Sottile House Shines at Night!

Walking to my car Monday night after my College of Charleston class I stopped and admired the old Sottile House at 11 College St. The beautiful yellow Victorian mansion dates to 1890 but looks better than ever, especially at night.

With some processing tools from Snapseed, a free photo editing app, I created this image, which adds to the beauty of the elegant structure. Not bad for an iPhone 7 picture, right?

Nighttime Capture- love the lighting!

Sunday Grave Trotting in Charleston!

In my College of Charleston class, "Beyond the Grave: What Old Cemeteries Tell and Teaching the Living," I needed to call a late semester audible. A few classes were wiped out by the busy hurricane season and I needed to get in some assignments.

Class Photo at the Unique Unitarian Churchyard

So I asked the students to come out on a late Sunday morning to visit a pair of old Charleston graveyards within walking distance of campus.

Unfortunately, less than half the class showed up. For my MIAs?  They missed out on a neat experience.

Prezi Project a Pain But Results Are Good!

It has been a while since I've produced a PowerPoint-type presentation in what's called PowerPoint 2.0, aka Prezi.

I'm having my college students create a top ten or ten all-time favorites list using Prezi as the platform.  So, to demonstrate how Prezi Next works (this has replaced Prezi Classic, of which I am much more familiar and comfortable) I wanted to put together a new Prezi. With all of the Magnolia Cemetery photos I have taken over the years I thought this could be a great subject. And I narrowed it down to 10 favorite statuary cemetery art figures.

Magnolia Cemetery has lots to choose from in this area, in that it is a beautiful Victorian necropolis that dates to 1850.




Embedding a Prezi in a Blogger post like this requires a couple steps. Here is the link I used that shows how to do it.  The short tutorial includes this HTML code. All you do is paste over the red part the URL that can be generated for your particular Prezi:

Before producing the first Prezi at the top of this post, I did one incorrectly that turned out like the above. I was able to convert it to a JPEG, then shared on a Facebook site called "Charleston History Before 1945." I like how it looks, though I cannot get rid of all the red underlines.  

Fall Backyard Bird Bounce

Cooler weather (finally!) seems to have increased my backyard bird activity this weekend. I spent some time on my back porch after seeing lots of action at my feeders while looking out the window.

I saw and photographed some returning favorites. Here they are:

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker

Yellow-rumped Warbler

Yellow-rumped Warbler 

Young Students See Very Old Magnolia Cemetery

Monday night we caravaned the 10-minute drive from campus to Magnolia Cemetery- a short trip but a very long step back in time.

Students were able to see up close and personal many majestic, magnificent and artistic graveyard treasures going back as far as the 1850s. And back then they were all created by skilled artisans using only hammers and chisels, I remind the students.

If you've never been to Magnolia Cemetery, one of the nation's most beautiful and historic, get a taste of it by viewing my "Best of Magnolia Cemetery" video on YouTube.  

Two days before Halloween and a few costumes in this class photo!

I look forward to reading the students' blog posts. I hope they enjoyed seeing Magnolia Cemetery as much as I enjoyed showing it to them!

Now that I'm critiquing my students' posts, Anna Buko's stands out so far. I really like her "Garden of Graves" headline and her quality descriptions. Check out her post here.

Reece Hammond also did a very good post with high-quality writing and descriptions.

This post by Kevin Myhre is outstanding!

And Jack Sutton show's excellent scene setting in his story's lead.