Back to blogging

I am looking forward to playing around with this again. Blogging "in the wilderness" can be lonely. It is like email except you never know who is going to read it. You just hang it out there- and just maybe someone will respond or follow you.

Week 5 Image generator

This was pretty cool! I used Image chef to create this in about 3 minutes! I created and dragged it to the desktop and then transfered it to Blogger. The direct upload didn't work. No need to sign into Image Chef!

This could be used to stimulate student writing. 

Flickr's  Big Huge Lab of Games and utilities is amazing as an image generator. I included a map of the world at the bottom showing the countries I have visited. There are many more cool things that can be created including posters

week 4 RSS bloglines

I set up a bloglines account. I set up 2 feeds. I need more time to play with this but I'm not sure I would have time to read more than 2 or 3 feeds. I like the idea of customizing it to get for instance PUSD news or only local news related to my school. I use itunes podcasts similarly to inform me on my commute of books and technology news.

The What is RSS video by common craft could be easily used to explain RSS to students.

I'm not sure I would want to share my blog in bloglines for privacy reasons.

Week3 Technology Reflections

My wife bought me a new MacBook Pro! I love the iphoto and idvd programs. iphoto organizes your photos according to events. It's important to have the correct date on all your digital cameras. After a view date changes all my digital photos were good to go. I can edit them, flag them and add keywords to them for creating albums

Once in "events" you can create albums or make slideshows. you can also burn dvd's. I was able to backup all my 2000 photos on 1 dvd and put them to music! Too easy!

I am happy to live in an age of "miracles and wonders" as Paul Simon sings about in Graceland!

Flickr

The hardest thing about Flickr is remembering how to spell it without the "e". Here is an not so adorable baby picture. I used the diting feature Picnic that comes with Flickr. I think I prefer the tools that come with iphoto on my Mac-but picnik is not bad as an online editor.

Also flickr allows you to store and post 100 mb /month. One of my 10 megapixel photos was 2.5 mb so that allows you to post 25 photos per month of a pretty high resolution. I don't trust flickr to be around for ever so recommend digital backups.

I looked at Picassa albums from Google-nothing special. I like the interface of smugmug--very elegant!

Week2 adding my avatar

I must have spent 1 hour trying to figure out how to export my avatar. I had incorrectly thought it was a "picture" element since I was told to make it a jpg. 

I finally found the answer on http://23thingsonastick.blogspot.com2007/11/thing-3-set-up-yourblog.html The code gets pasted under layout into the "html/javascript" element. This is the minnesota link to 23 things and was helpful. I was so desparate I was just about ready to ask my 16 year old daughter for help!

Week 2

I played around with Blogline but prefer Blogspot. Blogspot seems much easier to navigate.