Christmas Break

Christmas break has been wonderful. We got 5 weeks off. I did have to work part of that time but being away from school has been wonderful and given me a chance to visit with friends and family that get neglected throughout the semester! Nathan and I had a wonderful Christmas seeing all of our family over a weeks time! With so many of them we have to space it all out! This year, our schedule ended up more balanced than ever and we got to spend a lot of time with eveyone! I also got to catch up on sleep and read...for enjoyment!
Nathan has been working really hard lately and has had to work some overtime. The money has been nice though (rebounded from Christmas spending). He took some extra days off around the holidays and they were great! I recently scheduled a trip to NC to visit my brother and his family which unfortunetly Nathan does not get to go on. His vacation does not reset until May. I am bummed to go without him but excited to see that part of my family. So if you think about it check on him March 17-25th!
Classes begin again on Tuesday the 18th and I think I am ready! I am excited to get another semester closer to having a masters degree. This semester I will write the first 3 chapters of my thesis and have a proposal meeting with my committee! Wish me luck!

Until next time,
KMP

Cheesecake Brownies!

I got a new brownie pan from a friend for Christmas and wanted to try it out. So I made this recipe! It turned out so great.

Dark Brownie Ingredients:
• 2 cups sugar
• 1/2 cup cocoa
• 4 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup butter
• 1 cup chopped nuts (optional)

Cheesecake Layer Ingredients:
• 8 ounces cream cheese
• 6 tablespoons butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 3 eggs
• 8 tablespoons flour
• 1 tablespoon vanilla

Directions:
Preheat oven to 325°F. To make the brownie layer, mix the sugar, cocoa, eggs, and vanilla in a large bowl. Gradually add flour and salt. Then blend in the butter. Add chopped nuts if desired. Set batter aside.

In a separate mixing bowl (medium to large) combine the cream cheese, butter, sugar, eggs, flour, and vanilla. Mix until smooth.

Coat a 9x13 pan with butter and flour. Pour the cream cheese mixture in the bottom of the pan and then spread the brownie mixture on top. Unising a knife, swirl the top layer to create a marble effect. Bake at 325°F for 40-45 minutes. Cool on wire rack for at least 15 minutes.

These are best served warm.

First Full Semester of Graduate School!

I have made it through my first full semester of Graduate school...AND I have a 4.0! I would say that equals SUCCESS! Next semester may be a little more difficult as I venture in to writing my first three chapters and proposing before my commitee!

End of the semester is here and this is my final assignment for ETEC5213. We were asked to create a recorded message discussing the differences between downloadable audio files and podcasts. Audacity is a free recording software and very simple to use. There are also tutorials available for using many of the tools within the program. I simply recorded the message and then imported an mp3 music file to lay in behind my recording. I then exported the file into an mp3. When downloading Audacity you are prompted to also downloaded "LAME for Audacity" which allows you to change from the ".aud" to a ".mp3". The hardest part of this post was making sure the mp3 was available on my blog. Earlier int he semester we learned HTML coding which became very useful this week! A couple times, when i previewed my post the mp3 player was not present. FRUSTRATING!!!! But then I figured out that I was missing a forward slash and the file name was not capitalized! Simple things most of us would overlook! At least the problems were minor! While preparing this assignment I had an idea. Ag teachers are constantly training teams for contests. Creating recordings of oral reasons would be a great study tool for these students. Almost ALL students have an mp3 player and could learn to give reasons by simply listening to old sets. They could even take notes on the format and similarities and differences between the different files in order to create a format for them to follow. Also, if you added a visual component, you could recorded classes and create promotional videos for your FFA chapter! If you would like instructions on how I completed this assignment please leave a comment and I would be glad to share!

Instructional Website

School work is coming to a close. Recently for ETEc 5213 we were asked to create an instructional website and publish it to our UA Server. This website needed to have at least 3 instructional pages plus a homepage and an author page.

My website was a basic step by step approach to completing a promotional video for agriculture.

Dreaweaver is a great program for learning to build websites. It offers many troubleshooting tips as well as tutorials. The website I created was very basic and given more time and a little more experience could be altered to be very applicable in a classroom. the menu bar is created by using a Spry bar menu which was much easier than creating a "nice" menu by myself. It comes prepared to link to other pages and is esaily changed to other colors. The first time I used the menu the links did not work correctly but I deleted the menu and retried and the next one worked fine.

I would like to spend some time to create a photo album to add to the webpage for stick photos for students to access to use in their videos.

Shutterfly Christmas Cards

Oh Gosh....Its Christmas time! I still have so much to do. Decorate, FINISH CLASSES, Take Finals, and send out Christmas cards! Christmas cards are a great way to connect with family near and far. Its always better if those cards are personalized. This year, consider using Shutterfly.

Shutterfly in running a promotion to get 50 christmas cards free for promoting their site on your blog!

Simply visit shutterfly.com and fill out the form.

Until next time,
Have a great Thanksgiving and BLACK Friday!

Dreamweaver

Hello Blog World,
Class the past few weeks has been really busy and I am ready for the end of the semester. In Introduction to Education Media, we have been working with HTML and CSS for a while now, as I discussed in a previous post. Now, we have began working with Adobe Dreamweaver to create webpages. Compared to coding it all by hand, Dreamweaver is a God send! This software allows the creater to work from the design view. Being a visual/kinesthetic learner, I was able to pick this up much faster than before.
I had some trouble getting started but once I figured out a few tools, the rest was a breeze. Any trouble I had, I was able to watch tutorials and read step by step directions. This software is really easy to use and by having the basic knowledge of HTML coding it makes a lot of sense. I have said this numerous times and will probably say it again before the end of the semester...I AM NOT CREATIVE. I believe the point of a webpage is to catch a cutomer/person of interests eye and hold their attention. I am not creative enough to do that. I created a very basic webpage and really don't know what to do to "spice it up". Webpages are important and can be a great tool for managing extracurricular activities such as the ones in FFA. Maybe I will have really creative students that can help me out!

Until next time,
KMP