World Celebrates Obama's Inauguration

The world stood still today as President-elect Barack Obama was sworn in as our nation’s 44th president. It was an incredible sight to see the millions of people who braved the cold weather and lined the National Mall to be part of this historic event. What an amazing sight to see people from all different ethnic backgrounds, classes and ages unite as one as a spectacular show of support and admiration. From Japan, to Africa, Ireland and Russia people were captivated by Obama’s inauguration and his words of inspiration and hope. "Barack Obama really does seem to be the first American president who is also in many ways quite genuinely the world's president," said Constanze Stelzenmuller of the German Marshall Fund. I could not keep my eyes off the TV or Internet and was overjoyed when we were given the okay to show all the inauguration events in class to our students. I set up my Smart Board and internet access and began a live stream using http://www.cbsnews.com/. I started streaming at 6:45am and all was well up until about 10:15am. I started freezing up, losing my connection and buffering, buffering, buffering. I tried different sites like http://www.cnn.com/, http://www.msnbc.com/ and encountered the same problems. I’m not sure what went wrong, if there were too many people and too much traffic on the internet for the inauguration but there went my dreams of watching it on our large 62 inch screen Smart Board. I had to walk my classes over to the library and watch it on a 32 inch screen TV. I know, I can’t help it--I’m spoiled!! Needless to say, it all went well and all of our students were part of this historic event. They were able to see the first black president take office and hear his words of encouragement and choose 'Hope over Fear'.