Our day started at 8:00am. The morning was very grey and foggy and although it would have been nice to stay curled up in bed, I was anticipating the events of the day. We had a good breakfast and then moved on to the first session where Lennie shared a beautiful reading. As we sat in a circle, each person used one word to describe their feelings as the day began.
At 9:00am we went to the classroom. Our workshop started with a mapping activity that involved evaluating the Fading Footprints webpages created by students at King Middle School. As a group, we looked at those pages and used chart paper to illustrate how we interpreted them.
The next session was the Mozilla workshop where we learned to create our species web pages. We were given a template and instructions and we started working on creating our individual species pages. Although I have worked with other programs to create webpages, I learned many new skills today.
We were then off to lunch at the SPCC cafeteria. There I had the best tuna melt ever and my favorite curly fries. After a scrumptous lunch, Raka, Tom and I walked on the beach and enjoyed the beautiful sceanary. The sky started to clear  and  the lighthouse in the distance was visible.  Although the breeze was chilly,  the  smell of the ocean was irresistable and so, we were encouraged to explore the marine organisms that inhabitated the shoreline. After  holding a few crabs, we headed back to the hospitality center to start the second half of the day.
This afternoon we had an expert David Sparks conduct the next session, "the kick off" and this was amazing. He has an incredible wealth of knowledge about animals and have had hundreds of animals live in his house from time to time.  Among the animals he showed us were the flying squirrel, skunk, chinchilla, domestic deer, owl and my best friend the boa. He left the boa for last and when he took her, out I was stricken with fear. After living in a country with so many poisionous snakes, from early childhood, I developed an incredible fear of them.
 His presentation was engaging and I learned so much more about the animal he introduced to us. Well that was that! It was the end of both a fascinating, fun and scarry experience. 
We moved on to the next session, it was art. I felt very intimidated, especially after looking around the room at the amazing pieces that were mounted on the walls. The art facilitator, Ellen, has a very calm reassuring way of letting you know that the assigned tasks were achievable. We were given pictures of our birds, taught how to incrase the size and asked to draw them. Once completed, we transferred them to the watercolor paper we would be painting on.
During our personal time I took some time to relax and  communicate with my family and then we had  another  good dinner at the center.
The last session for today taught us how to share images on the web. We used a free online tool powered by Google called Picassa. It allowed us to upload our pictures from our iphoto folders and load them onto the site where they could be made available for viewing by others on the web. We also started conducting research for our bird species.
Well this was a great first day and I enjoyed it immensely. I am looking forward to tommorow and the field trip to the beach.

I have used a web building software called Macromedia Dreamweaver. Netscape composer however, has been very easy to use and is very student friendly. This is definitely a tool I will take back to school with me and will use in my classroom. It can be used in our expeditions and I am sure I will find many other uses in my classroom.
One valuable asset that I will take away from this experience is that the clearer the instruction, the more able my students will be to work independently. The instructions we were given were thorough, clear and contained many visuals. That made it easier for me to work independently. Most if not all of my questions were answered by reviewing the handout. I have seen the importance of making your directions handouts very clear and easy to use.

Friday