the surgery and the treatments for this horrible disease were no where near what they are today. The survivor rate was not a very good percent. My mother has survived and beaten Breast Cancer and I am happy to say she will celebrate her 90th birthday on March 27th. I was in my late twenties when mom had her surgery. What a devastating time that was for me. In those days when you had breast cancer you usually died. What a blessing that I still have my mother in my life.

The Second person dear to me, Melissa Fortener McGlaughlin, is the daughter of my roommate from Wilmington College. I had the pleasure of driving this beautiful baby home from the hospital in January of 1978 - the year of the blizzard. Her father's car was frozen in the parking lot and I was home for a snow day as a teacher at Valley View. I watched Melissa grow up to be a beautiful young lady. Four years ago Melissa found out she not only had breast cancer, but she found out the same time she was pregnant. Surgery and Chemo had to wait for this baby to be born. Unfortunately, the baby was born premature and lived only a couple of hours. What a tragic blow to Melissa and her family. Melissa had the mastectomy surgery and they found the cancer to be in her lymph nodes several layers deep. Not the best news to get when waking up from the surgery. Chemo followed. She beat this cancer this time! Just six months ago she found out the cancer was back. She went the chemo / radiation route again and I think she has beaten this horrible disease down one more time. What a strong young lady. She is my Hero! She proves the adage that "Attitude is Everything".

More later - I am tearing up just thinking about "Mo" (as she is known to her friends). I will include a link to her blog on Cancer awareness as well.

Here is the Link to Mo's blog on breast cancer: http://fortscancersux.blogspot.com/. Please take the time to go to it. Melissa and her family do a tremendous amount of work to help fight this disease.

I have been so amazed and so impressed with the attitude that this young lady has displayed in fighting this terrible disease. Imagine at age 23 or 24 being told you have a disease that will most likely end your life. Most people would go into a "Whoa is me" mode. Melissa never batted an eye. She came out fighting. She has been the most positive and upbeat person about this. Her attitude was "I won't let this beat me". Wow - the power of the mind. The power of prayer. Please add Melissa to your prayers. She is and always will be in mine.

I hope Melissa has the same longevity that my mother has had. Twenty eight years as a breast cancer survivor. WOW! Two women that are important in my life and I am happy to say both are doing just fine.

Blog I commented on today.

I commented on grizzle

Blog # 5 What do Graphic Design & Page Layout have to do with contemporary literacy & learning?

This is a great topic. In this day and age of computers and technology the ability for students and teachers to be able to graphically design a web page or a newsletter or even a Word document is a very essential skill they must master. We are now a society that no longer spends time reading the written word. As the old saying goes - A picture is worth a thousand words, you can express more in one page using graphics, fonts, colors, and more than you could describe in several pages of words. From the literacy standpoint, being able to draw a thought or concept together to have the user get the point is a skill that can be mastered using good page layout or design methods and concepts. I have noticed that in my classroom I have many more visual learners than all the other types of learners. These students will pick up on a concept if it is properly depicted. The fewer words and more pictures usually means these students will grasp the concept more easily than if they have to read several pages of text (text used to explain what the pictures, diagrams, or graphs are showing ). However, I have noticed that you cannot just throw a bunch of diagrams and pictures on paper and have the concept get through to all students. This is where the page layout and graphic design skills come into play. The information you need to get across still needs to be organized into a page layout that is aesthetically appealing to the reader and makes the topic easily discernible. Graphic design is very important in that you can overwhelm a reader with too many pictures or diagrams, poor color selections, and by making a very busy or overworked design.
Most students I talk with have had classes in the use of Microsoft Word and PowerPoint presentation software packages by the time they enter their freshman year of high school. With the Internet all around them and computers everywhere they are exposed to the max with tools that they can use to make use of graphic design and page layout techniques. These tools are the beginning for a lot of students to take off and use their imaginations and creativity.
In summary, I feel that page layout and graphic design are as important today in literacy and learning as mastering the English language and grammar were to my generation.

