The world we live in...

**Written a few days ago, forgot to publish**

This morning I learned that a massive 8.8 Earthquake had struck Chile at 3:30AM local time (just after midnight by my calculation in Calgary). I'm working an early morning shift at the Airport here in Calgary and I became aware of the event at about 5:00. I quickly read a few news articles on the web about the Earthquake but there were no pictures or videos available that that time presumably because massive chuncks of infrastructure (electricity, phone lines and mobile networks) were damaged in the quake.

It's now 9:00AM here in Calgary and our flights to Hawaii have been put on delay becuase there is a Tsunami forcast for almost all Pacific costal regions - including Hawaii. This led me to start reading up on the Tsunami predictions and more on the Earthquake. A quick search on Google for "tsunami warning" or for "earchquake" opens up thousands of different articles and websites on the event. There is a section on Google search for "latest results" which updates new search hits by the second. I can't keep up with how many posts are being created on the internet right now that contain the phrase "tsunami warning". Literally every second there is a new hit from newspapers, magazines, television stations, news blogs, personal blogs, tweets, etc... My facebook notification page is rapidly filling up with people's opinions, thoughts and well-wishes for the victims in Chile along with warnings for anyone on or near a beach.

200 years ago there would be no way to warn distant lands about a coming Tsunami

100 years ago the news of this event (and a warning) could be transmitted accross the distance but it would reach so few people that it would hardly be considered useful

20 years ago the warning can be sent yet many people would not be warned in time

In the world we live in, this warning of a potential disaster is almost instantly broadcast around the world in a variety of mediums.

February blogin'

I'm really enjoying the idea of blogging. I was a little reluctant to start one up but I see it as a great place to organize my thoughts and reflect on anything I want. There are many times throughout a day that I think of something I'd like to write about but usually end up forgetting what it is by the time I make it to a computer. I'll have to start making notes so that I can expand on it when I have time.

Last Friday the 29th Mike and I presented our mini-lesson on our new technologies. We decided to each pick a small web-based software/application to present to the class. Our reasoning in this was that we were worried 30 mins might be too long to spend on our chose applications. Looking back, we could have easily spent the full 30 minutes on either of our choices. I spent my planning time learning more about xtranormal while Mike worked with Intel's Showing Evidence tool. This is one thing I intend to explore more of in the coming weeks. I would have never thought of using it in a language arts class because my definition of evidence and proof is (was) limited to science or math. A tool like this definitely has a role in any argumentative case, defending an essay in social studies, character development in a drama class or debating interpretation and meaning of a piece in art class.

I was really impressed by the reaction to xtranormal.com! I was worried the class would find it too juvenile or useless for a classroom. There were a pile of great ideas of how to use it in a class:

• use it to re-create a historical event
• re-write the ending to a story
• develop dialog between characters
• question and answer between two people or groups
• digital storytelling
• giving lesson instructions

I'm sure there were more ideas proposed but I wasn't feeling too hot that morning so I might have missed recording some of them. I really regret missing the second half of the class; this is the one class this semester that I really look forward to going to but I needed to just get some rest and get better. Due to time constraints we didn't have much time to play around with the site or get into a good discussion but I think the list of uses would be much longer after some demo time.

I realized afterward that I didn't provide an artifact to the class for xtranormal. I don't think a paper handout would be the right thing for this showcase so I'd like to just give a link to the website and a link to the videos I showed.

xtranormal substitute teacher plan intro to xtranormal