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Sleepless Night; So here it is – the big Web2.0 everything, released under Creative Commons license Attribution-ShareAlike
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The YUI Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. YUI is available under a BSD license and is free for all uses
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With Lovely Charts's extremely simple and intuitive drag'n drop drawing mechanism, you'll be able to focus on what really matters. You won't have to draw boxes and arrows, you won't have to worry about what symbol to use.
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On Onlinecharttool.com you can design and share your own graphs online and for free
We support a number of different chart types like: bar charts, pie charts, line charts, bubble charts and radar plots. -
The place for everything about Keynote
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Interactive Sites for Smartboard Use – Grades K – 5
Monthly Archives: February 2009
Public Opinion
One of the things that marketing does constantly is poll its clients to find out their feelings on a particular product. From that data, they make decisions about where they wish to head with the product. It’s a tried and true method and attempts to gauge public opinion on products, opinions, etc.
Usually, it costs the company money to pay those being interviewed or they get the product for free or a reduced price. During the presidential elections, CNN had an audience that had dials that they would twist in response to the comments made by candidates during debates.
If you’re a political junkie, it makes for fascinating television.
There are utilities that will allow for live blogging during an event. I use coveritlive.com all the time. It’s great when one person is blogging and we allow others to hop in and comment.
However, recently, we’ve seen how social networking has allowed citizens to get closer to the action and see what’s happening from a first person perspective. There are some interesting tools that let you monitor the stream of info live.
At Neoformix, Jeff Clark has written a utility that he calls StreamGraphs. Basically, type in a term and watch as he visualizes tweets that come through with that word as he ties it to related words / concepts. Last night was the Grammy Awards and the world was alive with Twitterers commenting about things. For example, if we want to just look at “Grammy”, the graph would look like.
There were controversial moments too. Stevie Wonder played with the Jonas Brothers. Want to see how it looked?Here’s “Jonas”.
and here’s “Stevie Wonder”
Hopefully, I made the images small enough that you can’t make out some of the words. This was an event without controversy!If visualization doesn’t work for you, just go ahead and use Twitter’s Search Engine. Actually, any time of the day or night, if you’re interested in how the Twitter world is reacting to things, enter a search term and sit back and read. It was fast and furious at the Grammy Awards.
What better way to test your marketing and implementation than to stay on top of the twittering public. As this utility becomes accepted by more and more people, it will become of increasingly more value.
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links for 2009-02-08
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You can customize and use each of these presentation templates to provide in-house training to your users. Each presentation contains detailed instructions for performing the task, including screenshots and short quizzes.
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Thousands of video lectures from the world's top scholars.
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If learning is change then what what kind of learning is required in the 21st century?
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Bill Gates hopes to solve some of the world's biggest problems using a new kind of philanthropy. In a passionate and, yes, funny 18 minutes, he asks us to consider two big questions and how we might answer them.
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DestroyTwitter is a robust but compact Twitter application built to run on Mac, Windows, and Linux using Adobe AIR. It consists of a series of canvases that constantly update to keep tweets current and up-to-date using notifications that appear immediately after a new tweet arrives.
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Watch YouTube on your iPod in 3 clicks, for free.
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Pixar University's Randy Nelson explains what schools must do to prepare students for jobs in new media.
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If you have found your way to this site looking for technology tools for teaching that are quick and easy to download, learn, and start using in your classroom, you have come to the right place.
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Check tweets from around your current location
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Photo laboratory Photl.com presents you a fantastic collection of free photo images (Free Stock Photo Images) of high resolution for commercial usage.
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TrackClass helps you get your school work organized. From reminders to notes to assignments and grades, you'll be on top of your studies!
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The foundation of any good film is a great story. In this guest post Daniel Wallace, author of the book ‘Big Fish’, later turned into the Tim Burton film of the same name talks us through his top five tips for writing the classic story.
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Laura created Readinglady.com to provide support to teachers throughout the country. Teachers come to her site to network and share ideas. There are many free resources housed here, along with discussion groups.
Citizen Journalism Again
Every morning, I wake and check out the tweets from the Australian side of my aquaintances on Twitter. Generally, it is an opportunity to get a different educational perspective.
This weekend, however, the tone has taken a decidedly more serious tone as reports emerge about the fires that have broken out and engulfed folks, home, and even at least one community.
I don’t regularly read many Australian news sources but do know that there appears to be good coverage from ABC.
Normally, this news would be a sound bite on the evening news or another link in an RSS feed. But, as with recent news reports, the social network provides a far different perspective on the event. Real messages from real people talking about the real impact of this event provide an entirely different resource from the event.
From the public eye, we’re able to see heros in action. Here, photographer CSKK has captured an image of a rescue helicopter filling up with water before resuming work.
fire service helicopter filling the bucket by cskk
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Unlike conventional news stations which are limited by storage and time, Flickr and those citizen and professional journalists will give you more pictures, in far more detail in a timely manner.
I know that we are all looking for a quick solution to this horrible situation.
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links for 2009-02-07
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Designed specifically for peer-to-peer interaction, it's a great way for you to personally point out web page features or topics to others.
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Adobe Photoshop is the tool of choice for most web designers. From creating a website template to objects and components such as content boxes and buttons, Photoshop doesn’t fail to deliver.
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Twitterfall is a way of viewing the latest 'tweets' of upcoming trends and custom searches on the micro-blogging site Twitter. Updates fall from the top of the page in near-realtime.
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Murphy's laws for teaching
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Says-It.com allows you to make your own funny photos and graphics – simply type in some text and choose from a few simple options.
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Collection of free games going way back to 1999…
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Ginipic takes image search to a whole new level. Now you can search image search engines, photo sharing websites or your own local picture collections simultaneously. Find what you're looking for and use it instantly in your own creation – document, presentation, art work – you name it.
