Wildcat Drafting and Technology Integration

On the road again

2010-11-09T23:00:00.002-05:00

This fall the N.C.S.S.S.M.S.T. Conference is in Atlanta. So we're not going far. Since the conference is in our hometown, the Wheeler Gang is doing a few presentations. Linda Patterson and I will be presenting again on Teaching Engineering Classes in the High School. We've re-vamped it a little but basically it's the same presentation.
I'm venturing out solo this time and speaking on Creating Architectural Design Projects. After the last conference, I thought this would be a helpful topic. I imagine classes other than Drafting classes have units on architecture or home design and the teachers might like to have some tips on setting up projects in which the students can be successful at.
Once again, here's the Prezi for my prezentation:

Hope to see you at the conference, but if not just ping me. I'm out here in the Web 2.0 world somewhere.

If you are interested in the resource documents from the presentation, here's the link to a zip file on Google Docs.

If you've arrived here as a result of our presentation on Teaching Engineering Courses in the High School, here's a zip file of the resources on Google Docs.

Isn't Google Great?

2010-10-25T19:00:00.002-04:00

Sorry to not have written anything earlier this school year. It's been a challenging start. What with budgets, administrative challenges and class sizes, it's been rather difficult to find the time to update the blog. It's not that we haven't been doing anything interesting, it's just that time has been short.

Late last spring our principal received a big box from Google. Inside the box were 5 laptops and a letter stating that Wheeler High School had been chosen to participate in the STEM High School Laptop Grant program. Mr. Chiprany gave me the task of figuring how to chose the 4 students who were to receive these laptops. Talk about delegating! He passed that job off pretty quickly. Not to worry, Wildcat Drafting can handle it. But how do you choose 4 students out of a population of over 2,000?

After discussing this with several other teachers, we arrived at the decision that the students should be either senior or juniors, had taken several STEM classes, expressed an interest in pursuing STEM in either a career or post-secondary education and preferably not already own a laptop. We didn't want to make it a competition, so GPA's and essays were out of the questions. At about this same time, the school district's budget woes and teacher layoffs were the center of attention, so we decided to postpone making a decision about the laptops until school started back in the fall. We made our decision about who the recipients would be and then we had to find a time we could get them all together.

Google Laptop Recipients

Today was that day. We had asked the students to report to the media center under the pretense of having their photo made for a media project. As they came in, I had the four laptops on a table and I ask them to have a seat. They were looking at the new computers and making comments about them, but they were still a little confused as to why they were there. You should have seen their faces when I told them that the laptops were theirs to keep. I explained that Wheeler High School had been chosen, along with 599 other schools, to receive the laptop grant. We were to give the laptops to two male and two female students who demonstrated interest, ability and achievement in STEM related courses. They were so excited!

What about the students? They are all above average, but they don't have 4.999+ GPA's. Some are athletes, one is an Eagle Scout, one plans to become a doctor, another an engineer. One is interested in architecture and another in computer programming. Some are magnet students and some are regular ed. They are a good mix of bright, energetic students that make teaching a pleasure.

I must say a big "Thank you" to Google for providing the laptops, to Mr. Chiprany for giving me the opportunity to be involved with this project and Valerie Bryan, our Media Specialist for helping with giving out the laptops. It's been a great day! I mean how often is it that you get to give away 4 new laptops to 4 deserving students!

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

2010-05-03T22:46:00.011-04:00

I'm departing from writing about Drafting and Technology related topics for this time. I'm just too excited about this past weekend to not write about it somewhere and since this is my blog, I figure I can write what I want.

My family has been a part of a community theater group called Chr istia n Family Theater for years. This past weekend the kids put on 4 showings that were just amazing! I really am proud of all the young actors and actresses but especially my own children. My son Jon nails the portrayal of Joseph, my daughter Jennifer is the Awesome Narrator, Joel does a splendid rendition of the calypso-singing Judah, daughter Janna is the handsome brother Issachar and then the younger daughters Julie and Janelle are in the children's choir.

If you've never seen the musical by Andrew Llyod Webber or the movie starring Donnie Osmond, here is the description:

The Biblical saga of Joseph and his coat of many colors comes to vibrant life in this delightful musical parable. Joseph, his father's favorite son, is a boy blessed with prophetic dreams. When he is sold into slavery by his jealous brothers and taken to Egypt, Joseph endures a series of adventures in which his spirit and humanity are continually challenged. He is purchased by Potiphar where thwarting advances from Potiphar's wife lands him in jail. When news of Joseph's gift to interpret dreams reaches the Pharaoh (wryly and riotously depicted as Elvis), Joseph is well on his way to becoming second in command. Eventually his brothers, having suffered greatly, unknowingly find themselves groveling at the feet of the brother they betrayed but no longer recognize. After testing their integrity, Joseph reveals himself leading to a heartfelt reconciliation of the sons of Israel. Set to an engaging cornucopia of musical styles, from country-western and calypso to bubble-gum pop and rock 'n' roll, this Old Testament tale emerges both timely and timeless.

