Well, the girls won the Zone tournament on Friday/Saturday. Which makes it official, we have the best 3J girls basketball team in Northwestern Alberta. I wish we had provincials… we’d win that too.
Couple of college coaches approached us after the final. They felt that anyone of our starters and most of our bench could play college ball in Alberta if they decide they want to. I need to be a better coach so that I can get them there. At least two are talking about it…
Props to St. Joe’s in Grande Prairie for a fine tournament. A little short of refs on the boys side it seemed, but we were fine. Good people, good food, lovely school… look forward to playing there again.
Something tells me this will be useful… but I am not sure where right now. It is a collection of people reading a paragraph in english: sorted by native language and birthplace, so you get to hear the accents.
Maybe it will come to me as soon as I stop thinking about how great the girls played in their last game at the Zone tournament in Grande Prairie on the weekend. We won! The boys team also played fairly well… the first game pretty good, the second game no quite so, the third was the best game they’ve played all year… but they lost by two, and the fourth game wasn’t bad, but just didn’t have the intensity and drive of the third… so they ended up down three and in fourth place.
Just spent some time playing with this software for animating basketball plays. Works well… pretty simple if somewhat time consuming to actually draw out the plays one frame at a time.
I suspect the girls will like it, being able to see (in email even) how the plays or drills work. And to be honest, having to work everything out one frame at a time drives home just how much each of these plays requires of the players… should help with the teaching of them, understanding each part one step at a time.
Worth checking out if you are coaching basketball.
I know nothing about GIS, other than roughly what it says in Wikipedia. The Alberta Education social studies curriculum has this objective in the current Grade 7 Program:
“use geographic tools, such as geographical information system (GIS) software, to assist in
preparing graphs and maps”
And the new 8 & 9 curricula will be similar. As the resident computer geek, the Social teachers have asked for my help in developing a series of lessons to meet this objective. If anyone is aware of simple, free GIS software that we could use for this, and data sources that would be relevant to the kids… or any other suggestions about how to go about this, I’d love to hear from you.
This appears to be an excellent resource: Teachers’ TV. A wide range of videos covering the breadth of educational issues. Most appear to have related resources, comments etc. Rumour has it one of the biggest growth sectors in its audience is the kids…
Just a quick link to a tool I find useful here, Folder Size for Windows which allows you to see folder size in explorer (see the size of the contents of the folder to be accurate).
Very useful for scanning student accounts and seeing who is hogging server space with videos and music…
Have to apologize for the dearth of content and posting here. As always in my life it seems projects and commitments come in hordes, rather than one after another.
We are currently in the process of testing an email server and system for the division, using my Media classes as guinea pigs. Lots of fun for our tech guys I am sure… but the kids certainly are pleased. The first day they had access to it while I was trouble shooting accounts and logins etc. I asked them to send emails to get some volume on the system. It quickly became slow instant messaging, which I thought was interesting.
I asked a couple of the more academic and mature students (these are grade 9’s, so roughly 15 years old) if an IM system would be a useful tool for them to have access to at school. They said that it would be very useful… but couldn’t explain how. All of the suggestions were just ways of chatting, gossiping, and passing notes without supervision.
Much as I IM and multi-task with the best of them, they’ll need to do a better job of justifying an IM system before I’ll champion it for them.
Worth watching, four and a half minute on the impact of Web 2.0:
This is from a “Digital Ethnography” program at Kansas State University. They have a blog here with a series of student projects. Need to show this to my Media classes…some of my students should be capable of similar (in concept at least) work.
I think I will have troubles refraining from talking basketball now and then. I help to coach the girls team at the school, and we spent the weekend in High Level at the Norther Bear Invitational.
Just wanted to thank all the folks involved for a wonderful tournament, and the opportunity to coach some great ball.
And for those of you keeping score, our Raider girls placed first… by playing the best ball I’ve seen all year. Kudos to the Lacrete Lancers for making our girls work as hard as they did.
Framing for the world at large: I work as a teacher in a junior high in northern Alberta.
Spent a good chunk of Tuesday working through some of the data we have collected as part of the effective schools (should that be capitalized? in quotes?) process the AISI team is leading us through. This really drove home for me how inexperienced we were collectively with data collection and analysis.
The graphs we were looking at were somewhat confusing even for a math geek like myself. Made it very hard to move forward as quickly as many of us would have liked. It really did reinforce the absolute necessity for valid, strong data if we plan on guiding our practice with it.
I am really please that everyone seemed willing to buy into the process though, and am hopeful that as we proceed the data and its presentation improve. I left the day wishing for the ability to put our data into something like the Gapminder to truly give us an overview of the data.
If you haven’t played with the Gapminder yet, do so. If nothing else it would be an excellent resource in the Social Studies classroom. There is a wonderful talk by Hans Rosling (from the 2006 TED. And apparently, he is even more worth seeing in person if you get the opportunity.
