Wordle- This is the neatest site! I love, love, love it! Wordle is a site that automatically arranges words on a page. You paste in your own text or a url then pick the typeface and colors. This picture is of my blog url. How fun would this be to type in your own words or family names, and then print out and frame? Too fun!
Dollar Store Hack-This is a site of a design professor who challenged his students to take items from the dollar store and "design by hacking cheaply made plastic junk, and hopefully, manipulating some irony and employing some critically in an otherwise humorless and often anonymous world of product." The results are so interesting, so creative, and sometimes so fun!
Museumr-
This site allows you to upload any picture and see it in a museum! So silly but so fun!
Bloglines-Bloglines is a free site that allows you to easily and quickly keep track of all of the blogs that you enjoy reading. It's simple- you just register, enter in each blog address and it's collects them all. Instead of going to each individual blog each day to see if the writer has posted, you simply go to your bloglines page. It lists each of the blogs you entered on the left side and if they have posted, their name is in bold. If you click on the name of the blog, it shows you the post on the right side. So with one click- you can quickly and easily see who has posted. How cool is that?
By the lack of my posts this past week, you can tell I was a tad busy. I spent the week with my sweet friend Vicki training teachers- four days here in CS and then Friday in Victoria, Texas.
Vicki and I spent the week showing teachers ways to inspire, challenge, and motivate their gifted students. Presenting workshops is something I love doing and I am blessed to be able to work with Vicki. We both have a strong work ethic, are passionate about what we do, and have a fabulous time working together. She also shares my Sonic addiction-which is so important in someone who I travel with often!
We met some fabulous new teachers who will be starting their first year of teaching in only a few days. As I begin my (GULP) 17th year of teaching (holy cow- is it really 17 years?) it is so refreshing and exciting to see such intelligent, passionate, and loving young people fired up to join the difficult field of education. There are so many professions that they could have chosen- jobs that would have been so much more financially rewarding- and yet they are choosing to teach. And for that I am thankful. It truly is a joy to work with them and to get to know them. The week of training is always exhausting but always leaves me so excited for the new school year!
We finished our training here in CS on Thursday afternoon, packed up and drove the four hours to Victoria. Upon arriving in town, we did all the important things like shopping and figuring out the closest Sonic to our hotel. We stayed up late making sure we were ready for the next day and were at Sonic by 6:35am the next morning. We had a wonderful day with some Kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade teachers- and are excited about returning to Victoria to do some more training later this month.
I arrived home late Friday night, exhausted- and had to get ready for the garage sale I somehow agreed to participate in when asked by neighbors on our cul-de-sac. (Peer pressure is alive and well for this 38 year old!). The garage sale was HOT, sweaty, exhausting, HOT, funny (the things people will buy amaze me!), interesting, did I mention HOT?, and profitable. At the end of the day I had enough to buy a few more rugs for my new floors and got rid of quite a bit of stuff. The remainder was taken off to Goodwill and I took a nap.
I am thankful today is Sunday- I for one could use a day of rest.
I hope your day is blessed and restful!
PS I promise to post pictures of my pretty new floors and redecorated bathrooms soon! Pinky promise!