You have TWO MORE CHANCES to see a great production of "Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat". The remaining two performances are a dinner theater with the food being catered by Maggiano's Little Italy in Buckhead. Awesome food and a great show for only $20.

This show ran last weekend and received great reviews from ALL who have seen it. Some that came more than once that did not have anyone IN the show. They just wanted to see it again because it was so good.

Here are just a FEW of the many comments that have been made:

You HAVE to see this play.it was WONDERFUL, AMAZING and so FUNNY. These kids were incredible! I was so impressed with the level of performance. My 8 yo daughter was totally mesmerized by the Narrator's performance. That show got her thinking about what SHE could do if she tried. What a positive impact. ~Ena H. - FISH Moms Group ~
Great job to Christian Family Theatre...and their cast and crew. They did an AMAZING and I do mean AMAZING job with Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat! I sat there with my chin dropped. Would LOVE to have this show in Cedartown. If you have not seen them, you missed out BIG!!!! Way to go!! ~Pastor J.B. and Mrs. Kellie - New Hope Fellowship Church ~
WOWEEE!!! I loved it you guys!! Great job! ~Arielle S.~
Thoroughly enjoyed seeing the performance of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" last weekend. What a fantastic production! ~Kym & Shane D. ~

So if you live in the Metro Atlanta area and want to give a great gift for Mother's Day!! Come and see this musical!

Performance Location: Marietta Church of God, 1083 Allgood Road, Marietta, GA 30062

Call NOW to reserve tickets - 404-934-9937. We need to give a COUNT to Maggiano's by Thursday!

Email: tickets@chr ist ianfamilytheatre.org

N.C.S.S.S.M.S.T. Conference

2010-03-08T16:49:00.007-05:00

We did it!!

The Wheeler Team blew them away!! Seven of us from The Center for Advanced Studies at Wheeler High School gave presentations at the National Consortium for Specialized Secondary Schools of Math, Science and Technology conference. Mrs. Linda Patterson and I spoke about Teaching Engineering Courses in the High School Classroom. Our presentation started with the typical introductions and then some statistics about the great need for engineers. Linda prepared a graph indicating the projected needs and ranking of various engineering fields.
Next, came a description about our CTAE engineering pathways here at Wheeler. Computer Programming, Architectural drawing, Engineering drawing (I love these two), Electronics and Engineering. Linda then talked about our Science to Engineering classes - Aerospace, DNA/Genetics, Chemical Engineering and Materials, and Advanced Physics/Robotics.

Here at Wheeler, we've structured our CTAE Engineering pathway so that if a student is unsure about which field they would like to study they can take the Foundations of Engineering class and get an introduction to several engineering fields. They can then enter one of the other pathways or remain in the Engineering pathway. During their senior year after completing 3 pathway courses they can take the Research, Development and Project Management course. This course is designed to bring together students from all four CTAE pathways. They work in teams to design and develop a product. Some of our past projects have been a high-speed RC car, an electric powered go-cart, and a human-powered vehicle.

Presenting at the conference was a great experience for me personally, but greater than that was having the opportunity to demonstrate how we can integrate Career Tech courses into a Magnet student's education. Our presentation room was almost full and there were several questions about how we operate. Several people stayed after or met up with us later to further discuss the teaching of engineering in the high school.

Oh, and Mr. Duck was there to lend support!

Prezi at N.C.S.S.S.M.S.T. Conference

2010-03-02T22:40:00.009-05:00

My Goodness! Hasn't February been an unusual month? Two weeks ago we had 3" of snow here in Georgia, last weekend it was 60 degrees and today it snowed again. But this time I couldn't get out and enjoy it. I've been a busy little technologist this week.

Thursday and Friday I will be co-presenting with the wonderful Mrs. Patterson, our Chemical Engineering & Materials teacher at the National Consortium for Specialized Secondary Schools of Mathematics, Science & Technology (N.C.S.S.S.M.S.T.) conference in Nashville. We'll be discussing Teaching Engineering Courses in the High School. If the truth be told, she'll be discussing engineering. I'm just a lowly drafting teacher who understands a lot about technology and knows how to juggle multiple classes at the same time. We do have a great story to tell about our programs at Wheeler High School. Take a look at this flow chart of classes we offer.

That's a pretty diverse bunch of classes. And don't think for a minute that any of them are easy "A" courses. All of the teachers were professionals in their fields before entering teaching and they are all just as passionate about their courses as I am. You want to talk about raising the bar higher? If we did, the students would need to pole vault into class.

