Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋節)
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What we did on the weekend Dalian integrating technology blog at DAIS
integrating technology grades K - 12 tofu
Saturday, September 29, 2012
How are some weekends different from
other weekends? When there seems to be no end to the particular one being
experienced is my favourite way; for example, this weekend syncs with next
weekend in that the days between are part of the holiday of the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋節)
and no I have not advanced in my Mandarin to have written that – it is a paste
job; saying that, I know that this character 大
is the start of Dalian and we watch for it to get on the correct bus or is it the
start to Jinshitan, our local hood? – we get lost a lot but at 1 RMB – 15 cents
US for a bus ride it is affordable to hop on another bus and if we get way to
far afield we grab a cab, show our business card which is in Chinese on the
opposite side to what we can read. Unlike New York City cabs or Sydney, Paris,
Rome and other cities we tromp about these are quite cheap. To get home from
Jinshitan is 15 RMB – a tad bit over two bucks US for a fifteen minute ride.
NYC it would be like going from the West Village to Harlem and cost about $20.
Not that I had planned to write about money.
So we are here at
the start of the Mooncake Festival
(Zhongqiu Festival) 3000 years in the
advancing and most everyone I work with is out of here. We did get our fair
share of mooncakes on Friday, one of my favourite Chinese foods, well actually,
aside of tofu, just about the only thing I eat that is not western. I tried to
be more culturally globalized but my stomach had other ideas.
It is Saturday and most teachers have flown off
to Viet Nam, Korea, Thailand and various spots in China. We are staying home a
few days then flying out Monday to Yantai in northeastern Shandong province.
Sound exotic but actually we could not make up our minds where to go until it
was too late. I had wanted to go up to Dandong but last week when we finally
decided to go there all buses and trains were booked out. Being one of the most
traveled times of the year for the locals flights out of Dalian seemed to be
doubling by the hour. One of the few places left was Yantai – half an hour
away. There is a ferry to come back on that takes a few hours so we are flying
there and cruising home on Thursday or Friday or if we get to wandering around
various other cities we may come back on the weekend by ferry from Weihai or
Yantai or some such service, it is just across the bay.
I started last week off quite excited about our
new laptop program. I went home with the new Zenbook with Windows 8 installed
and spent a few days downloading lots of stuff. But now I am not so sure
whether I like this; the speed is great – I get onto the Internet (more about
that in a moment) quickly and programs run well: Adobe Flash, Dreamweaver,
Sketchup and etc. but it jumps when keying. It is impossible to write more than
a couple of letters before it jumps to another line – or maybe it is for
incredibly fast people – read young. I
need to plug in a keyboard to keep from going nuts. Or switch to my older true
and sure laptop like I am doing now. The keypad is way too sensitive and it
will be an issue when the kids get it if I cannot tighten it up. The Zenbook
would make a great travel companion (when the wife is shopping or printing off
grand- daughter photos) and I am left to my own devices.
Friday, yesterday, it was like being in the
stone ages. Holy cow – no Internet for a day! It started the night before
during a thunder storm; it was a dark and rainy night or is that stormy?
Whatever it was up to no good was going to happen with lightening all over the
shop, of which, one wayward bolt knocked out the server box. In the middle of
uploading photos, videos, words of wisdom/scattered thoughts or whatever I was
uploading to one of my sites my ftp-server crashed and that was it. So what was
there left to do? I could always talk to my wife, but I have done that before,
so we watched another episode of Dexter. We are on season 4 and it is
wonderfully horrific – just the show to watch on a stormy night with a banging
door and chairs blowing across the porch. The next day the server was still
down – I put up a note for my students that there was no Internet due to a
lighting strike and they thought I was joking. They often think I am joking though I am not
sure why they think that. Not using the Internet is fine, I had some classes
using Google Sketchup and we were not able to do stuff we were to do on the
last day before a holiday like getting grades done, submitting lesson plans and
all those wonderful time absorbing tasks that will just have to wait until
after the holidays. I found time to even clean my room which given the choice
of being online or cleaning has always been put at the bottom of the pile of
to-do projects. We have had other times when the Internet was down for a bit
and even a couple of times when the electricity was off for most of the day but
this time it seemed more OK. No one got to play our DAISlive video which I had spent several hours just on the introduction
to but I am sure I can get staff to play it when we are back in session.
