Check out the following Animoto video for highlights of our Teacher Tech Camp!

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!

I discovered a thrilling little nugget in a blog called The Shifted Librarian by Jenny Levine (Internet Development Specialist and Strategy Guide, American Library Association).  I don’t know a librarian, or reader for that matter, who doesn’t love those celebrity READ posters that show famous people with a favorite book.  I have several of these posters in my school library and even considered purchasing the CD’s that allow you to create your own posters.  Funds at my school are limited, however, and I’d rather put books on the shelves than create posters, even really cool ones.

Imagine my excitement when I read about creating mini READ posters online…. for FREE!  I’ve made two so far (see below) and am looking forward to creating many more throughout the year.  The ALA website (click here)allows the download of a picture, provides four format choices, and even lets you add text.  It creates a jpeg file you can then download to your computer.  I’m envisioning mini-posters throughout the school, use in library publications and school flyers/newsletters, offering students their own mini-posters as reading incentives, highlighting guest readers at our school, promoting RIF, letting teachers show off their favorite books… …you get the idea. In fact, I’m sure you have more ideas.

Keep reading and keep learning!

My daughter just came home from a sleepover and asked if we’d looked at www.befunky.com at Tech Camp.  Since we didn’t, she was excited to be able to show me something new.  It’s a cool little FREE way to cartoonize (is that a word?) a photo.  As you can see by the lovely photo of my family on the right, you can add accessories and frames to your newly created cartoon.  You can also add text.  In addition to just being fun to play with, I’m sure all those creative minds out there will put it to good use for educational purposes.  You don’t have to register to create a cartoon from a photo.  I’m not sure, though, if you can access this site through the MCS firewall.  I haven’t tried that yet.  Hopefully, it won’t be a problem.

There’s more to www.befunky.com than what I’ve done here.  Go check it out!  Have fun and be funky!

I’m back from vacation!  Tanned, rested, and definitely alot foggier on all that we learned during Tech Camp.  Thank goodness for all those notes I typed in Zoho Writer!  I’m looking forward to spending some quality time with my computer, re-acquainting myself with all those great tools we covered in camp.

My digital camera was the closest think to technology I encountered on vacation.  I took alot of pictures, though, and used many of the techniques I learned in Scott’s Digital Safari class.  Scott reminded us that one of the best things about digital photography is that you can take an almost unlimited number of pictures since deleting the ones you don’t want to keep is so easy.  This was invaluable advice on a dolphin cruise when, using the continuous shooting mode, I took well over 100 pictures.  Afterward, I found I had about 20 really good pictures and I deleted the rest.  If I’d been more tentative about taking pictures (as I was before Scott’s class), I probably wouldn’t have ended up with any good ones.

For me, a great vacation means having lots of time to read and this was a great vacation.  I finished three books and started on a fourth.  Being a librarian, I’m inclined to share alittle bit about the books I read but will save that for my next post.

Keep reading and keep learning!