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Download hundreds of free audio books, mostly classics, to your mp3 player or computer. Below, you’ll find great works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry.
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The Bioscience Challenges: How do these issues affect your life?
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Type accent marks, diacritics and other characters online
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Photo manipulation is an art that requires lots of patience along with the expertise in Photoshop and other photo editing tools. With your creativity and imagination, you can manipulate any photograph the way you want! Now it’s all about your imagination and using Photoshop’s effects and other tools cleverly.
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PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people
mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard. -
Inspire and motivate your students to learn by giving them a whole new way to express ideas, tell stories, and collaborate creatively in a private online environment.
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Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, …..
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Suggestions for marking up poems using Google Docs.
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Last year for her birthday, I took Mrs. Zeke and the Zeke-letts on one of the Wrigley Field tours. It was a picture perfect day in late June. We met the tour guide under the marquee, and then did a 90 minute walking tour of the ballpark. We walked the concourse, sat in a suite, toured the pressbox, the bleachers, and the visiting team and Cubs clubhouses.
Monthly Archives: March 2010
No Credit
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that I’m a fan of Georgia Wonder. The music is so intriguing and their music is on a playlist on my iPod, for sure. Above and beyond the quality of the music, I’ve come to admire their transparency and use of social media and the internet to self-promote themselves. They also leverage the power of the web for distribution of their music.
In the past week, we’ve see the first results of their new project “Made in Nevada” with the release of the first song “No Credit”.
You can purchase and download the song right now from their Bandcamp site.
Or, you can view the video on YouTube.
The video demonstrates the musical talents of Julian and the wonderful voice of Stephanie with their new efforts. If you like the music and video, there’s more here. The first two albums are available from the iTunes store.
If you’re interested in their marketing approach, head over to their website at: http://www.gwonder.com. You’ll have an opportunity to check out their attempts to use social media to their fans. You’ll see YouTube video, podcasts, a blog, online retail, embedded audio, and more.
Social Bookmarks:
links for 2010-03-15
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Why archive your web content?
Your website is central to your communications with customers, partners, investors and regulators. From a legal perspective, your website content cannot be treated differently from other electronic files. LEARN MORE -
Use this site to freeze a page on the internet as it looks right now.
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Archive-It, a subscription service from the Internet Archive, allows institutions to build and preserve collections of born digital content. Through our user-friendly web application, Archive-It partners can harvest, catalog, manage, and browse their archived collections. Collections are hosted at the Internet Archive data center and are accessible to the public with full-text search.
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Search for free images to add to Wikipedia articles, or replace non-free images and placeholders.
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The English name of a number
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Create your own podcasts with phone or VOIP
My Childhood Community
I was inspired to do this from a project by ZeFrank called “A Childhood Walk”. I think that it’s a terrific concept and I’m going to try to replicate some of it here. As a child, we occasionally went for walks but were always on bicycle tooling around town. Recently, I was actually in my childhood town of Clinton and went out to take a picture of the Cowper Street sign for a friend of mine, @cowpernicus, who used it on his blog and shared it with his father who had never heard of a Cowper Street. Hey, we had that in Clinton, and more. What blew me away as I was sending him a Google map showing the place was that this small Ontario town had been mapped by Google’s Streetview. That makes today’s entry possible.
Today, I live 3 hours and 15 minutes from where I grew up. When asked by folks where it is, I’ll refer them to London and then Goderich which everyone apparently knows and point out that Clinton would be on the way to Goderich if you’re headed there from London. Then, they get it. Many had been there!
So, here are some fond memories. Picture a pack of us with brushcuts making this trip around town regularly.
Clinton Public School – I went to school here for 9 years from Kindergarten to Grade 8. There’s some new finishings on the exterior but the main office from where Mr. Gray ran the show is just through the main doors.
Central Huron Secondary School – This was my secondary school home and it still has some great memories ranging from high school dances, playing soccer, basketball, wrestling, and badminton. The school had the original building which you see on the right and then the modern addition to the left. The gyms were located straight through the main doors. I understand that the original building and library have been refinished. I’d enjoy seeing that some day.
Bartliff’s Bakery – Every town needs its gathering place and, after the Hotel Clinton burned, and probably even before that, it was Bartliff’s Bakery. You can still visit for the greatest of breakfasts and incredible coffee. But for us, it was for a daily afterschool bike ride to the back of the bakery for the baking mistakes and day olds. A friend of mine’s father, who was the baker, would invite us to take these things that weren’t saleable by their high standards.
Fleming’s Feed Mill – This place works non-stop it seems processing grains, beans, and making cattle feed. My father worked there for years in the evenings and on Saturday mornings.
Clinton Swimming Pool – What better way to pass hot summer afternoons and evenings that by swimming? We’d bike over and just lean the bikes against the fence. I don’t think I ever owned a bike chain back then. Later on, I’d get a job as a lifeguard and swimming instructor.
St. Paul’s Anglican Church – An incredible church landmark on Highway 8. You could find the family here every Sunday morning.
