September 19th is, ye guessed it, International Talk Like A Pirate Day!  I wasn’t plannin’ t’blog about it, but those swashbucklin’ buccaneers o’er at Libr-ARR!-yThing made me bring a spring upon me cable.  Blimey!  Come around and go smartly, matee!  Go check out LibraryThing in pirate-speak.  If ye miss it, t’is shown below.  T’is handsomely done! Arrrrrr!

Shiver me timbers,  me pirate name is Calico Anne!

Stay yer course, heartie!  Keep readin’ and keep learnin’!

Everyone has a story to tell. With Storybird, there’s no excuse not to. It has incredible artwork in a variety of styles. It’s easy. And if you don’t try to play with it when it’s overloaded (which it must have been last night), it’s quick, too! What a cool idea. I think this may be what we do in our first Jr. Tech Camp this year. By the way, I read about this in the Read Write Web blog and also in Scott Holcomb’s blog.

Check out my life story… …so far, anyway.

Keep reading and keep learning!

I don’t know if I mentioned that I finally got an iPhone. The 11 month wait was worth it. I’m addicted. I was a little disappointed, though, when I tried to include a picture in a text and found that I couldn’t. The phone was willing but AT&T wasn’t able. That’s evidently going to change on September 25th. Hurray! I read about this on the Read Write Web blog.

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.

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!