A little fun and a little teaching.

I know that some people have been eagerly awaiting the opening of the Simpson's Movie on July 27 and one of the cool promotional ideas is that 7-11 has re-decorated 12 of their stores around the world as 'Kwik-e-marts' in honor of the Simpson's favorite convenience store chain. The slide show below was take on our visit to the location nearest us on July 4, 2007. The location of the store coincidentally is about 2 blocks away from the Googleplex.... Do you think some one in marketing planned this... I think so!




So, what am I going to teach with the Simpson's? How to present information to your classes in a new and easy way... its also a way to have students publish their own ideas on the Internet without having to have a digital camera or own their own computer!

One of the coolest things that has occurred over the past few months is the ability to mix media forms together with relative ease. That is what I am doing with this slide show. I took all of the pictures with my Motorola RAZR cell phone. Uploaded them using my Verizon service to their web site and then e-mailed them to myself using my GMail account that has virtually limitless storage. I downloaded the pictures onto my hard drive and then uploaded them to my Picasa account and created a web album. I then placed the pictures in the order I wanted them to be displayed and added captions. (You can view the captions by clicking on the cartoon-like text bubble!) After saving the entire slide show, I opened the 'embed' link in the lower left hand corner of the screen and copied the 'html' code from the window that popped up. I then came back over to Blogger and transitioned my post window from 'Compose' mode to 'Edit Html' and pasted the code in the location I wanted it.

From start to finish, it took me about 45 minutes. It was about 1 hour, 15 minutes to do the entire thing, including writing this blog post and inserting all of the hyperlinks to other sites.

I think this pretty cool and makes the technology and cool tools available to the students.