The Fort – I know that there’s nothing there but grass but picture an abandoned concrete block building with no windows or doors but two stories built just for hanging out. And we did. Superman had his Fortress of Solitude; we had ours.
The Fish and Game – This is as close as street view gets you but up the street and over what used to be train tracks would take you to a club with a small zoo-ish collection. I remember seeing peacocks, for example, and we would look forward to regular trips here.
This walk along memory lane is courtesy of my memories and images from Google Maps. Thanks to the original idea from ZeFrank. Particularly, if you have moved away from one location to another, it’s a great exercise to visualize things from the past.
I also like the concept in the classroom. Can your students build or tell a story composed of images from Google Maps? It’s one thing to type in an address and have the computer plot it on a map. But, it’s quite another to zoom in to StreetView where you need to get your bearings and orientation to get the picture perfect. How about documenting field trips? How about a tour of your province’s or county’s capital? How about landmarks? How about a new student to your class? Maybe it could be shared where they’re coming from or current students could give a tour of the new neighbourhood? There are opportunities at every street corner!
Social Bookmarks:
links for 2010-03-14
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Huge collection of videos suitable for kids.
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Paris 26 Gigapixels is a stitching of 2346 single photos showing a very high-resolution panoramic view of the French capital (354159×75570 px). Dive into the image and visit Paris like never before!
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Need a quick and easy way to share links and comments with your online followers? Start using the Social.com bookmarklet.
It takes just seconds to setup and you can send to Twitter, Delicious, and Ping.fm without leaving the page you are on. -
Cool concept – use Street View to reminisce about a walk that you used to take as a child.
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The Basic search help article covers all the most common issues, but sometimes you need a little bit more power. This document will highlight the more advanced features of Google Web Search. Have in mind though that even very advanced searchers, such as the members of the search group at Google, use these features less than 5% of the time. Basic simple search is often enough. As always, we use square brackets [ ] to denote queries, so [ to be or not to be ] is an example of a query
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StatusNet is the open source microblogging platform that helps you share and connect in real-time within your own domain.
With StatusNet you can encourage collaboration, build and engage your community, and be in command of your brand. -
After several years developing software, I have acquired a very a strong opinion on how software should be developed, I actually have come to the conclusion that everything boils down to 10 principles, that if well implemented, will make any software development successful.
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A recent MarketingProfs poll showed that more than eight in 10 Twitter users, most of whom represent small business, expect their company’s use of Twitter to increase in the next six months.
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A project-based approach to science and math activities is enjoyable for every student and teacher involved. Fun activities, supported by making connections with concepts promote learning. Over the past decade an increasing number of studies have shown the positive impact of project-based learning on student achievement.
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Everybody knows that the value of pi is 3.14…er, something, but how many people know where the ratio came from?
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Huge collection of student videos
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Facebook has become quite familiar with legal proceedings in recent years, but the site may soon be reversing its accustomed role as the defendant. In response to a derogatory and inflammatory piece (of tripe) in the U.K.'s Daily Mail,
Report Card Comments
Yesterday, I had a quick back and forth with @irasocol about innovation in education. He had made a comment about parents wishing to have the same type of education that they had without all of this new Web 2.0 innovation stuff thrown in. But, you know, we agreed that our education has been filled with moments where teachers have tried new to them ways to innovate in the classroom. We’re still covering the material for the bean counters but the name of the game has always been opportunities for engagement to increased interest in the materials.
At the end of the term or semester, teachers do have to report back to parents for accountability purposes. Have our report card comments changed to keep up with things? Perhaps the following might help as we move from old school comments to those that reflect what is happening in classrooms.
![529141904_e7b741a343[1]](http://dougpete.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/529141904_e7b741a3431.jpg "529141904_e7b741a343[1]")
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bbaunach/ / CC BY 2.0
“Plays well with others” – H/She set up a private wiki for the study of immigration and used it with his/er group to collaborate on their final presentation.
“Uses unethical computer technique” – H/She discovered some gaping security holes in our school network and explained to the IT Department how to plug them.
“Cheats by using Google” – During our unit on Confederation, h/she found all of the answers to the questions by using Google on his/er mobile device. I’ve learned not to put simple memory recall questions on the test.
“Organizes thoughts effectively” – By using an online graphic organizer, h/she was able to collect input on the outline of his/er essay and this resulted in a more thorough discussion about Green Industries.
“Analyzes data” – During our study of pit bulls, h/she conducted an online poll to collect opinions of this animal from students around the globe.
“Composes original music” – Using an online music editor and resources from Creative Commons sources, h/she was able to create an original composition by remixing their efforts.
Are we ready to be this transparent with our innovations?
Social Bookmarks:
links for 2010-03-13
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A great documentary of what happened on Sept 11, 2001 when planes were redirected to Newfoundland Canada. Commentary by Tom Brokaw of NBC news.
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Online free file sharing service
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It was amazing to me that today’s children often don’t know the difference between tomatoes and potatoes – how is it that that is possible? Has society really changed so much that we are living in a time where we don’t have either the time, the resources or the ability to teach out kids about vegetables, fruit and healthy eating?
