Two significant events occurred in my class this week. First, I had a guest speaker via video-conference - all hail technology. Ms. Renee Firestone, Holocaust survivor and founding partner of the Museum of Tolerance Teaching Tolerance program, came into my classroom to discuss her personal experiences during the Holocaust. I had spent some time teaching my intervention students about the ideas of prejudice and intolerance and scapegoats and used her story to paint a picture of what it looked like in its most extreme form. It blended in with the Black History Month ideas of prejudice and equality that we're supposed to be teaching.

Later in the week, I received quite a gift. The U.S. National Parks Department in Thousand Oaks donated 11 laptop computers to my Digital Arts Club. True, they didn't all come with power cords (and I'm looking into solving that issue) but to have these computers for the students to create their own films using Movie Maker or Adobe Elements is pretty cool. I'm very grateful. So I'm spending some of the weekend installing Windows XP on them all (they are all Pentium 2 & 3 systems) and getting them ready for the club meeting on Wednesday. And if you have an old laptop sitting around that you'd like to donate... think of me!