At commencement each year we honor impressive academic accomplishment—and we also recognize a student whose life has left an indelible mark on the community through service. This person, nominated by faculty and staff, has lived out Whitworth’s heart and mind mission in an especially inspiring way.

We had a very difficult task this year–So many of you have been involved in remarkable service, and our community and our world have been changed by your commitment. Finally, though we would have loved to have presented awards to several of you, we selected two recipients to receive this year’s Servant Leadership Award. I’ll ask each of you to stand where you are when I mention your name so that we may recognize you.

The first senior … I am pleased to announce that the first Servant Leadership Award goes to GLEN GUENTHER.

Our second award recipient also possesses natural leadership ability that inspires the confidence of others. As a Bonner Leader, he has been central in regional community development efforts; as a result of his tireless work, Spokane’s West Central neighborhood was able to leverage roughly $10,000 to be used for neighborhood improvements. In addition to his West Central work, he has served as President of Whitworth’s En Cristo club. Through this club, he addressed issues of food security, and provided housing advocacy for low income and homeless Spokane residents. However, his work doesn’t end here. During the fall, he served in Uganda and Rwanda in efforts to address hunger. This student is passionate about service, and inspiring others to become civically engaged. Like Glen, this student is already changing the world. I’m pleased to announce that the second recipient of this year’s servant leadership award is KYLE NAVIS.

Please join me in congratulating Kyle and Glen.

The film was shot in two parts only because the studio wasn’t big enough to accommodate the whole shoot. The film took six million dollars and three months to shoot.

Cog was a television advertisement for the Honda Accord, made with minimal CGI and no trick photography. It was created in 2003 by the London office of advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy.

The two-minute advert appears as a single, long camera dolly along a Heath Robinson-esque chain reaction arrangement of parts from the car. It is in fact two one-minute chain-reaction sequences, carefully set up on opposing walls of the studio and stitched together^[1], the join being at the moment where the muffler/exhaust box rolls across the floor (this can be seen by watching the floor pattern change). The advert took approximately 20 takes on each of five days of shooting to film, and only minimal CGI was used, for lighting highlights and slowing down the motion at one point. The cars featured, one disassembled for the pieces and the other on the trailer, were two of the six hand-built pre-mass production Accords.

PowerPoint 2003 Users:

PowerPoint 2007 Users:

If your school or organization blocks YouTube, view one of these videos describing how to embed YouTube videos into PowerPoint while offline:

Embed YouTube into a PowerPoint 2003 program with no internet connection.

Embed YouTube into a PowerPoint 2007 program with no internet connection.

The solution … ask kids to bring in their own. So many parents are one their second, third or fourth laptop. What happens to the old one? I asked kids to bring in a laptop if they have one and I would train them on how to use them. So far 16 of the 22 students have brought in their own laptop. Dell, Lenovo, Panasonic, Asus, Macbooks, Fujitsu, NEC, Samsung … they can all be found in my classroom. Mobile computing is great.

I have found laptops to save time, space, increases quality of work, help organize and collect work into one place. It has increased self-directed learning, develop higher-order thinking, and more time on task. When students have access to mobile computing 24/7, their research, writing, calculations, presentations, and problem solving are likely to be better organized, more thorough, and more polished.

It’s been a great treat to work with the future … I can’t wait for the next generation!

Will having a fit at the check-in counter help? See for yourself. This is a choice video from the Hong Kong airport. The woman misses her flight and goes ballistic. Makes me very thankful for my wife.

This year I started collecting student work electronically from the beginning of school. Our school developed an information management system for students and teachers called MyDragonNet. As an elementary teacher, I find the system to have wonderful firewalls and safety systems, so much so that the parents (my primary clients) are locked out unless the students give them their password.  Because communication with parents is key to my work, I decided to look else where to find a home for my ePortfolios.

Look no further … Google Sites has allowed me to be as creative as I like. Seamlessly merged with Google Docs, Calendar, Picasa 3, YouTube, Google Videos, and Gmail (as well as what seems to be new programs every week) I have all I need to create and fly into Web 2.0.

Here’s how I started. Before starting with the class, I created my own template of what I wanted from each student. This gave the idea of what I was looking for.Once I was comfortable with the initial layout, it was time to roll it out to the class.

Each student created a Gmail account (although not necessary, in hindsight, it was the best decision). Each student had the basic requirements in front of them to follow. They could be creative as to the formatting their little hearts desired. I have a number of great sites. If you would like to actual examples, send me a note and I’ll be glad to have students share a site with you.

I have created a best of best page using actual kid examples. You can view it here. The sampls include tips for:
* Creating a Home Page
* Embedding Projects
* Creative Design options
* Sharing Your Writing
* Vodcasting and Podcasting

There was one sad note, the principal came by observed the creation of the sites. As he watched, he noticed a couple of girls chatting via Gmail. Unfortunately, he didn’t notice or realize their discussion was about the web sites. They were collaborating, he was worried they were playing. His trust of the kids wasn’t at the level I have. Sure, they’re 10 years old and they will make mistakes with electronic media. I consider mistakes a learning curve, not a loss of control. I would rather the mistakes come early and on my watch rather than later where kids might really get themselves into hot wate … at least now, I hope I can bail them out.