So about the conference. If you've ever been to one you will understand what I'm talking about. Two and a half days of "Death by Power Point." Handouts by the hundreds. Severe information overload by the time its over. This time, I decided to do something about it. Our presentation only has one slide. That's right, just one. And I'm not talking about a ten minute talk here. It's a full blown "probably got more info than we can cover in our 40 minutes" presentation.

You see, I've read about this Prezi thing from my Twitter PLN and thought I would check it out. Prezi is a new presentation format that allows you to be very creative in your presentations. You can embed photos, video, audio, images, PDF's and all kinds of stuff. If you could find a way to upload a student, then they could probably be in your prezi! Maybe, I'll have to check on that one. But it's a cool way to present. Easy to create and you don't have to worry about including the source files in your PPT folder when you zip it up. That's crazy, what was MS thinking about when they created PPT.

Check out our Prezi here. Watch for updates, I'll be posting and tweeting from the conference.

Wheeler High School Engineering Program on Prezi

February's Activities

2010-02-15T19:48:00.007-05:00

What a month February has been! And we're only half way through it.

School was canceled early on Friday due to the approaching snow storm. While some of you may not think 3" of snow is a big deal, here in Georgia it will shut everything down. And rightly so. We only get snow once in a blue moon, so we have to celebrate it. Here's what it looked like as I was leaving school on Friday afternoon.

Saturday was beautiful! I was up super early in order to take my wife to work and packed my cameras for a morning of snow photography.

But enough of this, I want to tell you about our latest class project we tried. Wheeler High School has the best boys varsity basketball team in the state. Quite possibly in the nation. They are that good. So for the project, I wanted to integrate something the students might be interested in with some GIS research and analysis. I prepared a shared Google Docs spreadsheet with the teams that we play against this season. I put in headers for the data I wanted the students to collect. They were to pick a school and find the address for that school. Then using ESRI's Make a Map they were to locate the school and get the available census data for the area around the school. The students were to put this info back into the shared spreadsheet.

After the spreadsheet was completed, the students downloaded a copy as an Excel spreadsheet and had to perform analysis and graphing of the data of their choice. I wanted them to see what were the similarities and differences between the teams.

All in all, the assignment went pretty well. Some students were interested in it, some wanted to act juvenile and randomly change data in the spreadsheet. In retrospect, I should have used a Form instead of a shared spreadsheet to gather the data. Next time, I'll know better.

Here are a few of the student's blog postings about the exercise.

Check them out and leave a comment. Now we on to other mundane drafting related things that satisfy the number crunchers.

How to Shoot the Moon (and other nocturnal images)

2010-01-17T20:08:00.009-05:00

It seems that every year I’m explaining how to get started in lunar photography. I finally decided to write it all down so I can refer folks to it instead of trying to remember all the details from memory.
To begin with, you must understand that most photographs of the moon have been processed in some form. The moon is a really small, bright object in the midst of a really dark background. It doesn’t lend itself to photography very well. You’ve got to apply a few tricks and take lots of images in order to get a keeper. That being said, let’s start with equipment.
Obviously, you’ll need a camera. A DSLR is best. I’ve tried to get lunar images with point and shoot cameras and as of yet, I’ve not been able to a decent one. Next, you’ll need a tripod. The camera has to be very still in order to get a clear image. If your camera has a mirror lock-up function, then find out how to activate it. It’s located in the custom functions of the menu on my Canon. With mirror lock-up turned on, the first time you press the shutter button the mirror folds up. The second press activates the shutter and takes the photograph. A remote or cable release helps. This allows you to activate the shutter without touching the camera. If you don’t have on, then use the self-timer. We want to be able to take the photograph without having the camera shake. Your lens choice will be determined by what kind of image you want. The longer telephoto lens will give more detail of the moon. A wider angle lens will give more detail of the surrounding landscape.
When to take the photo? Well, duh! At night of course. Most of the time anyways. Sometimes you’ll be able to get lunar images at dawn and dusk. Really I was referring to the time of year. Here in the southeastern United States fall and winter is the best time. The air is clearer. Late spring has a lot of pollen in the air and summer has a persistent haze. Clear nights are best but not always. I have taken some on cloudy nights and just waited for a break in the clouds. Here’s a link to the StarDate Online Moon Phase Calculator http://w ww.stardate.org/nightsky/moon/ You can use this to see what phase of the moon falls on what date. I use the U.S. Naval Observatory website http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/RS_OneDay.php to get moonrise and moon set times. Of course, getting clear weather on a night you have time to photograph the moon in the phase you want is a gamble. You just have to be flexible. Here’s a link to Keith Cooley’s Moon Photography web page that explains all the details of moon photography http://home.hiwaay.net/~krcool/Astro/moon/howtophoto/index.htm . Take a look at his page for a full explanation. He has a chart of exposure setting to use as a guide. I created a word document of this information, printed it and placed it in my camera bag.

