The NY Times has released a collection of absolutely fantastic pictures from this past year, 2008, the Year in Pictures.

They have an especially long cache from the election. I’m not really sure I want to relive that whole thing again, but I did enjoy the photos a lot. Rich, large, and you can take over your whole screen with their Flash app.

I’m thinking teachers could use these for discussion points, and a little off-the-cuff research… “What is this?” “What’s going on?” and have students explore some recent events. Another project might be for students to choose 5 favorite photos and put together a “photo story” on the significance of each photo or news story. They’d likely come across stuff they knew something about, and others they had little clue.

I am currently completing the transition to the new site design. The static pages were easy; the Wordpress theme presents more of a challenge… soon enough.

Incidentally, the theme was inspired by a new layout I created for presentation handouts. And that’s a whole other discussion.

The PDFs are designed to be viewed full-screen on an “HD” display, or something at 16:10 ratio. I really don’t want folks to print them (you know, save the trees). But they will print too, on letter-sized paper. This particular presentation is for EdTech 2009 in Ashland, Virginia.

Some time ago, I fancied making really posh PDFs. But then OS X came along, and Preview, and then they didn’t do all those fancy things anymore. But I still think it’s cool that such a small file can produce such a gorgeous looking document (not mine, in particular; no bragging!). While I use Helvetica on the site, I used Formata and Minion Pro for the PDF.

Today I read an interesting story via CNN about how satellite imagery is being used to discover ancient ruins, specifically, in Egypt.

The high resolution nature of modern satellites allow archaeologists to “see” where ancient dwellings were. It’s an interesting application of the type of imagery now available in portions of Google Earth to solve some mysteries behind ancient civilizations. 

I haven’t spent enough personal time of late to really be creative. It’s something that’s a luxury to do, I feel, and I might as well do it, as long as I can.

Today we took photos… for the simple pleasure of improving ourselves at it. I used the Lensbaby 2 lens I got this year.

Tonight, I found some remarkable photos taken with this family of lenses via Flickr.

This one I took isn’t particularly great, but you’ll get the idea of what these things can do.

Those ducks were making fast time in the water, so I couldn’t get the exact shot I’d like. But I do like the color and “depth” to the shot. The Lens Baby I have has removable aperture disks. I was using a pretty open one, so I got some dramatic blur on the edges.

I think taking the time to explore your creativity is important, as an adult. And of course, we should always be offering the opportunity to our students. No fancy reasons why, just because.

1. Not backing up data.
2. Treating a school computer like a home computer.
3. Not supervising computer-using students.
4. Thinking online communication is ever private.
5. Believing that one’s teaching style need not change to take full advantage of technology.
6. Ignoring the intrinsic interest of tech use in today’s kids.
7. Thinking technology will go away in schools.

Doug Johnson writes these seven stupid mistakes, and I was either chuckling or nodding my head in agreement to each and every one.

Be sure to read all of Johnson’s insight into each one, not to mention a good collection of comments with some additional mistakes.