Just Found Out - I'm Going to be a Grandpa!

My son, Ross, just called me in class this morning to let me know that this coming June I will be the Grandfather to most undoubtedly the cutest little baby girl in the world. How about that. Honestly, I am too young to be a grandfather, but I will handle it. My feet are not touching the ground right now.

Unfortunately for me, Ross and his wife Lindsey live in Louisville, Kentucky. So I will have to travel to see the baby. My other son, Scott, Just moved to Louisville this past month. He asked his brother if they heard more than one heartbeat. Kind of an in side joke because Lindsey has triplet siblings (two girls and a boy that are now 17 years old) and there is a big history of triplets in her immediate family. That would be someting. I would probably have to move to Louisville too!

Blogs I Have Commented On

Commented on

Blog # 4 - How will I use Newsletters Professionally?

Being a teacher and a coach offers a wide variety of areas where I can use a newsletter professionally. I would love to have a Greene County Career Center Newsletter published quarterly maybe even monthly. In fact, I think this will become an assignment for my Junior class. I can divide my 15 students into groups of 3 and give each one a section or column to write for the Newsletter. We have digital cameras to take pictures. Finding topics that are relevant to them would be the problem for me. I have learned that giving them some freedom and lattitude in this area often generates a lot more creativity and excitement about doing things. It does have to be monitored very heavily regarding content and appropriateness these days. They will put down anything that comes into their minds.

My intentions for Information Technology would be to have a section on the class itself - what is goingon in the Junior Lab and in the Senior Lab. We just finished our BPA (Business Professionals of America) regional contest and next week will find the results of who in my classes won and will advance on to the State contest. We could have a section on all of BPA at GCCC and cover other Business Academy winners. A section highlighting a student of the quarter / month that would not be written by that student. Have someone conduct an actual interview and write the article.

As a basketball Coach I am developing ( for this class assignment ) a Newsletter about the school I coach at. Most of it will pertain to my Boy's Basketball teams. Using Pictures, statictics, game summaries and highlights> Stivers is 65% through a major construction / remodel project using State and Local money. A section on the construction and a picture storyline would be a nice feature. The students and faculty moved out of the Stivers building about a year and a half ago for this construction to take place. They plan to move back in next October.

There are many ways to make use of a newsletter. Truthfully, I never realized it was as easy as it is with Microsoft Publisher. My school (GCCC) is a member of the Microsoft Alliance. Every student at GCCC receives a free copy of Windows XP Pro, Office XP Professional, and FrontPage. With Publisher being a part of Office every student will have this at home as well as on all the PC's in my classroom and lab. I hope to make good use of this.

Blog # 3 - How I will use image editing professionally.

My classroom for Information Technology offers a vast playground for the use of image editing. I plan on teaching a mini session on the use of Adobe Photoshop in my Junior IT class. In years past I have had to rely on finding a student in my class that was good enough at Photoshop to do some of the posters or photographs that I needed for the lab. Now I am capable of doing these myself and even better yet, teaching my students how to create these. On the first day of school I have each student take a picture of themselves and store it on their student drive. We then make two photographs using this picture and text to create a composite photograph of their picture and their name, home school, grade, nickname. etc. One of these picture gets taped to the back of the LCD on their classroom desk PC. The other photo gets folded into a triangle and is taped somewhere at their lab station - usually on the top of their CRT. These two photos aid greatly in everyone learning names and schools as well as marking their work areas in both the classroom and the lab area.

There are a great many other things I would love to do. We take tons of digital pictures throughout the year. So far most of them have been relegated to trhe CD or floppy disk they are shot onto. I have two older Sony Mavica FD95 cameras that take still photos and short 5 second mpegs to a floppy disk. I also have a Sony Handycam that shoots movies and still pictures to a mini DVD-R disk. In the Business Academy at Greene County Career Center we also have a very high quality poster printer. I plan on making use of Adobe to create some very nice posters of my students "in action" and add text, shading, background, etc. to these posters, and then hang them throughout my classroom / lab and the hallways around my area.

