Week 3, Thing 7, Digital Cameras

One of the best pieces of technology out there is a digital camera. I like that I don't have to worry about "wasting" film when I don't know if the picture will turn out or not, instead I can delete the image and not have a shoe box full of photos that aren't good enough to put in an album, but I don't really want to throw away either. There are numerous sites and software available that will allow you to crop, adjust the color and contrast, send pictures to friends via email, and post to sites like Flickr (or some other image hosting site)
At times I have had a digital camera in my library, and the kids love being able to take pictures of their creations. In a class I took last spring, a teacher was taking digital photos of the pages of the Houghton Mifflin book for the week so she could project it on a SMART board.
On the down side, it's way too easy to just leave the pictures saved on the memory card and never print them.

Week 3, Thing 6, Big Huge Labs

I went to the Arctic Thunder air show yesterday, and made sure to take pictures so that I would have something to work with for this assignment. The 3rd party site I went to was Big Huge Labs. I really liked this site. It was easy for me to get the results I wanted. I decided to put a matte on my picture of the U. S. Air Force Thunderbirds.

I have a couple of ideas of how to use some of these tools. First, I have been wanting to put up pictures of the staff at the beginning of the year reading their favorite children's book , but have the book cover their face, so the students have to guess who the person is. Second, I would like to have pictures of each of the Battle of the Books teams to give each participant when I give them their participation certificate. I thought I could use the ALA READ CD for these, but it turned out to be way too time consuming for me. Big Huge Labs didn't have anything quite as cool as the READ CD, but is definitely doable with my time frames.

Week 3, Thing 5, Flickr

When I first looked at Flickr I thought it looked pretty intuitive. Finding photos is pretty easy for me, but when it came time to post it to my blog, it didn't go quite as smoothly. But I finally got it!
I chose this image because I have been waging serious war on the dandelions in my yard. I keep hearing from my family that we should weed and feed, or use some other kind of weed killer. But I am trying to be environmentally friendly and go the organic. So we are pulling (at a minimum) a 5 gallon bucket of dandelions each day.

Week 2, Things 3 & 4, my blog

Obviously I was able to set up a blog.
Last summer I played around with making an avatar, but couldn't figure out how to save it, and didn't know what to do with it if it had been saved. During the school year I found out what to do with avatars, so I made one (complete with purple hair.) But I liked the backgrounds on Yahoo, so I made this one. So far I'm having fun with only a minimum of frustration.

Week 1, Thing 2, Lifelong Learning

While trying to view the 7 & 1/2 Habits tutorial, I was running into all kinds of problems, (started out fine, but then lost the audio and slides, couldn't down load the learning contract.) I tend to look at these kind of things as roadblocks and get frustrated. I'm getting better at not letting my frustration get the best of me, but it still happens. So as a lifelong learner I would have to say that the hardest thing for me is to see problems as challenges. The easiest thing for me is to begin with the end in mind.