So how do you get that great image in post-processing? The key to a great print is starting with a clear, crisp image taken with the largest zoom lens you have available. This will give you the most detail. Then you re-size the moon to fit your final image. Here are a couple of examples.
In the Battleship photos, I took photos of the moon with a 200 mm lens and whatever size lens I needed to get the ship images. In the ship images, the moon was hazy and washed out. So, I re-sized the zoomed moon image and placed it over the washed out moon. Then I cleaned up some of the glare and haze.

I used the same process with the images of the moon over my house. The first image is the original image taken with a wide angle lens to expose the moon and the landscape.

Next is the telephoto image of the moon alone.

Finally, after editing I placed the good moon over the fuzzy moon and here's the result. Go to my Flickr page to see all the exposure details for these images.

I hope this gives you some ideas and incentive to stay out late some night and howl at the Moon! Post a comment or send me an email showing your work. And for all my Edtech 365 photo buddies, keep at it! Don't give up, it's only January.

End of the Semester Joys!

2009-12-17T14:01:00.009-05:00

We made it! Fall semester is over. Projects and presentations are done.

I would like to recap some of the highlights from the semester. Brentley has been working diligently on our campus mapping project. His first project was the 3-D map in which we just used shapes to create the buildings. The last half of the semester he has been working on the master CAD file with the intent to place 3-D buildings on Google Earth. We got close, but not quite there yet. Our computers just don't have the capabilities to process these huge files. Hopefully next semester we can break it up into pieces and finish it up. Here's an image of what he has accomplished. In such a small image it's hard to see the building details, but they are there. Notice the roof-top images captured from Google EarthThe Architecture 1 class finished their Project Jekyll models and presentations. My friend Steve Lindstrom, the owner of K & B Studios, was kind enough to come and watch the presentations. Steve is a great guy to give of his time to help mentor my students. If you need a new kitchen or bath, give him a call.
I know it's a lot of links, but here are the group's blogs that they kept going through the project. You can read about their work and their reflection on the course. When I read them, "I laughed, I cried. It moved me Bob!"

Wildcat Drafting website with student presentations
Ideal Design
KALM Housing
Housing Design
Valkova Architecture

The last couple of days was spent just wrapping up some loose ends. One activity was to create a mind-map of the design process. One group's was so creative I just had to show it to you:

All that's left to do now is finish grading the exams, eat some cookies and pack up the lab for the holidays. I plan to spend a couple of weeks with the family catching up on all the things at home that get put on the back burner. I hope that you have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I'll see you in January.

The New YAH Map

2009-12-10T11:48:00.006-05:00

It's almost the end of the semester and we've finished up another mapping project. It started out as a GIS project involving the student capacity of each classroom. But one of the many committees that seem to inhabit schools decided that we needed maps of the school placed in the hallways.
You see, Wheeler High has 9 major buildings, two of which are 2 story and one is 3 stories. Confusing!

The GIS project became a CAD mapping project. We took the master CAD file of the school which is a file that has been copy & pasted, added to and altered several times. It took a lot of cleaning up to get it to a usable file. Then using a Google Earth image as a background we tweaked the placement of the buildings, drives and sidewalks. The next problem was where to place the 2nd and third floors. I mean, where could we place them that made sense? Especially when one of the buildings is surrounded by other buildings.

The original plan was to color code the critical areas such as administration, offices, restrooms and handicap access area. But the map just looked plain. I sent a copy to my friend Brian who teaches Graphic Arts at Hillgrove High to get his opinion. Brian made some very good recommendations about placing the alternate building levels. He also talked me into color coding the buildings. Great. Color selections, my favorite thing. I pulled out the color wheel to see the colors and then did a little internet research. I found a cool NASA site for testing color selections for maps. My son, who is taking GIS classes at Kennesaw State University, showed me a site called Color Brewer for testing various colors to use in mapping. So now I had some professional help!

We applied the colors and labels, created a legend and ran a test copy. Looks good! But we had to tweak the colors a little to get the right look when it printed. Then we had to create double mirror images for the maps that would hang on the East walls. The original map faces West.

The maps are done and everybody thinks they look great. The principal, Mr. Chiprany, took one to a meeting with the architect and the construction manager for our next building project. Guess what? They wanted a copy also. So I guess Wildcat Drafting is in the mapping business now.

And just to show our appreciation to Mr. Chiprany for his support, we made a smaller map that he could keep on his Blackberry.

Jekyll Island (cont.)

2009-11-19T16:43:00.010-05:00

Our Jekyll Island project has been underway for about three weeks now. The student groups have been under a lot of pressure to get the work done and they've all done pretty well. From my perspective, the biggest difficulty has been in communication. They've handled learning about buildings, materials and CAD procedures with a good attitude.

If you are coming to this blog from Twitter or an email contact, please click on one of the student groups listed on the right and make a comment on their blog. We want to see how far the tweets reach!

