Flickr

I did it! I fiddled around with Flickr for a couple of days, all the while thinking it was quite beyond me. Then this afternoon I received Abby's gentle reminder that I needed to produce something, so I just forged ahead. I've created a Flickr account - only one image so far, but if you go to you can see it. Since Primary Source started my adventures in China, I thought it would be appropriate to share a photo from a China trip. I didn't have a digital camera when I went with Primary Source, so I can't share those photos until I digitize them. The photo on this blog entry is from the Mu residence in Lijiang which I visited in March of 2006 after a visit to the Gao Xin School in Xi'an. If you check out my Flickr account, you'll see some different photos from Lijiang. The collections on Flickr are a fabulous resource for teachers. I intend to use some photos from it when I redo my China geography presentation for my daughter's class.

A Second Start

When I attempted to set this blog up, I discovered that I already had an account on Blogger. This came as a big surprise since I thought this was my first foray into blogging. As it turns out, it was my neighborhood book group blog, and I vaguely remember signing up when the rest of the group did. After the initial excitement, we never used the blog, and so it vanished into the black hole of memory. I've had this sort of thing happen before when I've tried to sign up for something or other only to discover that the very name and password I wanted to use had already been taken. I sometimes suspect that I was the taker of that name and/or password at some long forgotten earlier time. Who knows? In addition to Blogger, I may have multiple accounts on gmail, or ebay, or even Amazon.com. These ghost accounts are a bit like the unread books in my house, but because I'm constantly knocking over the various piles in which the books reside, at least I know they're there.
Enough random rambling - I'm interested in learning about wikis and all those other useful online tools whose names currently escape me. They strike me as having so many classroom uses, and though I've retired from teaching, I still fantasize about all of the ways teachers could be capturing children's imaginations and helping them become aware of the world and their own place in it. I don't miss the papers, the fire drills, the endless testing, the report cards, but I do miss the pleasure of developing and trying out new curriculum and innovative ways of teaching.