It’s summer vacation, my son is enjoying an hour on his PlayStation, and I’m enjoying the time to just browse the internet, catch up on the starred posts in my google reader, read some books (some fiction, some teacher-ish!) and generally relax.  It’s been a while since I last posted …… I thought I might be having writer’s block again, but the more I think about, the more I’m convinced that I really haven’t had anything worthwhile to say for a while.

I do have a few posts brewing, one on Writer’s Workshop (my own personal area for development and improvement for the 2009/10), a reflection post on the whirlwind year moving from New Zealand to Bangkok, Thailand, and a few other little projects gently simmering in the background!

Image attribution:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/mark78/1463574952/

The lovely Sylvia T, from Langwitches, tagged me for this new meme, ” Passion Quilt” created by Miguel Guhlin. I am to find or create an image that captures what I am most passionate for kids to learn about.

Our Classroom Has No Walls.
This is what I am the most passionate about.  I want to show and model to the students that pass through my class each year, that we don’t have any walls to our classroom.  Our learning just don’t come from the books on our shelves, or from the brain of the teacher, or from the many computer screens dotted around our classroom.  We are connected to and by people from all walks of life, in all parts of the world.

3 Simple Meme Rules:

• Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
• Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
• Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

I would like to know what YOU are passionate about:

Kim Cofino from Always Learning
Allanah K from Life is Not a Race to be Finished
Simon Evans  from Educating the Dragon
Sue from And Another Thing
Claudia from ELT notes

^{_{Photo Attribution: Image: ‘A way to get through the wall‘ www.flickr.com/photos/64294921@N00/227360076}}

Recently Jen Wagner posted some of her thoughts about iGoogle after having John Pederson on the WOW2.0 Show. In that post Jen asks “Do you use iGoogle? How?” As I was pondering how I use iGoogle, up popped this post from Sylvia (Langwitches) about
iGoogle – Really Personalized

So thanks to Skitch, I am able to share with you my personalised iGoogle page. It’s my hub-home-page! It makes my internet life much more manageable, therefore much more organised and I love it!

Uploaded with Skitch! Click on image to see larger version

What do you use?

PictureTrail (many thanks to Langwitches for having it in her Del.icio.us Links).

Uploaded with Skitch!

It was very simple to do and the array of “flicks” to choose from to display your images is really cool. Embedding the code for so that your “flick” appears in Edublogs was a little bit technical (but not too hard) …… Here’s how to do it incase you want to give it a go! (It really was easy!)

When you’ve signed up (free of course) and made your flick in PictureTrail you will be given a copy and paste code for embedding.

1. Copy that code (entire) and paste into a textedit app. of some sort (or I guess a word doc. would work too)
2. Look for the code that starts with http://flash.picturetrail.com/pflicks…….. etc and copy……..up to it’s ending of .swf
3. Click on the flash button of the edublogs visual editor and paste the url just copied from picturetrail embed code
4. Click ok and enter the WIDE pixels (which should be around about “460″) Click ok and enter the HEIGHT pixels (around “350″)
5. Click ok and you should see a code pasted in your blog post. You be able to see your “flick” from PictureTrail embedded in your post (using preview)

Merry Christmas everyone. May you enjoy the festive season with your family where ever you may be!