Next week is Thanksgiving break and I'm giving an extra credit assignment to create their design in Project Dragonfly. They'll be able to add furnishings to the floor plan and see how their designs look in 3-D. I'll just have to see how that goes.

Please check their blogs, make a comment and enjoy the holidays. See ya in a week.

JR

Jeykll Island Development Project

2009-10-30T12:57:00.009-04:00

Wildcat Drafting is developing Jekyll Island!! Not really, but it's the basis for my Architecture and Civil Engineering Drawing class. The architecture students are working in groups of 4 to design state park rental cabins. There are several design specifications they have to meet. I decided to base this project on the real re-development proposals seen here. Although we're not doing it for real, we are using real guidelines to work from.

One of the new items for this year is that the group has to blog about their designs. Each group has created a blog and will post their designs and a weekly description of their work. Here are the groups: KALM Housing, Housing Enterprise, CMZ Designs and Valkova Architecture.

We started last Monday with a quick promo video I put together. It's not really what I wanted, but I ran out of time in preparing it. I wanted to draw the students into the project, give them a feel for the Island.

(11/05) I was able to get the promo video completed. Here's the new and improved version. Doesn't it make you want to design some cabins?

The students start out brainstorming and sketching possible designs. After a few revisions, they will develop the floor plans in AutoCAD Architecture. In order to involve the entire group in the designs, they will migrate the floor plans to regular AutoCAD and finish the rest of the project there. Then at the end of the semester they will present their design, along with a scale model, to a panel of professionals. It's a good learning project that involves lots of different skills.

I'll be sure to update as the semester progresses.

Student Sample GIS Project

2009-10-19T21:45:00.005-04:00

I've been playing with a few GIS tools to see what we might could do in the Wildcat Drafting lab. This project involved taking student data and mapping their location. In itself, this could be easily done in Google Maps on a small scale. But I wanted to test something a little bigger.

I started by setting up a Google Doc's survey where students could enter their street address, class standing (Freshman, Soph., Jr. or Sr.) and whether they were a magnet student or not. I ask a few teachers in addition to myself to have their classes fill out the survey. I had hoped for around a hundred respondents. I got 27. Of those, I had to delete 14 due to faulty data. I mean, come on, nobody at WHS lives on Peachtree Road or has a zip code of 12345.

So, I had to work with the 13 lines of info that I had. I used GPS Visualizer to convert the street addresses to latitude/longitude. This site is pretty cool in that I could also create a Google Map or a Google Earth KMZ file for my data. But I wanted more than that. After the conversion, I opened the CSV file in MS Excel and saved it as a dBase database file. Then I imported it into ESRI's ArcMap and included a Cobb County map. I selected different colors for magnet and regular ed students and different shapes for class standing. Then I added some pretty stuff for the print-out and there it is. A bogus map of student distribution.

It's just a small way that we could use GIS as a planning tool. I could just as easily added public information such as home values, unemployment rate, median income or any number of census data items. Or even set up distances from WHS. Or calculated student density. Or .... you get the idea. The possibilities for GIS is almost unlimited.

Another "cool" tool at work in Wildcat Drafting.

iMapFlickr

2009-10-11T22:13:00.009-04:00

I saw this app that takes geo-tagged images from your Flickr page and creates a Google Map of the images. Thought I would give it a try and see what happens. It did take a couple of tries to get the map size right so that it would fit within the borders of my blog.
I could see students using this to write about their vacation trip or maybe the journey of a book's character. Let me know what you think.

10/14/09 8:50 am
I just went online to check a blog posting and saw that the map wouldn't load. It wouldn't load for me on the iMapflickr site either. Not sure what the problem is. Here's a direct link to the map that you could try. This could be a Flickr issue or a Google map problem or maybe an iMapflickr hiccup. Not sure, but it was great while it lasted.

ESRI's Make a Map

2009-10-09T20:03:00.004-04:00

I'm looking forward to maybe, just maybe, teaching an Introduction to GIS course at Wheeler High School. Lots of things will have to fall into place before this happens. But one can dream, right? I am already including small bits of GIS into my drafting classes now. The 3-D Campus map was one project. We've done some student mapping projects in Google Maps and Google Earth.

In doing some research, I came across this app from ESRI. It's a beta project of theirs in which you can make your own map from their database of selected information. It's limited right now, but it will give you an idea of the possibilities. I centered the map at Wheeler High. It is interactive, so go ahead and zoom, pan and change the demographic.

Pretty cool, huh?

Topo Map Video

2009-10-06T18:51:00.010-04:00

Here's another little project I've been working on. (Scroll down to see the video)

Our Boy Scout troop is making another trip to Philmont Scout Ranch next summer. Philmont is an amazing adventure for any teenager to experience. You spend 12 days backpacking through the Sangre de Cristo mountains of New Mexico. You live in a crew of 12 people. You cook together, eat together, hike together, etc., etc. It's as close to a true wilderness experience most of the kids will ever experience. I've been truly blessed to have been able to visit Philmont as a 16 year old scout and to share it with three of my sons. 2010 will be son #4's time.