DAISlive
is our news/events video that I do with my high school broadcast class. It is
shown two times a week and lasts around three minutes. I spend way too many
hours editing it. I started it last year as a way to get my middle school
publication class to do some real-time speaking. By the end of the school year
every single middle school student had appeared several times as anchor, news-reader,
and creator of an ad, usually for the school store. My publication class is a
six-week unit in our applied studies course. There are six applied studies
units ranging from robotics to ‘The Odyssey of the Mind’ and a student
government component. I found this a very effective way to get students who had
English as a second language to become surer about their speaking. My favorite
example was during my first few week. Everyone in my class had to present in
front of the camera but one girl would break into tears whenever she had to
speak English. She would whisper a few words and that was it. We got her to say
‘thanks for watching DAISlive’ then
she gave a big smile. After that she would be the first to volunteer to be on
our show. This year I am doing DAISlive
as part of my high school broadcast journalism course. We have been given a
large room in the basement of the school which I am gradually turning into a
video studio. So far since starting more than a year ago all I have had is a
cheap video camera and I used AVS Video Editor until recently when we purchased
a site license of Power Director 10 with the hopes the students would do all
the editing. They are still learning the program and last week I spent like
four hours just making a new introduction. I have had one short session with
them using Boinx TV to make a real-time newscast but after holiday we will dive
into that and have wonderful blue screen backgrounds. soon my hours of editing
will be turned over to the students and my too much editing will end and I will
have all that extra time, hopefully, to learn new stuff. I was told yesterday we may be getting Adobe
CS6, which I put in for last year but at about ten-thousand dollars it got
knocked back and now it appears we may get it which excites me to no end and I
am looking forward to Narda printing more granddaughter photos and shopping for
more shoes and me doing fantastic stuff like more web pages to add to my
current thousands, and more video clips and finally finishing my e-book “Tofu
Again – ‘The lost book of tofu” http://tofu.neuage.us/ which is not just another book of tofu
recipes but has lots of stories about my days as a tofu maker (eight years) in
Australia whilst raising two children by myself (Try This ~ http://neuage.org/trythis.htm) along with tofu recipes. Needless to say creating an eBook with
InDesign and making phone apps with Dreamweaver will be my first endeavors.
There is also talk of getting some good video equipment and lights for the
video studio.
My
real excitement is bundled into our next step in DAISlive when we go global, sort of. I have been corresponding with five schools in
India to add a section of Collaborative Broadcast Journalism to our program. I got involved with the British Council programme called International
School Awards last
year then hooked up with the British Council Schools team "World Class" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldclass/) and out of that five schools have been
corresponding with me about doing projects http://neuage.us/edu/blogs/collaborative-broadcast.html. Then this
past week when the head of ISS (more further down) came to visit he got me in
touch with Raphael Raphael (that is his real name, first and last) at an
International school in Kazakhstan. Raphael has a doctorial in
film and like me is the tech dude at his school. We will do some real-time news
broadcasts with our students and hopefully I can bring in India too. “and now
to our reporter in India… Kazakhstan (No! not Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of
Kazakhstan). I did several projects
like this when we lived in New York City. Narda’s school, St. Luke’s and my
school, Ross Global Academy did several live interactions together from Narda
having her 3rd grade and our 3rd grade class do songs
together to my 8th graders doing a hip-hop workshop with her 8th
graders. We went with three schools a couple of times but never
internationally. A school I taught at
two summers ago in south Australia wants to be involved too so maybe we will
have this incredible learning space between Kazakhstan, India, Australia and us
in little old Jinshitan. My ultimate,
though it will probably never happen, is to get involved with a school in North
Korea and do this. It would not be political – just students of the same age
hanging out talking about stuff in their life, about what is going on at the
moment at their school.
Overall it has been a good week here at
Campus Village/Dalian American International School in Jinshitan – (Golden
Pebble Beach) in the DDA (Dalian Development Area which is also Kaifaqu),
Dalian, Liaoning province, China.
Charles Gregory, the head of ISS
(International School Services - https://www.iss.edu/) which runs our school, visited for the week.
We get to see him a couple of times a year. He lives an incredible life, having
personally started 16 schools internationally the past nine years. He has so
many stories from cobras in the hallway of a school in the Congo to students
trying to push a large bear over the fence to starting a school in Myanmar a
decade ago when supplies had to be carried on the backs of people through
jungles. He has such a great and positive view of education throughout the world
and I have inspiration for my next writing project because of him. The life of
being an international school teacher is really special and I wish I had
started a few decades ago back when I was a single parent living in a coastal
town of Australia. My children would have loved living in all the places other
teachers tell us about. I hope to teach in one more country before it is all
over though at 65 then 66 next school year and I think another year older after
that the choices are dwindling. I have a list of countries that issue work
visas for teachers and the list is quite small with maybe a dozen with no age
limit and a few with 70. But then again if they let me stay in China we could
be here quite some time. I hear that our area is one of the few places in China
that will issue a visa past 65. Several of the southern provinces won’t issue
them to anyone past 58. Damn I may have to retire someday and write books about
tofu.
contact Myanmar 2014
Blog updated February 15, 2014 K - 12 technology (updated February 04, 2014). Travel Site (2014) updated February 15, 2014. Videos/Blogs on Youtube, Twitter, Wordpress, Photo albums. Updated 15 Second Street, Round Lake, New York and photos from parent's 1943 wedding as well as Leigh's page. Farmville page updated Thursday, March 17, 2011 5:58 PM. neuage.org updated February 11, 2014 10:31 PM neuage.us updated February 05, 2014 7:21 PM. Resume updated February 05, 2014
Technology Coordinator and Computer Teacher at Dalian American International School, 2 Dianchi Road, Golden Pebble Beach, Dealian Development Area 116650 P.R. China
Blog updated / Integrating Technology Blog February 10, 2014. also: terrell.neuage.us and/or neuage.me
Today working on picture poem links starting around "better" (). Picture poems are the digital format of work I did as a street artist in New Orleans in the 1970s, as well as New York City, Honolulu, San Francisco and Adelaide South Australia. Follow @neuage
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