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Sharing Stories with Google Earth
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Join in and surround the world
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Ideas for 2020. Why are we doing this?
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Carbon footprint calculations are typically based on annual emissions from the previous 12 months
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My Footprint takes a measure of your lifestyle pattern through 27 simple questions. The result is likened to the amount of land and ocean area that would be needed to sustain your way of life. The ecological footprint is measured in global hectares or global acres. What you swallow from the Earth is also calculated across categories like home energy use and transportation, food, housing, and goods and services.
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Zerofootprint's mission is to develop the software, technology, design, and rigorous risk management that together will achieve a massive reduction of our environmental footprint.
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Worried about your impact on the environment? The way we use the planet's resources makes up our ecological footprint. Measuring yours takes less than 5 minutes and could set you on a life-changing journey
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Follow the quiz and see the image you are having on the Planet
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WattzOn is a free online tool to quantify, track, compare and understand the total amount of energy needed to support all of the facets of your lifestyle
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Be a leader in the fight against climate change: select our presets and offset your carbon footprint today!
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Talking Points Memo is one of the most innovative political news organizations in the country. Media watchers consider TPM the site to watch as the news business transforms from the old world of print to the online digital future. In March 2009 TPM topped TIME Magazine's list of 25 Best Blogs of 2009. "Talking Points," wrote Time's editors, "has become the prototype of what a successful Web-based news organization is likely to be in the future." And in September of 2009 The Atlantic listed founder Josh Marshall among the nation's 50 most influential commentators.
Its combination of breaking news, investigative reporting and smart analysis have made it a must-read for DC insiders, the media who cover them and politically engaged people everywhere. -
Plagiarism is one of academia's most common problems and a constant concern for teachers. While the Web may have made plagiarism as easy as a few simple clicks, it's also made detecting plagiarism just as easy. If a student can find the essay in seconds, so can you—if you know where to look.
Monthly Archives: April 2010
Tell a Story
A new feature of Google adds considerable excitement to the whole search process with huge overtones for the classroom. Huge.
One of my favourite albeit condescending application in this realm is “Let Me Google That For You“. It’s a great answer when you get the question – do you know about …? from someone who is too lazy to use a search engine for their own purposes.
From Google comes a new feature. If you saw the advertisement during the SuperBowl, then you’ve already got a flavour for it.
Head over to Google Search Stories to begin. In the example below, I used the custom template to create some Google search terms for where you might expect to see any content that I’ve ever created and posted to the internet. Then, it’s just a matter of picking the appropriate music and let the application do its thing. The result is a movie that you can post to YouTube.
That was amazingly easy to do. Now, where could you possibly use it in education?
Portfolio
Suppose you are indeed a great creator of content. Why not use this facility to quickly create a movie to show others where you are and how to get there? It adds a whole new dimension to the concept of being “Google-able”, doesn’t it? If you’re not giving back, you’re - well – hard to Google.
Research Bibliography
I really like this concept. If the current project involves elements of student research to find digital artifacts as part of their studies, use this utility to demonstrate to the teacher exactly what search terms that they used to feed their research. If the students are indeed pulling down articles from various internet resources for their works, why not embed this at the end of the report on the class wiki. Since the length of the movie created is dependent upon the number of searches created, perhaps a nice side effect is a richer depth of research as they try to find the best resources.
School Website Enhancement
Related to the concept of a personal portfolio, how about a video about your school or organization? If you’re active and have a dynamic presence in the community, creating content, or want to show off teacher wikis and blog, why not search for them and put together a nice montage suitable for embedding?
It’s a fun web application, to be sure. But, I think used properly, there could be terrific enhancements to the research and reporting process.
How could you see it working?
Social Bookmarks:
links for 2010-04-13
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America might be one of the youngest geopolitical nations around, but we’ve still got some interesting history to discover. Thanks to a partnership between Foursquare and the History Channel, some of the app’s users will get to learn a lot more about the history of their checkin locations over the next couple months.
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Image Resizing at a New Level
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THE HTML5 TEST – HOW WELL DOES YOUR BROWSER SUPPORT HTML5?
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Share all your routes with the world
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rsizr is a Flash application that lets you resize JPG, PNG, and GIF images on your computer. With rsizr, in addition to normal image rescaling and cropping, you can also resize images using a new image resizing algorithm called seam carving (a method of image retargeting) that tries to keep intact areas in your image that are richer in detail.
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Collection of digital storytelling resources
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Here you will find curriculum resources developed by the PlaceNames Project. Click on the links below to download.
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WRDSB Library Learning Commons Site
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Desktop Integration with the cloud is hot news. Ubuntu One is a great example of this. Currently Ubuntu One integrates file storage, contacts and notes sync, and now you can even buy music from the online store, delivered straight to the Rythmbox media player. But for some devices, integration with the cloud isn't just a nice feature, it completely changes the user experience (UX).
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Financial literacy. Here is a great opportunity to address two pressing concerns at once: financial illiteracy amongst some youngsters, and one particular area of digital safety. Yet in trawling the internet and skim-reading a few documents, the only reference I could find to teaching young people about guarding themselves against financial predators on the internet , as opposed to sexual ones, was in an Australian paper published in 2003!
Mark Up That Globe
You need Java to see Globe Applet.
If that isn’t cool enough, the project allows you to stick little pins into your globe. These pins are identifed by their latitude and longitude. In its simplicity, we just identify places.
But…
Each of the little pins could also be tied to a URL. In the second example on this page, I’ve painstakingly visited each of the Canadian Capital cities with a GPS unit to find its location and tied it to the city’s main webpage. (Or used Google Earth to come to a close value) Choose your version of my story!
Double click on the base of each pin to visit the capital cities of the provinces and territories.
