PictureTrail (Nifty tool; used it in my class wiki)

A few sessions ago, Dennis had posted a bunch of examples of teachers using blogs with their classes. One third-grade teacher had included some pictures in her site in really nifty ways, using a tool called PictureTrail. (You can find it by googling it. I think it's just www.picturetrail.com)

I put pictures of 20 of my students' marionette puppets (for the myths project that we're doing) on a page of my class wiki. They're in a really neat rotating picture cube! (The cube turns, and periodically features one picture in a close-up, and also automatically cycles through all 20 pictures even though there would, of course, only be room for 6 on a real photo cube.) You can see it by clicking on the title of this post. Once in a while it has trouble loading; try refreshing the page if so. Usually it works well.

One potential dificulty: In 31 days, my account will automatically downgrade to a more basic level unless I pay for it. This might not be a problem, or it might be -- I haven't found a list of which features will disappear when the account downgrades, so I don't know whether my picture cube will vanish at that point, or not! (Interesting business model. There's a little bit of a "bait and switch" feel to this ploy, which I don't really appreciate. On the other hand, the things the site lets you do to display and share pictures really are very cool. I might even consider paying for it -- which is exactly how they want their bait and switch tactic to work, of course! I still wish that they had an clear, easy-to-find list of which features disappear when an initial free account downgrades to a "more basic" free account after a month. There might still be some very nice options available, for free -- I don't know.)

One more interesting issue, that maybe someone reading this can help me with: When I first looked at those example blogs that Dennis had posted, I put comments and links to some I really liked in my own blog so that I could find them easily, later. When I was trying to remember the name "Picture Trail" Iwent looking there. My comments led me easily to the right link -- but, of course, it was an ACTIVE link, so clicking on it took me to that third-grade teacher's CURRENT blog post, not to the earlier one where I'd seen the Picture Trail stuff! I looked around in her blog's previous posts a bit, but didn't find it. (In the end, I just remembered the name "Picturetrail" on my own.) I understand from the course readings a few sessions ago (on searching using current links versus cached versions) that what happened is that I was sent to the current post rather than the one I actually wanted. What I DON'T know how to do (for the future) is to make my own "cached version" of a blog entry, so that I can link to the actual post I wanted to remember, rather than the person's current blog. Anyone know how to do that?