Part of the preparation is to do several shakedown hikes. During these hikes, we teach the scouts the proper way to live in the wilderness. But, the shakedowns are more than that. We emphasize physical training and team building in addition to wilderness skills.

In preparing our first shakedown hike, I put together a trail map using National Geographic's Topo software. This event will take place at the Atlanta Area Council's Woodruff Scout Reservation in Blairsville, Ga. I used a GPS and the camp's trail maps to plot the trails in my software. I went back into my Topo file and changed the color of the route we will take and added the campsite icons. I'll print these maps for the crew to use during the hike for navigation training.

The Topo software has the ability to do a 3-D flyover of your trail. I ran it a few times to get what I felt was the right look. I had to exaggerate the terrain a little to show off the little mountains we have here in Georgia. Once I got the flyover working right, I launched CamStudio screen recording software and set it to record the Topo flyover window. Then I brought the CamStudio video file into MS Windows Movimaker to edit the video. I just had to cut the beginning and the end of the flyover to start and finish at the right points. I then added an audio track from Freeplay Music, a title slide and some credits. Rendered the file and uploaded it to the website.

Pretty nifty little meshing of technologies to prepare the Scouts for their first training weekend. So you see, drafting and technology do come together. Even on the weekends!

Tabasco is Delicious!

2009-10-04T22:38:00.003-04:00

It should be obvious to you by now that Tabasco brand pepper sauce should be added to any food source. Chili, stew, greens, chocolate, brownies, ice cream ... you name it, and Tabasco goes with it.

Besides spending a little time this weekend eating, I organized my Delicious bookmarks. I know, what an exciting way to spend the weekend. But it was a chore that needed to be done. When I uploaded all my bookmarks from both home and work, I had close to 700 bookmarks!!!! That even surprised me.

In case you don't know what Delicious is, here's the description straight from their website:

What is Delicious?

Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.

Things you can do with Delicious

Bookmark any site on the Internet, and get to it from anywhere

Instead of having different bookmarks on every computer, Delicious makes it easy to have a single set of bookmarks kept in sync between all of your computers. Even if you're not on a computer you own, you can still get to your bookmarks on the Delicious website.

Share your bookmarks, and get bookmarks in return

If your friends use Delicious, you can send them interesting bookmarks that they can check out the next time they log in. Of course, they can do the same for you. As you explore the site and find interesting users, you can use our Subscriptions and Network features to keep track of the Delicious tags and users you find most interesting.

Discover the most useful and interesting bookmarks on the web

See what's hot with Delicious users by checking out our popular tags. By looking at popular bookmarks for a tag, you'll be able to discover the most interesting bookmarks on the topics you're most interested in. Browse bookmarks on just about anything from the best programming tips to the most popular travel sites, all in an easy to read format.

Below is a cloud of the top 100 bookmark tags that I have. As you can well imagine most of them have to do with education. But there's something from every slice of my life. Say, I think I remember there being a slice of pie left in the fridge. Where's that bottle of sauce....

GIS, CAD and the 3-D Map

2009-09-30T12:44:00.015-04:00

Part of the Geospatial conference I attended during the summer was to implement some aspect of GIS into my classes. I've several ideas I want to try, but the one I could start on right away was to create new maps of the Wheeler campus. There are 12 major buildings, 8 portables and several small outbuildings. We needed a campus map!

I decided to work with my Civil Engineering Drawing students to create this project. This is a small class,but they're self-motivated and enjoy trying these new projects. To start out, we needed a base map. I used ArcView to get a base map from the available datasets. Then I brought the base map into AutoCAD. It worked, but not too well. I obviously need more practice with ArcMap.

I remembered that with our new release of Autodesk Civil 3D has the ability to capture terrain data from Google Earth. So, I brought the Google Earth data into Civil 3D. This worked pretty well, except the contour lines did not accurately describe what is actually here. I mean, the last time I checked there wasn't a ten foot slope across the football field. I spent a little time trying to correct the contours and the surface model but when I rotated the map to look at it from an isometric perspective, the lower elevations in the rear of the school would be hidden by the buildings in the front. So, I made a command decision to keep the terrain flat. Like Kansas.

Step 1 with the students. Capture a Google Earth image of the campus as a JPEG and bring the graphic into AutoCAD. Scale it to real-world size and OMG!, pixelation like you've never seen!

Back up one step. We went to the Cobb C ounty GIS site and exported an image of the campus and brought that into AutoCAD. Scaled it to real-world size and OMG!, this will work! The image was still crisp enough to trace the outlines we needed. Plus, the image showed the property lines. The Cobb County GIS website is great. As a taxpayer, I'm glad that my money has been well spent for a change.

