DisneyWorld SpringBreak!

The BubbleShare slideshow at the foot of this posting will grow :). After two days driving the 12 hours to get here, we muscled our stuff into our lovely All Star Resorts domicile for the week and pushed on out into the Disney MGM Studios park to take on the infamous Tower of Terror. Colin: "That was totally awesome but I NEVER want to do it again!"

Heheheheee.

We had a lovely meal at the Sci-Fi Dine-In Theatre and made it back "home" to the hotel via a wild bus ride with an insane driver who led out-of-key singalongs of Disney songs. Just how many keys can "It's a Small World" bear all at once!?

Day 2, Monday, Colin and I took off for Epcot and enjoyed Mission Space together, wandered around Epcot in the Innoventions center, then decided that Test Trak looked a bit too much for our courage level, jumping on a bus over to Animal Kingdom where we ate lunch at the Restaurantosaurus (a glorified and very bizzy McDonalds, albeit with better burgers) and Miranda joined us to do Everest, the insane mountaintop rollercoaster. After we survived that we hopped on over to Magic Kingdom where we did Space Mountain, Splash Mountain, and Thunder Mountain Railroad. We wandered around in the course of those and caught the parade and the spectacular fireworks, then headed home for a late dinner (11:00!) and bed.

Day 3 we got up and grabbed MickyWaffles to go and drove the 35 miles up to visit my mom in Lake Mary Nursing Home. It was a great, relaxed visit, and we took her the DisneyWorld throw we had bought for her. It'll keep her warm out on the patio on these cool mornings. We trucked out at lunchtime to pick up a Krystal burger for her and surprised her with a Starbucks Double Chocolate Chip frappacino. Drove home in the rain, took a break with Colin in the arcade and Miranda and I hanging out in the room vegging on tv (the rain was good to us, made us relax--I actually love rain, especially in the middle of a busy day!), changed clothes, then headed off to MGM where Colin and I did Star Tours while Miranda shopped, then we took in Drew Carey's funny radio show "Sounds Dangerous" and did an extended bus hop to Disney Downtown for dinner. All the restaurants were on 1 hour waits (at 9:00 pm!) so we, ravished, took in a really great light dinner at Earl of Sandwich, then Colin had to spend some time at the Lego Store (see pics) before we headed home, again late, for bed.
Day 4 we were off to Magic Kingdom after sleeping late. This is the first day we used FastPasses and, wow, the FastPass is da bomb! We nabbed one for the 3:40 Space Mountain then grabbed another at 2 for the 2:40 Spash Mountain. We ate nearby, killed a little time with Miranda shopping (great blue sundress!) while Colin and I took in Pirates of the Caribbean. Fantastic pic in the slideshow of C-man with Cap'n Jack Sparrow. The kids played checkers at a sidewalk pickle barrel then we walked up the FastPass lane to Spash Mountain, which was a blast, then made our way to Space Mountain. With the FastPasses our wait time was 9 minutes (as opposed to the curren 50 for walk-ons-see the two line pics for a notion of the incredibly long line for that wait, winding around a good acre of property in snakey switchbacks) and 4 minutes (as opposed to what had to be over an hour for the poor masses). Well, to be truthful, we waited that way for 50 minutes our first time at Space Mountain, but I have to say the short wait on our Day 4 was glorious. Again, we screamed like little girls!!!

Day 5 We got up early for another visit with Granny and then came back down for a wild aternoon at Animal Kingdom. Last night we vegged out with tv and planned to retire early after order-in pizza (really goooood pizza, really!) and wings. The kids did some non-stop Disney Channel during dinner, then early to bed. Our visit with Granny was great and she loved hearing the CD of Miranda's singing that I made for her to play on her new CD player. She tried to make me take the player home but I told her that I wanted to be able to send her new recordings. The 4 lovely ladies in the courtyard sitting area applauded after every song. Colin's going to be doing some recording, I'm working on some instrumental stuff with mandolin and guitar, and Miranda will be recorded every chance I can get. Now we can send her music as we make it.

Once back at the hotel, we set off for Animal Kingdom where we discovered the park was closing in two hours this night. We marched straight to Kali River Rapids and did it once, getting soaked. Since we were soaked we did it again. And again. Off to Everest where the wait was short too so up (and dooooooown) we went. Colin was laughing so hard at the end of it we had to turn around and do that again, too! Finally, we trekked off to Dinosaur, the indoor scariness of scarinesses. I lovvved that one! The pic they took at the crucial moment the giant TRex appeared to eat us showed 1) Miranda ducking down so you could only see the top of her head, 2) Colin nowhere to be seen, he was ducking down so far, and 3) me, eyes and mouth wide open staring at the sucker. We didn't buy it, but I will remember it!

Back to the hotel to eat in-room salads and sandwiches, then back out to Magic Kingdom again for a last assault on the park.

Later, and finally:

Well that's it. The last pic in the slideshow says it all. After 3 Kali River Rapids, 2 Everests, 3 Spash Mountains, 1 Dinosaur, 1 Primeval Somethingorother, and 1 Thunder River Railroad, we're outta here. On the way in for all that we stopped and had our breath taken away by the spectacular fireworks from the top of Main Street. I got video. Here it is!

Think good thoughts for us as we pack up our pit of a room into our van and make our way back north to our much-loved home and our much-loved Lee Ann.

Cheerio!

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Panel Discussion Monday, March 5

The USN Lower School Technology blog has complete information on a class I'm helping facilitate this coming Monday. If you're in the Nashville area you're more than welcome to come participate in this panel discussion about our children and the Internet. See that post for the skimmy.

Cheers,
Scott

Furniture for Sale -- Nashville, TN

Hey, all,

Needed a place to post a little .wmv movie of items for sale at our new home. Here it is.

NECC 2007 Presentation! Come to Atlanta!

Hey, just updating about my NECC2007 presentation acceptance! NECC is the International Society for Technology in Education's annual get-together of over 10,000 teachers, techies, and school administrators and it's always rewarding to go. This year I'll be all over the place, so Skype me "scottmerrick" if you need me but if you really want to see me workin' a room I'll be in a room "tba Mid-May" on Tuesday, 6/26/2007, from 3:30pm– 4:30pm presenting a workshop session called Podcasting with Windows: Tools, Tricks, and sTrategies for Success!

Clever title, eh? The brief marketing blurb ISTE asked for is: Just because we don't have that nifty GarageBand drag and drop stuff doesn't mean we can't podcast! Seasoned podcaster to teachers: You can start today!

And here's the session detail:

Participants will leave with the ability to seek and obtain various freeware or commercial products that work best for them--for their budgets, their software preferences, and their schedules. They will better understand just what podcasting is and how it has developed into a tool many educatonal institutions and school districts are utilizing in ways that could not have been imagined only a couple of years ago. Participants will leave with their curiousity piqued: How can I use this valuable technology to the benefit of my students? my teachers? my parent-base?

Participants with laptops will no doubt begin to access the tools before the session is complete.

A broad survey of tools both commercially available and freely downloadable will be provided, along with URLs and links to reviews and tutorials. These will include podcast aggregators like iPodder Lemon, iTunes, Juice, and many others, plus resources to sites that catalog and review these. Several microphone options will be shared, as well as hardware options for remote (off-computer) recording, such as a Pocket PC, an iPod with Griffin iTalk, and a digital voice recorder; and recording and compression software solutions will be demonstrated, including Audacity and Adobe Audition. The process of mixing a multi-track podcast using one of these tools will be demonstrated (these skills translate well from one piece of software to another).

Details of just how the Windows podcaster can upload a file to a school web server will be touched upon and demonstrated, using ftp protocol, and the process of creating a feed will be demonstrated using the free service at feedburner.com in conjunction with the free blogging service at blogger.com. These processes are the final step in making one’s podcast public and as such are very necessary. A discussion of several “automatic” services that offer to simplify the process will be offered, along with their pertinent URLs.

An educational podcast does not need to be just a spoken message or lecture. One approach to keeping one’s podcast interesting to a broad range of listeners is to include independent music as one of its features. A great deal of good independent music is available to all podcasters, free for use without royalty payments; and those resources will be shared and demonstrated, including the Podsafe Music Network at music.podshow.com and the commercial site magnatune.com (“we are not evil”).

Participants will also leave with target list of useful educational podcasts they can explore on their own to see just how innovative educators all over the world have begun to take the discussion of educational best practices, technology, and reform more public than at any other time in our history.

Examples from my own podcast, currently 46 shows [Make that 52 as of this post!]and going strong, Snacks4theBrain! will be shared as evidence of the successful application of these tools and strategies.

Come see me in Atlanta! Cheers!

The Move Movie

Well, it's really just a slideshow, but here it is (use Internet Explorer or open with your IE plugin)...

Itttttttt's Mooooooving Weeeeeeeeeeeeeek!

TMI, ya'll (TooMuchInformation), but I'm soooo moving my family out of a house where we've lived for 13 years to a new house half the size. Me, I'm outtttttta pocket...

Blizzard in Denver 2006!

Oksie Doksie, ya'll, here's the photo album, to be added to as we snap pics in the snow, around town (after the roads clear!) and at the tree. This album is gonna be HUGE, hence I took out the displaying version from this page! Here's an ABC News story!

Christmas Toonz

As a proud dad I must share with you a quick PDA-recording of my lovely daughter Miranda singing the National Anthem at USN's Homecoming 2006 basketball games. Our girls' and our boys' teams both won, of course, largely inspired by the pre-game singing! Here's the music file.

Later in the week, my lovely daughter donned choir vestments and a sparkly golden halo and joined the musicians in the organ balcony to sing "O Holy Night" to an assembled group of parents and children about to participate in the annual Christmas Pageant at Christ Church Cathedral here in Nashville. There will certainly be a photo album of the event and when it's up I'll edit here to add a link to it. Listen to the opening offering, straight from my heart's heart, then, hear the single verse closer, both beautifully filtering through myriad children's noises and crowd static.

Oh, and (on an immeasurably less beautiful note) here's my annual gift to anyone who can find it here :), my "Elf Who's King of Country," originally recorded at Sun/Plantation records back in the mid-eighties, released as a 45 rpm single, and now here for your holiday chuckle.

I'm hoping to release a 2 song CD next holiday season, featuring "Elf" and "Moose Nuggets for Christmas." Here's a beta version mock-up for the cover, Ho Ho HO...

Picture snapped by my 4th grade student Gracie!

Ahhh, Including Students in the Plan

This place is so random. Sometimes personal posts, sometimes professional, sometimes just something I so darned know needs to be shared that I share it.

This post's just to note a neat one from Lucie deLaBruere at the InfiniteThinkingMachine blog, all about including your students in your planning for technology as it develops. Check that out!

Thanksgiving Treats!

We have so much to be thankful for. Our day out at Blue Moon Farm B&B was wonderful, culminating in a bonfire replete with roasted marshmallows. Here's a slideshow:

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And, and, and!!! My friend Scott Slone, host of the Alaska Podshow podcast, did a special show on Thanksgiving evening because he was inspired to do so by one of my own songs. Listen to it here!

Atlanta NAEYC!

After driving down from school after my last class Thursday (don't know I'll ever make that decision again--it was hard, even with a good book listen, Stephen King's Cell ) I'm finally getting into the swing at the National Association for the Education of Young Children in Atlanta, participating in a session by George Forman, Community Nursery School, Lexington, MA. It's an interesting session in the Tech Resource Room where I'll be doing my uptoten.com presentation a little later today. George is advocating a text-based presentation for video clips (over the creation of linear video) using a combination of Microsoft Word and Quicktime Pro to create text documents with hyperlinks that open brief clips of video. This has prompted me to pop over to the Apple site to upgrade my Quicktime Basic to Quicktime Pro, something I've been putting off ever since an iTunes upgrade last year rendered my already-paid-for previous upgrade useless. If that happens again, Steve Jobs, I'm gonna be less than happy...

Extensis Portfolio is a file organization software that he highly recommends, though I just checked that online (blogging this during the session) and it's a $199.99 piece of software. Perhaps some good file management habits with folders and filenames would do the trick, too. There's always Picassa!

More later!

Here's more from the second session. Diane Gross from blank slate Board Books just served up an interesting session on ways to create classroom books from templates available at her company's website. I'm walking from the session with a CD that I'll share with our teachers, and I'll include the website in the teacher resources on our webliographer.

Then the presentation was Lynn Hartle, University of Central Florida Distance Learning guru, who shared some rich resources for anyone interested in doing that themselves. That would be me, and that would be me hoping to enrich the professional development and earning income potential of all my colleagues. A very shareshare experience.

Later:

I'm sitting in Gail Lovely's session with all kinds of littlekid websites. Look for some new sites at K1-GoHere! soon! This woman is the real deal when it comes to seeking out and sharing great websites for teachers and students.

My own session went great. Though I started out like a Nervous Nelly, I settled down and got the job done, finishing with an entertaining and informative Skype video interchange with uptoten.com's creator and producer, Jason Barnard. Seems he's finalized the European contract for the Boowa and Kwala Show (working title?) and is now off into the development process for that. The best part was the instantaneous verification of Premium@School accounts for all 20 or so teachers present. Woo. Woo! I'm off to find a burger and early to bed for a full day of sessions an a venture out to the exhibitor floor tomorrrow!

G'night!

The Next Day:

Saturday I slept late (for me, 'til 8) then I was down to the conference center by 10 or so, to spend 2 1/2 hours on the exhibitor floor. I'm so glad I did, discovering a number of products that can help our youngest children in the classroom, from furniture to software to some amazing science resources from Steve Spangler Science. Among the most fun and interesting is "insta-snow." Yeah, I bought some. Stay tuned.

I popped my head into several sessions after lunch, but the pervasive tone was clearly "we're outta here," and they were sparsely attended and not very pertinent to my work or those of our colleagues. Most valuably, I made the closing session, an extraordinarily inspirational (I admit to a tear or two) address and songs by Raffi, and managed to get him to sign a copy of his new CD for the library. His new book, Child Honoring, is a must-purchase for the library. Wow. Here's a pic from the signing part. I'll cherish this picture. This man is a magic one: The forward in his book is by the Dalai Lama, for goodness sakes!

A funny story: I mentioned to him that I saw him perform in Nashville 11 years ago with my little girl, who's now a junior in high school, and told him that I had been tempted to go onstage today for a hug when the 40 women went up to dance with him (click on the pic below for that) and lined up for hugs before leaving the stage. What did he do? He signed our CD "To USN Teachers," posed for the pic-- taken by the wonderful lady in line behind me--and then he turned and hugged me. I've been hugged by Raffi! Yay!!!!

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