Return to Sender Animation

Here is a stop-motion animation made by students from the Fifth and Sixth Grade with help from Librarian Beth Nelson and additional technical assistance from Richard Ruane (the tech guy).

It is about the book Return to Sender by Julia Alvarez.

Animation about the book Return to Sender by Julia Alvarez from Lincoln School on Vimeo.

A stop-motion animation made by students from the fifth and sixth Grades of the Lincoln Community School in Lincoln, Vermont. It is about the book Return to Sender by Julia Alvarez. It was made with help from Librarian Beth Nelson and additional technical assistance from Richard Ruane (the school's tech guy).

 

Want to see videos of student work?

There are a number of videos that have been posted of student work here at the school. The links for these are often put in blogs related to the class that worked on the pieces or in the Library blog.

If you would like to see them all though, just visit the school's Youtube account link. It is:

http://www.youtube.com/linclcc

There you will see recent postings of a stop motion animation and digital stories by fifth and sixth graders based on the book Return to Sender by Julia Alvarez. These pieces will also be on display at the Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury as part of the exhibition "Invisible Odysseys - Art By and About Mexican Farm Workers in Vermont" from April 9-23.

Other videos you can watch via our Youtube link include the second grade's Bee Waggle Dance animation, two author explorations by the first grade and a documentary by the third and fourth grade about work they did to improve the walking trail around our school.

Enjoy!

Creating a Bootable USB Hard Disk for Ghost Disk Image Files

This is a real tech blog about how to do something techy. It isn't directly related to school other than other Technology people at schools need to do this same thing, so I thought I would pass this on to people who might need to know how to do this.

I have successfully created a bootable USB 60gb hard disk that I am using with Symantec Ghost for imaging hard disks at my school. I am using it both with a Ghost server and with Ghost images on the USB hard disk. Here is the procedure I used:

First I removed my existing partitions from the USB hard disk using Disk Management (in XP and Vista it’s in Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Computer Management).

I then created a partition of 32gb in Disk Management and formatted it as FAT32 (it wouldn’t let me format it that way unless the partition was less than 33gb). I also created a second partition with the remaining space on the disk drive. I’m pretty sure I didn’t needed to create either partition because they were overwritten by the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool after the next step. I’d try skipping creating these partitions.

I formatted a floppy as an MS-DOS startup disk (right click the floppy drive, click on format and check the “Create an MS-DOS startup disk”). The HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool needs to copy the start up files from this floppy.

I ran the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool (downloadable from PC World at http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,64963-order,1-page,1-c,peripherals/description.html) choosing the FAT32 file system, having it “Create a DOS startup disk” (meaning making this USB disk bootable) and telling it to use the DOS system files from the floppy I had just created. Though a FAT32 disk is limited to 32gb in Windows XP, the HP tool had no problem creating a 60gb partition.

I then copied all the files from the Ghost boot disk zip-file http://www.divshare.com/download/8531838-415 I created to the newly created hard disk. This zip file contains all the files and directories I am using, with the exception of the Ghost executable file. You will need to add that yourself.  NOTE: If you modify this set up with your own files, be sure that you don’t overwrite the system files (MSDOS.SYS, IO.SYS, COMMAND.COM) on your USB hard disk.

Notes:

This hard disk comes up as the C: drive. In Ghost it shows as Drive 1. Don’t make a mistake and overwrite it. Your computer’s internal hard disk will be Disk 2.

All the real work of this was done by the author of the Visible Procrastinations blog postings “Build yourself a bootable Ghost USB key” (http://visibleprocrastinations.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/build-yourself-a-bootable-ghost-usb-key/) and “Build yourself a bootable Ghost USB key II” (http://visibleprocrastinations.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/build-yourself-a-bootable-ghost-usb-key-ii/). I have modified the config.sys and autoexec.bat configurations somewhat to fit what I need at my school. You will need to modify settings to match the network cards you are running. Viewing the Visible Procrastinations blogs will give you a better understanding of why things are set up the way they are and how to change them.

There are drivers in this setup for CD-ROM drives, including SCSI drives. These will result in device error messages on start up if you don’t have all those drives hooked up. This is by design, in case you might need them.

Using images on the hard disk that had been created using Ghostcast Server resulted in me getting a message when it needed to go to the next file in a set. The message is “Insert next media and press enter to continue”. My choices are OK, Cancel and FileName. If I choose FileName I just click on the next file in the series and I’m fine (until I need to do the same thing again for the next filename).

The files and directory structure in my zip file do not include the Ghost program. You will need to add that to the Ghost directory. I also use the G-Images folder for my Ghost images.

Another year is getting in gear

Well it happened. September came around and suddenly the school is full of people and energy. All sorts of projects are beginning, and it hasn't even been two full weeks yet. Teachers are starting to learn how to post things on the web and we will be reaching out to the community for their input too.

Our second grade teacher just had a parent night and talked about the Second Grade Blog as a means of finding out what the students are doing in class, including postings of student work.

The third and fourth grade teams have been working on blogs with the students. Their first audio blog was posted today. The students are working on a project that includes interviewing people about the nature trail here at the school, so why not make it available on the web.

This afternoon I'll be meeting with the fifth and sixth grades.

The teachers and the students are excited about the year ahead.

Justin and Anna are enthusiastic about the new year!

It should be a good one.

RR

Testing, 1, 2, 3

Being the tech person means I sometimes use my blog to test to see if certain things work the way I think they might.

In this case I'm trying out an idea I had for blogs having text in boxes and columns and maybe even throwing a picture in as well.