Step 2. Tracing outlines. We made two copies of the base image. One student started tracing asphalt and concrete, while the other student started tracing buildings.

Step 3. Merge the two CAD files. Easy enough.

Step 4. 2-D and 3-D. Felipe started working on the 2-D map. He added fills, color and text to the map. He then created a paper space layout and added the legend and title information. From AutoCAD he plotted it as a PDF file for the final product. Brentley worked on the 3-D map. He extruded the buildings and islands, added colors and got the isometric view situated. It took several trials to get our colors right. We talked about primary, secondary and all those other color combinations that the Art teachers lament over. Since most of us here at Wildcat Drafting are not "artsy", we went to the Internet for a solution. We used a color combination from Colourlovers to start with. Our problem was what looked good in basic Autocad, didn't look good when we rendered the image. What looked good as a rendered image, didn't print well. So we had to make several samplings to get a color combination that worked in all three cases. After the colors were decided, Brentley set up the scale and orientation for the image and then rendered it as a JPEG. A few trials and we decided that creating the numbering and legend would be easiest in MS Word. Then, we used CutePDF to output the final product.

Step 5. Web conversion. We converted both images to a high res JPEG that our web-masters can use. I'm somewhat limited as to graphics programs here in the classroom, so we had to perform a screen capture on the 3-D map and paste it into MS Paint (ugh!) in order to make a JPEG out of it.

We had good intentions to use a transit and measure the building heights, but this has been the wettest September ever. So, we just had to make a few estimates on building heights.

There you have it, the creation of our new campus maps. Lots of different technologies blended together into a worthwhile, real-world learning project. I got to facilitate the learning, the students got to learn while producing work and the school got new maps. What more could you ask for?

JR

What a nice surprise!

2009-09-17T08:59:00.003-04:00

The first 6 weeks grading period ends tomorrow (9/18). I have to tell you, this has been one hectic school year. With my grad school classes and the GIS conference, the summer was way too short. There's new initiatives, new programs, new testing, new evaluations.... If you're an educator, then you know what I mean.

The classes here at Wheeler High are going well. I've 47 new Intro students and 17 returning students spread throughout the day. The Architecture I drawings are beginning and they will start their design project in about three weeks. The two Civil Engineering drawing students are working on new maps for the campus here. Once these are finalized I plan to write a post describing what they did.

The surprise was coming in this morning and finding an email telling me that my blog had been included in the Top 100 Drafting Blogs. Check out the listing. There are some blogs there that I'm familiar with, but there are several that are new to me.

GIS Day 5

2009-07-25T09:49:00.006-04:00

What a week! I'm sure you know the feeling. You know, you've been at a conference for a few days and the information is coming at you so fast you just can't take it all in. I need some time to ingest all this new stuff. It's been a great week. Chris, Dwight, Carol and the others at Gainesville State College and been great. The workshop was very well organized and they really are excited about sharing this information with the educational community.

The morning of Day 5 we started working on a Hurricane Katrina exercise. We took storm data from Unisys and downloaded it into Excel. There we could graph the wind speed vs pressure of the hurricane. After getting it into the format we could work with, we brought the data into ArcMap and created the map that shows the storms path, intensity, and population density of both cities and counties.

After this we worked on creating a 2-D and 3-D map of the campus. They had streamlined the process for us by providing us with the data files ready to use. If we had to do this from scratch, we would have to create the shapes of the buildings from a 2-D aerial image. Not a big deal really, but time consuming. We used the ArcMap software to create a 3-D landform from the contour lines, added the buildings, lakes, roads, etc. Gave everything an elevation and a height. Then set the colors to make it all look pretty.

The workshop has been a great learning experience for me personally. I've always enjoyed maps and graphics and data. Now I've got some new toys to play with!!! What little time there is left before school starts back, I plan to implement some of these GIS tools into the Wildcat Drafting classes. With only 1 week until pre-planning starts, I don't have much time.

JR

GIS Day 4

2009-07-25T09:18:00.006-04:00

The GeoSpatial workshop hasn't been all work. I've been able to squeeze in a little photography at times. Here's a sunrise panorama taken one morning.

Day 4 was pretty intense content wise. The morning was spent learning how to use GIS tools for hazard mapping, humanities and social science research. One of the exercises involved using a free set of tools to predict the spread of a chemical release. Based on certain climate conditions, size and location of the container and the type of chemical, we could project the plume and threat zones graphically.

In this example we had a tanker truck carrying chlorine that experienced a rupture in the tank. The accident was placed at the intersection of I-20 and I-75. Although the graphics in this screen capture is not too clear, the Red zone (certain death) was almost two miles long.

