The Weekend

This weekend ushered in a new era in the life of our family. My youngest son is about to celebrate his 9th birthday. He loves animals and we have been exploring the possibility of getting him his own pet for his birthday. For the past month we have been learning about ferrets. As a family we decided to get him a ferret for his birthday. This weekend was the big day. A pet store in Courtenay was waiting on a shipment of ferrets. We had our name on a list of people interested in obtaining one. My wife called the store on Saturday to see if they had come in yet. They had received 4 of them, but forgot to call us. Fortunately there was one left. A 6 week old male. We went to look at him and my son (actually the whole family) fell in love with him. He is named Christopher, after my son's friend who moved to South Africa.

So far, it seems to be a good investment. Our kids are always upstairs in their room holding him and playing with him. He loves to nip, so we are doing our best to train him not to bite because I don't think it will be that cute when he is older. We also gave him a bath for the first time. Not sure how much he liked it, but he didn't squirm too much. It's going to be interesting to see his personality develop. Check out his picture.

Welcome

Well, another summer has come and gone and it is time to get back into the swing of things and continue enriching our lives with education. The face of journalism is no longer constrained to the pages of published papers. Today, everyone has an opportunity to be a journalist. One of the ways you will be able to reach out to the world in this class is to create a blog for yourself. This will be an excellent way to have access to what you are writing from anywhere you have an internet access. Each class will be spent reading print and online news sources which includes blogs from other people. As we progress throughout the class, we will develop clear expectations for what you will be required to complete for evaluation purposes. Reading in class will be part of your mark, probably based on a log you keep and hand in periodically. Blogging will be a part of your mark. I will have access to reading your blogs online and will be able to provide you with comments on your writing. Other marks in Journalism will be based on specific writing projects you will be given that will culminate in a final project. The most important aspect of this class is that you become willing to write. Write about whatever you are interested in. We will work on developing specific skills in writing as we progress throughout this class. Your ability to incorporate these skills into your blogs and other writing will help me in my assessment of your progress. I am in the process of creating a bunch of links that you can access from anywhere that provide a number of sites that may be useful in finding interesting things to read. You can access this site at the following link http://del.icio.us/sgatejournalism If you come across a site that you think the rest of the class will find a great site for reading, send me the link and I will bookmark it for us. If you are a student in my journalism class, let me know you have read this post by leaving a quick comment behind.