I had fun with this one, letting out a bit of my campy side along with my geeky side. I guess I’m just so giddy about getting a new laptop and this fancy new presentation remote. I don’t work for Targus, but I sure wouldn’t mind if they sent me a check! Ha ha. Really, though, I am so happy with this product and it fills a need that anyone who does presentations and has a MacBook Air is going to need to fill. I wish this information had been there for me when I was frustrated with the lack of any solution in the Apple Store yesterday. Just get one. You won’t be disappointed. Or your money back. (If the store you buy it from has a money-back guarantee, that is.)

P.S. There is a tiny switch inside the remote (which you can see when you pop off the back) that allows you to set it to Windows PowerPoint, Mac Keynote, or Mac PowerPoint. Very nifty, but you might overlook it if you didn’t know better. So now you know!

Thanks to Joy Marks at the Desert Valleys Regional Cooperative for taking this photo and for providing the logistical support and classroom, and thanks to Joy and ACDHH for providing the promotional materials and CEU sponsorship. Thanks also to the 15 people who attended. We all had a good time and I do believed we all learned a lot- including me as I did my research in developing the workshop!

My workshop title was Speak & Spell: How to Pronounce & Spell Foreign Names & Words, and it involved a comparative survey of the phonologies (sound systems) and orthologies (spelling conventions) of a variety of the world’s languages. I mixed lecture with interactive exercises that encouraged participants to spell, pronounce, talk about and explore international names and words. Our focus in this workshop was the mastery of foreign spelling and pronunciation in our ASL-to-English and English-to-ASL interpreting.

I’m happy to say my workshop was a success! I’m now going to spend the next two months developing my next workshop, “Just What They Said: Retaining Ambiguity When Interpreting Vague Language” on Saturday, September 19 from noon to 5:30 PM (location TBA).

I’m such a nit-picking perfectionist it’s killing me! I’m working on tweaking my slideshow presentation for a workshop I’m teaching at the Arizona RID State Conference, and I’m creating a Venn diagram because it was suggested by a few of the participants when I first taught this workshop last November. Problem is I’ve never created a Venn diagram before. I’m trying to represent how Genre Recognition is a skill that develops at the intersection of Discourse Analysis, Predictive Skills*, and Genre Theory.

Is this diagram readable? Does anyone have any suggestions for improving it? Can you believe I’ve been working on this for an hour? Urgh! I hate being a perfectionist!

*While Googling "predictive skills" (a term used a lot in ASL interpreter training), I could not find a single page that defined the term. Hm… interesting.