I know you think you’ve seen every possible image from the Presidential Inauguration but I just had to post one more. I think this is just the coolest! Click on the picture below and it will take you to the picture on the Gigapan website. Once there, you can zoom in and move around in the same way you would at Google Earth or Mapquest. The detail is amazing (almost creepy!).  Check out all the former presidents!  Look for celebrities!  After you’ve checked out the crowd at the inauguration, you might want to explore the other incredible scenes on Gigapan.

Our third South Side Middle School Jr. Tech Camp was a big success! My criteria for success is fairly simple. If the students enjoy what we’re doing and have fun with it, it’s a success. If excitement, laughter, and spontaneous applause are any indication, our campers definitely enjoyed themselves.

Since our theme for this six weeks is Memphis, our campers used pictures from around town to learn how to crop and edit digital photographs and create their own slideshow, using Memphis music.

Last weekend, my husband and I drove around town, taking pictures of Memphis’ major attractions, colleges, businesses, historical interests, etc. I ended up with about 100 pictures but pared it down to 50 photographs, which I loaded onto my flash drive. I also compiled a CD of 8 songs related to Memphis. It didn’t take very long, then, to upload the pictures and songs into iPhoto and iTunes on each of the laptops we were using for this camp session.

I had originally planned to use Picasa (I really like Picasa!) but later decided it’d be better to use our Mac laptop cart in the library instead of our computer lab downstairs. Our laptops have older operating systems that won’t support Picasa for Mac, so we stuck with iPhoto. It worked beautifully for our purposes. The students’ artistic flair was apparent as they adjusted the tint and slanted the pictures to create “art house” photographs. I was impressed!

I intended to export the slideshows to iDVD and burn them onto dvds for the campers to take home. I knew our laptops didn’t have dvd burners but thought that I could use an external dvd burner instead. It didn’t work. I’m still determined to get these beautiful slideshows loaded onto dvds so the kids can play them on a dvd player at home. I’ll post later and tell y’all what hoops I have to jump through to get that done.

In the meantime, here is an Animoto video of some of our campers pictures. I love what they’ve done!

We’ve all seen those little candy conversation hearts that are everywhere this time of year.  I’m not crazy about how they taste but they’re just so cute.

Since I’ve adopted a valentine’s day/candy heart theme for my upcoming RIF book distribution, I was excited to stumble on www.cryptogram.com/hearts/, a website that creates candy heart pictures that say whatever you choose to write.  I created twelve different hearts (I even used one of their anti-valentine’s day “goth” hearts just for fun), uploaded them to flickr, then used Big Huge Labs‘ mosiac maker to arrange them in one picture.  I probably didn’t really need to make the mosaic to create my poster, but it was fun anyway.  I also noticed a trading card maker on that site, too, which would be really cool for students to use for reporting on states or countries or rivers or planets… …but I digress.  I’ll try that later.

I added my RIF theme “Follow your Heart… READ!” and some clip art border and… ta da!… I have a poster for RIF that’s personalized for our school.

Candy conversation hearts are cute, but they’re even cuter when YOU get to compose the message on them.  Use them to promote whatever or whoever you want.  They’re sure to be a hit!

Keep reading and keep learning!