The afternoon was learning about the principles of remote sensing. In other words, how do satellites take the images and how do we interpret them. The most basic description I can give here is that it's all based on color and reflectivity. Different substances reflect light and heat differently. By adjusting the color rendition of the computer screen, we can change the view of the satellite image and then interpret the data. Pretty cool stuff, but way over most of our heads!

Here's a link to GLOVIS. It's the USGS Global Visualization Viewer. Here you can select different satellites and almost any location on the earth to see a low resolution image of that area. This would be a great activity for any earth science class. By choosing the different satellites you can see to what extent and size of image they create.

And to end the day, here's the sunset -

GIS Day 3

2009-07-24T10:52:00.006-04:00

Here's a photo of the Cool Beans Coffee Shop. I stopped in every morning for an extra large house blend and a muffin. Great coffee and great folks. Remember, friends don't let friends drink Starbucks! They're located at N34.229126° W83.867925°.

The morning of day 3 was spent learning how Global Positioning Satellites and receivers work. After the classroom session, we went outside and took a series of data points around the campus. We used a couple of different types of Garmin GPS units to collect the data with. The afternoon was spent transfering the data points into both ArcMap and Google Earth. We used a free program called DNR Garmin to download the data from the GPS unit. While in DNR Garmin, we could edit description fields and determine which format to export the data to. One option is to export it to a KML file which will load directly into Google Earth.

GIS Day 2

2009-07-22T09:00:00.005-04:00

Day 2 of the Geospatial Workshop was great. We concentrated mainly on using the ArcMap software and created more maps for our hurricane search and rescue scenario.

We set up the basic terrain map in ArcMap. Then we captured a screenshot from Google Earth in order to have greater resolution to see details. Then we georeferenced the Google Earth image on top of the ArcMap in order to locate the light poles and other possible obstructions.

In Arcmap, we set a height for the various obstructions and ArcMap then calculated the safe helicopter landing zone.

Here's a good video introduction to GIS from Penn State.

End of Summer Fun

2009-07-21T14:47:00.009-04:00

Classes are over for the summer at UWGA. But there's not time to relax yet. I'm attending a workshop on Geospatial Technologies at Gainesville State College.

Day one was an introduction to GIS and the mission of the GeoTech Center. ESRI's ArcGIS is the software that we will be using mostly during this week. Here's a link to their Education Community page. Lot's of ideas for classroom projects.

We started learning to use ArcMap software. The first project was a map showing flooded areas due to storm surge.

The workshop is great. I'm learning cool tools that goes way beyond Google Earth!!

It just so happened that I had to make a presentation in one of my UWGA classes this afternoon. Dr. Bray was very gracious in working with me to allow me to present about video conferencing in the classroom by making a Skype call into the class. I was able to access the internet by wi-fi at Gainesville State College, make a Skype video call to Dr. Bray at UWGA, and present a power-point slide show to the class. As you who work in education know, there are several obstacles to overcome in network security at schools in order to make Web 2.0 tools work. I was amazed! We actually pulled it off with just a little difficulty. Here's a link to my project and the backup video I prepared.

But after the day is finished, I'm on the water paddling.

Google Earth Re-visited

2009-06-12T13:44:00.002-04:00

I told you had something I was working on! I just had to finish up the project before writing about it.

If you haven't seen the new Google Earth ver. 5, you need to hurry up and download it. It is way cool! You can see Mars, you can go under the ocean and you can link back to the Google Maps Street Scene. I've spent way too many hours following Oceanographic expeditions by turning on that layer.

Well, my newest project is for both my UWGA class and for my students at Wheeler High School. It's a virtual tour of a few historical civil engineering projects. My goal is to introduce Google Earth to the students as something other than a flight simulator game that gets past the firewall.

The KMZ file, project instructions and student worksheets are posted here. The tour starts at Wheeler High School, of course, and goes to the projects that I picked out. At each project there is a description of the project and a photograph. Two of the projects even have 3-D buildings to look at. Give it a try if you have a few minutes. It really is not too difficult to create a tour of your own. The Google Earth help files explain the process step by step. No matter what your curriculum area, you can use Google Earth in some way to expand your students thinking.

JR

Summer Update

2009-06-10T22:51:00.003-04:00

Well, for the 2 of you who follow my blog, I apologize for not keeping up with it. Spring semester was pretty hectic. The workload at Wheeler was tremendous. All three class periods were mixed classes so I had a total of 10 courses going. Never again!

Classes at West Georgia were do-able. The photography class was great. I really stretched myself to learn new things beyond what Dr. McKenzie required. You can see my work at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tabasco_jack if you are interested. There's a lot more there than just the classwork.

May was really busy. One son graduated from high school and another son was married. Then the girls and I took a few days to go camping.

Don't worry, I've got another technology oriented posting in the works so stay tuned. Tell your friends and neighbors. It's kinda embarrassing to blog and not have any readers!

JR