Cathy Healy

NG Traveler: Fireworks Tonight? Why Not?

July 13, 2010 by Cathy Healy // Leave a Comment

Mark your bucket list for next year. Contributing blogger Cathy Healy watched DC’s fireworks from the roof of her condo building. She was feeling smug until she discovered that a friend in Orlando won the prize for Best of Show.

Fourth of July occurs every night in this fantasyland where fireworks light up Cinderella’s castle and the geodesic dome at Epcot Center. So what’s special about the real 4th in Orlando? It’s bigger, better, and sooner. Orlandoans erupt with cheers for fireworks on July 3 with the Red, White and Boom show, a few miles up I-4 in Altamonte Springs, says Mari Lynch. The next night, some residents, like Mari’s husband, Michael, an Orlando native, and their seventh-grade twins, John and Liam, join visiting friends to make a Disney night of it on the Fourth.

That’s when the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, and Movie Studios combine forces to shower your senses with 35 minutes of fireworks, smoke, fiery torches, lasers and music, starting at 9 p.m. and ending at 10:16 pm. These aren’t your usual fabulous displays, these are multimedia, pyrotechnic Disney stories, with patriotic extras.

Let’s pause for truth in reporting: “Why would anyone come to Orlando in July?” asks Mari. “It’s 95 and humid!”

Answer: To cool off from Washington, D.C., where thermometer stayed stuck at 103 for days. Full Story

The story only you can tell: Bringing your photos to life

July 10, 2010 by Cathy Healy // 1 Comment

My associate, Mari Lynch, and I have been working on a blurb that describes my upcoming presentation to staff at the Washakie Museum and Cultural Center on Sept. 7, 2010. We think we’ve captured the essence. I am particularly fond of Mari’s title.

The story only you can tell

Bringing your photos to life

Stuffed in boxes. Stored in the basement. Stacked in scrapbooks. Where are your family photos? What story do they capture that only you can tell?

On September 7, 2010, Cathy Healy will show you how to bring your photos to life, including using the techniques of Digital Storytelling. Telling a story “digitally” means creating a three to five-minute video. As in any historical documentary, you start with a story. Once you record it, you illustrate your words with photos, letters and home movies, then, finally, complete your mood with music.

Bringing storytelling to the computer arena means you can more easily share and distribute your stories. Digital stories can be watched on your television set with DVDs; they can be stored online on family genealogy sites, or added as links in books that soon will be accessible on e-book. Book lovers—which are most of us–can create hardback books that can be updated and reprinted. You can even make them available on Amazon, and on the Kindle.

Cathy is a third-generation regular in Worland, who as journalist, novelist, magazine editor, and online producer, crossed the mountains to see the world and always returns home. She recently completed graduate certification in Digital Storytelling from the University of Colorado-Denver, in a joint program with the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, California. Cathy’s professional expertise (National Geographic Society, Amèricas Magazine), technical expertise (Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford University) and volunteer interests (international, K-12 collaborative projects) merge to link people and their stories.

Fav News: Hundreds of Wyoming teachers are teaching conversational skills to Koreans and Japanese

July 6, 2010 by Cathy Healy // Leave a Comment

Finally! Major media have discovered Eleutian, 14 years after its founding. I hope this is the start of a blitz of stories about a company that teaches English to Asians via the Internet.

My back story: In 2003, at the International Education and Resource Network (iEARN) conference in Japan, I learned that the Japanese government had declared a crisis with with English language because their university students were fluent in written English, but most could not communicate in English. This the era when courts were ruling in favor of parents who sued US universities because their children couldn’t understand the Asians who were teaching classes, particularly science courses.

At the same time, I knew a number of people in Wyoming who would like to work part-time. Most of us in Wyoming speak with a TV news dialect, which is in demand in the outside world. Clearly there was a cottage-industry business there. But I only mused. That’s why I was thrilled, delighted, impressed and enthusiastic when Kent Holliday started Eleutian in Ten Sleep, which is less than 30 miles from my hometown of Worland. That was in 2006. I drove right over to see what was happening.

CNN’s story is attracting a lot of negative comments about how Eleutian’s teachers are training competitors who will take more jobs away from the United States. Perhaps…but to my mind, Eleutian helps ensure that the world can communicate with us and that business is still being conducted in English. I’ve read that all Chinese are supposed to begin English lessons in the first grade. I assume these commenters are not ready to mandate that all US students begin Chinese in the first grade.

And no one — except CNN readers in Wyoming — gets it about the impact of the Eleutian experience on the people in the Big Horn Basin, where Ten Sleep is located. Think of the Basin as a valley shaped like a round washbasin adjoining Yellowstone and surrounded by mountains. The Big Horn Basin was the last place in the continental United States to be settled. Yet hundreds of its residents now are living in a virtual global crossroads. Their experience has moved them from geographic isolation into personal experiences with the world. Talk about people-to-people progress. This is it.

New global outsourcing hub – Wyoming?

By Lara Farrar, for CNN

July 5, 2010 10:08 a.m. EDT

Students in classrooms across Asia can take real-time English lessons from American teacher

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

A Wyoming company is employing hundreds [700] as long-distance English teachers
Thousands of students in Asia learn real-time English from laid-off U.S. teachers
The company pipes teachers into 500 classrooms across Korea and Japan

(CNN) — When it comes to call centers filled with English-speaking employees, India likely comes to mind. Not a tiny town in Wyoming called Ten Sleep, population about 300.

What Ten Sleep has is not, exactly, a call center. Instead, the town is home to a teaching center that is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There, American teachers provide real-time video English lessons to thousands of students in classrooms across Asia via high-speed fiber optic networks…. (Full Story)