A Word Makes a Difference
At the recent Computers in Education School Contact meeting, I happened to see one of our teachers giving a shout out to the work of one of her students on the school wiki. It wasn’t a big deal; just a moment to brag to her elbow partner.
Interested, I took a look and it was kind of cool. Amidst all of the bling, goodness knows Grade 7 students need their bling, was a set of technical instructions that a student had written to help her classmates use the resources of a website. Ironically, it was another bling website (www.befunky.com).
On the drive home, I was thinking about this. In this day and age, it’s difficult to get students to do writing. Even more difficult is to get them to do technical writing. However, in this case, the student had succeeded. I would go one step further and appeal to any teacher who reads this post. There’s nothing that forces you to learn something so deeply than to have to teach it.
If you do something for yourself, you can fumble and stumble your way through it. But, if you’re going to stand up in front of an audience or a classroom, you had better know your content inside and out. Stepping away from the main point, take a moment and think about the whole writing process. The ultimate is to write for an audience. Web publishing takes it just that much further because you never know where that audience will come from. So, you’d better have your act together!
So, thusly inspired, I included this young lady’s instructions in my February newsletter. I have one page entitled “Miscellaneous”, if you read the file name, and it’s generally a spot where I put instructions about how to do something or use a new resource or … This month, it was Erin’s turn to explain how to use the BeFunky website.
Image of Harley after going through BeFunky.com
I went into the Wiki and added a comment to her page and thanked her for letting me use her content and pointed out to her that my newsletter has readers from all over the world and took a picture from Google Analytics to show her where the readers come from.
What happened next blew me away. After reading the reply, up came another set of instructions to do something else. The teacher of the class got back to me with information that another student in the class has written instructions about another process. I’m so humbled that something as simple as a comment can make such a difference and inspire to students to really write for a purpose.
Periodically, on Twitter, some teacher will indicate that they’ve started a new class blog or wiki and ask folks to check it out. If I have the time, I generally do and drop off a comment or two.
Those of us who blog or create wikis get a hoot when someone drives by and reads a post. When someone takes the time to comment, it’s even more fulfilling. But…imagine what it does for a 12 year old who is posting for the first time.
I would encourage everyone to take a moment and check out a school or student or educational project blog and take the two or three minutes needed to make a reply. It can make all the different in the world to an aspiring writer.
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links for 2009-02-06
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Interview with Will Richardson about Personal Learning Networks
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Rotoball is a collaborative rotoscoped animation project. It was originally intended for high school students as a unique opportunity to connect with other students who are geographically distant.
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It is really important that parents and caregivers are involved in helping children to learn their spellings. Confidence in spelling allows children to write more freely and imaginatively.
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TIMESAVERS for TEACHERS specializes in printable, often-used classroom forms, report card comments, spelling activities, practical teacher tools, worksheets and downloadable teaching materials designed to save teachers valuable time.
When does software become useless?
I had a couple of interesting conversations yesterday with secondary school Computer Contacts.
On one hand, there was a concern that we need to purchase licenses of Microsoft Office 2007 as it is the current state of the art product being shipped by the software giant. Many students have this software at home – it’s a great marketing plan by shipping it pre-loaded with new computers. It’s considerably easier to pay for the registration rather than to remove and reload something else. We are also starting to see files being delivered in the new .—x format. Previous versions of the software will not open the latest version although there are some converters available. The plot thickens when you have students who have co-op placements with businesses that use the latest pieces of software. It’s tough enough for a teenager to walk into a business and fit in without having to learn a brand new piece of software as well.
Then, I have a conversation with another. One of the challenges that you face when you go to a meeting or workshop mid-day is leaving a lesson for the supply teacher that is meaningful for students and manageable for someone who may or may not be comfortable in your subject discipline. In this case, it was an electronics course. In this case, the school had purchased (and never thrown away) copies of Rocky’s Boots. Rocky’s Boots was originally shipped as a “game” in electronics but those of us who teach/taught computer science or electronics recognize the educational value as you use the program to solve problems using logic gates and other tools.
There is a 30 year spread between these two programs!
In both cases, we have examples of educational software that, when used properly, provides an excellent educational opportunity for students. Both address curriculum expectations in the hands of great teacher practitioners.
I’ve had a couple of interesting queries lately.
“Does anyone still use Hyperstudio?”
“Do we still teach keyboarding?”
I’m sure that those of you who know me, know how I responded. After all, I do a presentation called “The Answer to Every Question is Hyperstudio” and I am also obsessed with having students get the most from their computer experiences. It’s just so painful to see hunter and peckers try to keyboard an essay.
These are tough educational questions that are asked. Why does Ministry licensed WordPerfect, StarOffice or Appleworks lose its relevancy? Why does a piece of software released in 1982 still have a use in the classroom?
It begs two questions at least. When does software become useless? Does it become useless at the same time to everyone?
links for 2009-02-05
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Interactive SMART Board lessons
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Using the iPod and Podcasting in the Classroom
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15 of the most memorable, entertaining, and important commercials from past Super Bowls, in reverse chronological order.
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If your business or organisation requires clients to print and fill-in PDF or Word forms and documents, Doculicious can simplify the form completion for your clients, and give you the tools to track and process completed forms.
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Let the Twitter world know what you're listening to
Wireless
I’m preparing for a presentation to our Secondary School Computers in Education School contacts today.
Topics will include the rollout of:
- Learn 360 on demand video, audio
- ExploreLearning Mathematics Gizmos
- Band in a Box
- Finale
Oh, and an update on the wireless project.
Exhibit A – Doug goes wireless
Just a day in the life…except for the data projector where I should be sitting.
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