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Free numeracy games for students aged 9-13
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This article, which is HUGE by the way, aims to be a one-stop destination for all things YouTube. It covers numerous tricks, hacks, tools and apps for YouTube fans. The guide is long, detailed and informative.
Virtual Conference Attending
Without a doubt, one of my favourite computer conferences to attend is the one put on my the Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning organization, or MACUL. It’s held in the spring of the year and annually attracts a large number of educators. We’ve always joked about MACUL and its love for rivers. You see, it bounces between Cobo Centre in Detroit overlooking the Detroit River and DeVos Place in Grand Rapids on the Grand. Both locations are world-class sites and, in order to say that you’ve been to the MACUL Conference, you really need to attend a session at both locations.
The Detroit location is most convenient for me – a quick hop onto the Tunnel bus takes you under the Detroit River, through Customs, where you re-board to continue the trip which stops right at the front door of Cobo Centre.
For the last part of the past week, however, the locale was Grand Rapids. Due to commitments here, I wasn’t able to attend physically but did my best to stay on top of things by following the hashtag #MACUL10. I created a TwapperKeeper here to review things but this morning, I found that someone had assembled all of the tagged tweets into a Google Docs (a big doc at 90 pages) here using “What’s the Hash Tag”. Check out the stats…there’s no question as to when the conference was, is there?
A large part of my interest with the MACUL group is how innovative I find the things that they’re doing. The group is very friendly and the sessions always seems to have a comfortable feel to them. Few people are there on grants or trying to sell things; it’s largely just great educators sharing new ideas and what they’re doing with them.
I really missed not going this year physically but did tag along virtually. Even though we were headed into our March Break, Thursday and Friday were very busy for me but things had calmed down as schools closed up for the break. I was able to hop in and at least connect to the Hall Davidson closing keynote. A couple of Tweets reminded folks that it was being covered live via live blogging using CoverItLive here. You can replay the session any time to get a sense of what was happening. Interestingly, I sent out a Twitter message to anyone who wanted to follow along and was immediately direct messaged by a couple of people in the audience who wondered if I was in the room and wanted to meet up.
The session appeared to be classic Hall. He always tries to engage his audience is the activities. I remember at ECOO when my friend Nazreen nominated me to come up on the stage so that Hall could demonstrate some green screening. The effect was less than stellar as I was wearing my green and blue plaid shirt! But, the show goes one. Yesterday, there was a couple of things that I saw, er visualized, happening…one was an experiment creating the American national anthem via audience cell phones and Google Voice (I really wish I could have seen that – live blogging didn’t do it justice – perhaps a reader of this entry was in the audience and could share…) and an attempt to talk about a “dream lesson” using a collaborative document posted here.
I did send those links out live but was trying to visualize just what was happening in the audience. The live blogging was the next best thing to being there. Many thanks to those who kept the stream alive for those of us who were following along – Ben Rimes, Steve Dembo, Pam Shoemaker, Kevin Clark, Steve Dickie, and Tom. I really appreciated your efforts in making this real conference virtual for those of us who couldn’t attend in person. I do hope to attend next year when it’s back in Detroit.
Social Bookmarks:
links for 2010-03-12
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Get your daily dose of internet culture
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Your audience is tweeting
How do you draw them into your presentation? By asking for their opinion, and displaying their tweets directly in your slides. With Poll Everywhere, you can invite people to tweet a short comment directly to your slide in real-time, while still blocking inappropriate or off-topic tweets. You can also ask multiple choice questions and watch a graph evolve as people vote. -
Facebook continues to update its privacy policies. Every time Facebook makes a change, parents and kids should immediately take the time to redo or review their privacy settings.
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With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties. See examples of how you can use Google Insights for Search.
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For one year, twelve cows on a dairy farmTwitter about their lactation cycle and robotic milking activities.
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Carbon-Dioxide emissions Clocks
(Since visiting, this year, or since 1750.) (customizable) -
World Clock
A visual map of the world's time -
Smithsonian for kids – interactive Flash environment
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Sharendipity is a web based creativity suite where anyone can build and deploy engaging and interactive web applications.
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Upload your music and collect your royalities
Just Cool Artsy Things
It’s been a long week and as I sit and unwind, I come across the Textorizer. I know that I get overly interested when I play with something over and over. This was the case here. The online version is at the link referred to previously and there’s a downloadable application available here.
The concept is not new. 
We’ve been using alternative ways to express art for a long time. I recall when I was a Business Education head that our keyboarding teachers did something along this line. Turns out – the concept goes back AT LEAST to 1948.
I’m a real sucker for visualizations, I guess and so therein lies the interest in this.
A few years ago, our incredibly talented graphic artist created the GEC Computers in the Classroom logo for me.
I think it’s a great logo, in itself, and use it all over the place on my website.
But, the Textorizer let’s me add a new twist to it. Just provide it with a JPG or other graphic and provide your collection of words to be used in the construction of your output visualized image. You can also let the program know how many strokes are necessary for the drawing. The result? See for yourself – a pretty funky and artistic rendition of the original.
Don’t you just love modern art?
Social Bookmarks:
