Learning With Lucie

Staying Connected as a Family

What a busy couple week... Within 3 weeks, all three of my kids and my grandson are celebrating another birthday and the twins are graduating from college.  Despite the fact that all of us are in different states, it pleases me so much to watch us stay connected as a family and to see that the boys have brought some very high quality women into our family.

 

Thanksgiving 2007

I took my first trip to the desert this Thanksgiving.  I few to Tucson; visited the Sonora Desert, then drove through Sedona on my way to the Grand Canyon.  The way back brought us back through Sedona.  It was wonderful to have a host who had much experience with the Canyon and the desert.  Knowing that Craig had hiked down and back when he was 16 with his Dad, and once again with his daughter when she was 16 was part of the experience. 

www.flickr.com

This is a Flickr badge showing photos in a set called Arizona 2007

You can view these pictures as a Slideshow.

Adam's Concert

Driving home from the University of Hartford after having thoroughly enjoyed the Hawkappella Spring Concert, I dialed Adam's cell phone to ask him if he could find out who the guy with the video camera was at the concert (obviously someone's parent by the age of the videographer) and whether we could get a copy of the video.  "Sure Mom,  but there are already a bunch of clips from the concert up on You Tube".  Sure enough by the time I arrived home and turned on my computer I was able to enjoy Adam's solo again,  along with many other numbers captured by his college colleagues using cell phones and cameras.  How OLD SCHOOL of me to think I had to 'hope' to make contact with an unknown member of the audience to possibly get him to make a fellow 'parent' a copy of the video footage he took.  As I write it, it even sounds "OLD SCHOOL", doesn't it.   So when I got home I not only took the time to learn how to create my own You Tube Playlist of Hawkappella videos  but checked out the Hawkapella's MySpace. 

 

Matt's Recital

Oh How I've missed the live music that use to fill my home.  This weekend was filled with opportunities to see Adam, Matt, and their friends collaborate and create wonderful music.  Starting with an evening at a jazz piano bar, followed by a morning of special music at the UCC church, and ending with Matt's Junior Composition Recital at Ithaca college.  Here's a video clip of the last piece of Matt's Recital -- Blues for Adam, which he composed for his twin brother who inspired him to explore blues piano.  Adam joins Matt's Jazz Ensemble on the piano, with Matt on the keyboard.

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Adam joins his brother, Matt, during the last piece of Matt's Junior Composition Recital at Ithaca College.? Matt wrote this piece for his brother Adam who inspired him to explore blues piano.

deLaBruere Family Reunion

What a great time I had organizing this year's deLaBruere Family Reunion with my cousin Roland.  Since Roland (owner of NorthEast Business Systems) and myself both have background with Technology we decided to bring the family reunion into the digital age.  I organized a Digital Family History center.  I brought digital cameras and digital voice recorders and worked with members of each family to capture some media (photos, videos, and audio) for a deLaBruere Family website.  Eleven of the twelve families were represented in some format.  I tried to engage a member or two from each family to use the digital tools to capture memories from their family.  Passing on the sense of responsibility of capturing family history to the upcoming generation was part of my goal.  Using the tools of the digital generation seemed to be an important part of the process of getting them involved.  I hope it worked.  I used Google Pages to set up a container, and experimented with other sites to host the images, videos, and sounds.  I chose to password protect the two photo albums  on Shutterfly since there were over 200 images and I wanted to respect those who might not want their pictures on the web.   The audio is hosted as a podcast on Odeo.  The short video clips were uploaded to DropShots.  I think there is great potential for this type of activity. 

On Vacation

Two months since the last post, doesn't mean I don't have much to say... but rather that I've been saying it elsewhere.  The two online grad courses I'm taking at UVM have consumed much of my web publishing energy for the past few months, as has the VT-CITE project.  But alas, April vacation took me away from much of it and brought me to Block Island, Rhode Island.  But I didn't go cold-turkey. I purchased a mobile tech toy right before vacation (Pocket PC) and experimented with mobile computing.  But to prove that I did find some respite, I've chosen to experiment with a new technology resource called Film Loop to post some photos from our bike tours around the Island. Enjoy either the pictures or the presentation technology... or both! 

I got rid of the film loop here because it took too long to load.

My family

Coming from a large French-Canadian family, I take pride in being close to my family.  I must admit that I don't personally know the names of each of my cousins, but since I have over 100 first cousins,  I think that's understandable.  My mother was one of 8; my father was one of 12;  many of their siblings had large families; it doesn't take long to pass the 100 count.  I am the oldest of 5 girls,  mother of 3 sons, and  grandmother to Simon. 

Here is a small photo album where I get to show off some recent pictures of some of these special people in my life.   

Getting serious

It's been almost 5 years since I started dabbling with blogs in education mostly for student projects in my classroom.

It's been about a year since "blogs" have started to really get the attention of the masses (marked by it being the most frequently looked up word in the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary)

It's been a few months since I selected "blogging in education" as a research topic for a few grad classes.

Finally... I've decided that it's time to get serious and start my own blogs with some serious blog tools.  Many of the blogs that really got my attention during my research project were done on TypePad.  Getting serious for me was shelling out a few dollars a month to discover blogging at the next level (beyond free blogging tools like Blogger and Xanga)

My goals - 

1. To discover what features non-free blogging tools have and whether they are worth paying for.
2. To move from the  a user of  free blogging tools for educational projects  to a blogger who explores the process of blogging (not just the tools)
3. To update the format of my old web site to a more interactive format

Let's see what happens.