The Reason I Was in Orlando

While Nicole and I did manage to squeeze in a totally awesome whirlwind two-day cousin retreat in sunny Orlando in January, the reason I was in Orlando was for a fantastic education technology conference for teachers, which started up the day Nicole left.

It was a really awesome tech conference!

The pictures from the conference are mostly of slides from presentations I attended, so I'll show you pictures "around" the conference.

Follow By Email

Thanks for reading my blog!

Look over there - - - ->

To the left.

Ha ha!

Made you look.  It's to the right.

See where it says Follow By Email?

Put your email address in there and press Submit.

Then, check your email for a confirmation email from "FeedBurner" and click on the link sent to you (this is a one-time step).

That way, you'll get an email from my blog each day I make a post.

Thanks, from Shannon Lee

I love Wordle

I do.

I love Wordle.

I think you will, too.

If you are not sure what a Wordle is, or if you are thinking, "Oh, there goes Shannon Lee, again:  making up words," well, read on my friends.

Yesterday, I attended an Information Technology Professional Development Day.

Information Technology is just fancy talk for computer gadgets.

Professional Development is just fancy talk for a day when teachers get to be the students to learn new ideas, or be to be reminded of ideas that they have forgotten about because their heads are so full of... well, stuff.

After these important learning days, I need time to sit and contemplate the meaning of life.

Then, I get inspired.

This afternoon, I sat down to write about a few events of the past week for my blog, but I got distracted by Wordle.

I love Wordle.  Have I mentioned that before?

Wordle is a really cool FREE website that has an amazing algorithm which takes any text you copy and paste onto the website and analyses it.  It generates a "word cloud" which has the most frequently used words in larger font, and the fonts decrease depending on frequency.

It's like a graphic graph.

I just made that up.

You can use it if you want to.

So, I put in my most recent blog entries (on Last Saturday, a Northern Thanksgiving with Gramma and Grampa, the snow of a White Thanksgiving and a Duck, the Matching Game, and Noah's Ark), and this is the Wordle I got.

Isn't it beautiful?

Now, on the Wordle website, you can save your Wordle in a public gallery for the whole word to see. I decided that I would prefer to keep it right here, where we can see it, so I took a screen shot and cropped it to be a pretty picture, which I can now keep forever. 

If you need me to tell you how to take a screen shot someday, let me know and I'll do a blog post on it.  Or, even better, you can come to visit me here in Yellowknife or buy me a plane ticket to your house.  Just giving you options!

So, after I did a Wordle with my recent blog posts, I copied and pasted my entire thesis so see my Wordle on a two-year chunk of my life (which, I totally have an itching to do again, I might add).

It's a lot shorter than my thesis, I will say that much.

And, it's pretty.

So, go on over to Wordle and have a blast.  If you just want to play, the more frequently you type in a word, the larger the font will be.  And, you can control colour, font style, and many other features.  The randomness of it all is pretty exciting, too.

Now, I'm off. 

Go forth and Wordle.

Wordle.  You can get to it at http://www.wordle.net/, or by clinking on any of the hyperlinks I've put on this page (which is every time I typed the word Wordle... oh, there it is again!).

I'll write the post I intended to type today later. 

It's in my head. 

I just have to tell my fingers.