Zillions of uses - limited only by the imaginations of my students ( and rated / approved by me ).

Blog # 2 - My Photoshop Experiences So far

Wow - I never thought you would be able to do so much so easily with this Photoshop tool. To date I am completely overwhelmed with what we have covered in class. Staying up with Fawn as she does things in Photoshop and trying to take notes at the same time is quite a chore. One thing I have found is that graduating from college over 30 years ago, my note taking has become very bad.

Another sad realization I have come to is that you can drive your self crazy trying to remember every step you did in class creating an image. The concept of layers is very cool. And I love the history browser. I make a ton of mistakes and it is great to be able to drop back past the one level of undo to the last good image or to the starting point (I do this often!). The guys that wrote the Photoshop software were top-notch and on the ball ( a plug from an old has-been programmer ).

Selecting the images I have used so far is very easy for me. I have been taking digital pictures for many years. The neatest thing I have done so far is to take three different pictures of the family dogs and pull the image of each dog and put them together into one picture as if I took that picture. I have decided that it is a very good thing that I did not choose being a graphic artist for a career. It is very hard for me to control the lasso while tracing around images.

I would love to learn more about plopping an image into another image and making it seamlessly blend in. Oh - that is this weeks lesson.

The kinds of pictures and images I find interesting all deal with my family, my team, and my students. There is always something you wish you could add or delete from a photograph. For basketball we always take our team picture at the very beginning of the year. last year I had a young man that I had to dismiss from my team for violation of my rules. They would not have a professional photographer retake our team picture so I did it myself. It would have been so nice to just take this one player out of the existing picture. I can do that with Photoshop. I am also always adding text to the team pictures ie; year, names of players, etc. I have always struggled doing this in MS-Paint. Looks to be a lot easier and more flexible to do with Photoshop.

Blog # 1 - It's All About Me !

My name is Richard C. Kayser. I currently am employed as a teacher of Information technology at the Greene Counter Career Center in Xenia, Ohio. I have re-entered the teaching profession after a 26 year hiatus.

During those 26 years I worked as a Systems Analyst ( fancy title for a computer programmer ) at NCR Corp ( 6 years ) and then at BASS, Inc. (20 years). BASS, Inc. provides complete systems to grocery store and mass merchandiser chains. I have software that I wrote in over 5000 grocery stores and mass merchandise stores around the world. Unfortunately for me, BASS was purchased by a company in Israel named Retalix Ltd. ( http://www.retalix.com/ ) and they decided after 3 years that they no longer needed my services. What a blow to my ego that was.

After a 3 month summer of searching for a new job, I found the position at Greene County Career Center. What better for me than to be able to go back into the teaching profession and to be able to teach about computers. The only bad element was the big cut in salary I had to swallow. I am having a ball teaching A+ PC Repair & Troubleshooting, Network+ networking, Visual basic.NET programming, and Visual C++ programming to Juniors and seniors at the Career Center. Life is good again.

I have served as the Boys Junior Varsity Basketball coach at Dayton Stivers School for the Arts for the past 5 years. I get a great deal of satisfaction working with the young men that play for me. Quite a few of my past players have gone on to have a 1 or 2 year successful career at the Varsity level at Stivers. This is an even bigger thrill for me because I am an Alumni of Stivers (class of '72) as is my mother (class of '35). In fact my mother, who will turn 90 years old in March, still lives in the same house I grew up in just a few blocks away from Stivers in the South park Historical District in Dayton. Check out the picture of my JV team on the right.

I have really begun to delve into the world of Multimedia with my students. I often feel so inadequate because my students 1.) know so much more about this than I do, and 2.) they can do just about anything they want to in the way of editing and "touching-up" digital pictures. I have decided this class may give me the opportunity to catch up with them ( at least I hope so !).

For years I have been taking digital pictures and videos of family, teams, games, you name it. There are so many pictures I have that I would like to "adjust" or add to that I don't know where to begin. Maybe I will finally get around to doing just that.