Cool Cat Kid Blog

Cool Links 4 Kids 04/11/2008

• FunBrain.com - The Internet's #1 Education Site for K-8 Kids and Teachers

  I love this website for kids educational games and my kids do too!

  tags: education, coolcatkid, games, edu_newapp

posted by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher @ 1:30 PM Comments: 0

Great place to play games

We love to play games at popcap.com. We really like typershark, it is a lot of fun.

posted by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher @ 4:15 PM Comments: 0

Happy Easter

Happy Easter: "





This is a great photo from Jeff in the Phillipines!

New Life...New Beginning with the Lord.















Photo taken at Sacred Heart Novitiate the neo-regents' retreat 2006 "

posted by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher @ 11:44 PM Comments: 0

We love our robosapien, should we upgrade?

Brother and I were looking at Gizmodo after our trip to Disney and found out that we can get a new brain for Robosapien.

In the Gizmodo article Robosapien Gets New Brain: "
...Manufacturer WowWee's deal with Evolution Robotics provides their Roboraptor and Robosapien programmable robots with more sophisticated navigation and pattern recognition systems. So now instead of merely frightening your pets, it can ruthlessly hunt them down.

WowWee hints at future deals with other companies, but offers no details yet. Self-awareness, powered flight and crushing human skills underfoot are probably next on the list.

We'll definitely look into it!

posted by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher @ 11:13 AM Comments: 0

Kewl Kid Pick this week: the Ruler Pen

Hats off to Gizmodo for this great item! I definitely want to find this for my kids. I know $40 is a bit but it would be so very handy. (Unless you needed to make tick marks AND measure at the same time!)

Ruler Pen: "This one goes to eleven! Who needs a ruler, measuring tape, stylus, pencil, and pen when you have this magical conglomeration of classy coolness? It costs a mere $40...

posted by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher @ 4:30 PM Comments: 0

Family Calendaring Made Easy: Cool Cat Kidcast #2

Our family has been testing a new service on Airset for managing our family calendar. In this kidcast, we talk about :

• How the family calendar works
  
• How mom synchronizes it with her Palm pilot
  
• How it reminds us over cell phones and e-mail when we have appointments
  
• How kids and parents can put things on each other's calendars
  

Mom rates Airset a 10+. It is the first thing that can synchronize my palm, remind my husband over e-mail and cell phone for me and he can put things into the family calendar and check the family calendar without having to find me. We love how it e-mails the kids their schedule every day and automatically appears on their google start up page when they log in the Internet.

We hope you'll enjoy the Cool Cat Kidcast Volume 2.

If you want the details, I'll write how I set it up on my cool cat teacher blog.

posted by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher @ 4:58 PM Comments: 0

How to customize your design

Anne at one of my favorite teaching blogs today wrote about cool cat kid and my cool cat teacher blog. I was so honored! Here is what she says about cool cat kid:

Isn't that the coolest thing! Check it out. It is fantastic.I love the design. The kitten is adorable. I want some lessons on how to design like that. As soon as my grandkids are a little older , I will jump in that arena. I know Vicki will blaze the trail!

So, Anne, here is your lesson on how we created the design for Cool Cat Kid:

1) My daughter and I searched for free blogger templates.

• http://blogspottemplates.blogspot.com/ - Aman from Singapore does a great job.
• http://blogger-templates.blogspot.com/
• http://spiderman.sonypictures.com/bugle/weblogs/downloads.php - Spiderman blog templates
• http://not-that-ugly.co.uk/index.php?id=viewall
  

2) When we found the one she liked, I downloaded and copied and pasted the code into the blogger template page. (Each one has their own set of instructions, I printed it out and followed it as I checked it off. This modeled the behavior I want to show to my children.)

3) I set up a free account on photobucket and uploaded the free photos that came with the template.

4) I customized it some with that old HTML knowhow (but not too much!). I added a counter from statcounter and claimed the blog on technorati to add those links.


All this is with one caveat: Do this before you customize your template. If you have already made changes to your blog and added technorati tags, bloglines, etc. you will want to set up a new blog or be very careful with your changes. I suggest doing this first on a test blog or a new one. I wouldn't attempt one of these with one of my existing blogs and I've been HTML coding for a while!

To learn more about blogging read my Ten Habits of Bloggers that Win. It will get you jump started!

posted by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher @ 11:37 AM Comments: 0