You need Java to see Globe Applet.
What a way to make Geography or History come alive.
Use research to identify student origins or explorer’s travels or current events or…
Or, you could just zoom in on Antarctica and see it in whatever context you wish for the first time.
Geosphere is downloadable from http://sourceforge.net/projects/hm-geosphere and instructions for installation and creation of the file for your stick pins are included in the documentation.
Download it and give it a shot. If you’re interested in the file with the latitude and longitude for the Canadian Capital cities, you can download it from here.
links for 2010-04-12
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Have you ever wanted to just make music
online with your friends in real-time?
Well, now it's possible. -
The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is an Open Source project based at Tufts University. The VUE project is focused on creating flexible tools for managing and integrating digital resources in support of teaching, learning and research. VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information.
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If you have a hunger for nodes, now is the time for a secret taste test. Sign up to be a beta tester, cook up your own special sauce, and keep checking back for improvements and new features. Your key to the kitchen gives you access to a buffet of tools and recipes that are sure to kick your website up a notch.
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Many find it interesting to glimpse inside the lives of famous thinkers in an effort to understand where such thought and intelligence is rooted. In that vein, here is a peek into the routines and rituals that writers, philosophers, and statesmen have depended on to keep their work on track and their thoughts flowing. Whether you need inspiration to make it through the next college semester or are working on a future best-selling novel, explore these daily rituals you may want to incorporate into your life.
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Did you know you can store notes to read on your iPod? They're very readable, but cumbersome to create. So we created this web page to make it super-simple.
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Digital Teaching Tools – Your Keys to Improved Instruction
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Ten Steps for Better Web Research
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Google has announced that it has rebuilt Google Docs from the ground-up. The result is a massive overhaul of Google Docs, including completely redesigned spreadsheet, document, and drawing editors, group chat functionality, and the ability to collaborate with real-time character-by-character mark-up, much like Google Wave. You can preview the new changes, starting today.
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One big thing Ubuntu can teach Microsoft, Apple, and all CTOs | Tech Sanity Check | TechRepublic.comUbuntu has earned a reputation as the most user-friendly version of Linux on the planet, but I would argue that the secret of success for Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) is not really about a great UI or an extensive hardware compatibility list.
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Kids are leading the world's transition to digital media.
This is in part because kids aren't afraid of technology, and, in part, because kids haven't spent years getting use to anything else.
A Challenging Weekend
We Petersons are an incredibly competitive group. I attribute it to my parents. After all, we used to have to play Bridge after church on Sundays, I think we owned every board game ever invented, and Peterson Christmas with my aunts and uncles was just one big rotating circus of Euchre games. It’s amazing that I married who I did. Her family counts with fives. Good Grief!
It was my kids that convinced me that I should invest time in a Facebook account. Daaaaaad, we can play Scrabble and Word Twist. There goes time every day being humbled repeatedly by my daughters.
So, it comes as no surprise when the oldest one – let’s call her The Weasel sent me a message a couple of weeks ago. Dad, do you have this app called Word with Friends? We could play a word game on our iPods without even going on the computer. Her iPod has become her constant companion and it sure gets a workout.
This weekend, it got a really intensive workout with two applications. First, there was Words with Friends. To her mother’s chagrin, we would even challenge each other from one end of the couch to another. The game was so hot and heavy and active, that I knew that I could grab an overlay of an announcement that it was my turn as I was composing a Twitter message to that effect.
It was great fun, back and forth, and I seem to be the master of this game — for now. The Weaze also likes the feature of taking on random competitors from the Internet to improve her game. Myself, I noticed a tweet from @elemenous inviting people to challenge her, so I had a game with her as well. I can’t speak highly enough of this application for engagement. The advertising in the free version is a little “in your face”, but it’s a great app.
Our weekend got even more competitive. I read a Twitter message from @CanadaCool. I checked out the statement and was impressed and retweeted it. After all, good success and innovation needs to be promoted.
Then, I downloaded this app. My first impression – yeah, it was created by an 18-year-old. The crude graphics looked that way. But, an hour of poking around later made me realize that it wasn’t about the graphics. This was a real noodle scratcher.
It just kept getting more and more difficult and more and more fun. Games like this are a real challenge to me. After all, how could an iPod outsmart me. Grrrrrr.
Then, I showed The Weasel the application and she was off to the races. Now, we’re again in the same room furiously tap, tap, tapping our way through the puzzles. When my wife joined us, we got the obligatory “nerds” comment but we were busy trying to one up each other. Eventually, we both did go our separate ways. However, the telephone was put to use to convey strategies and ideas for some of the more challenging levels.
Whew! It’s almost relaxing to go to work and get behind the content filter which takes all the fun out of using these things.
I would encourage you to check out both applications – but make sure that you have disposable time to enjoy them.
Words with Friends – Challenge me if you do download this.
The Impossible Test – Don’t read the spoilers until you’ve worked with the app for a while.
Social Bookmarks:
links for 2010-04-11
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I’m always amazed that more people don’t know the little tricks you can use to get more out of a simple Google search. Here are 10 of my favorites.
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In 2006, Finland's pupils scored the highest average results in science and reading in the whole of the developed world. In the OECD's exams for 15 year-olds, known as PISA, they also came second in maths, beaten only by teenagers in South Korea.
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iPhone apps generate a lot of buzz in this Apple world of ours, whether they’re useful, entertaining, offensive or just plain expensive. Below is a list of the ten most expensive iPhone apps. Are they useful? In some cases, that’s debatable. After all, the most expensive iPhone app in the App Store’s brief history was little more than a screen saver—that is, before Apple pulled it following user complaints
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To separate the proper musical apps from some less desirable offerings, we’ve highlighted 10 great iPhone apps that provide a darn good musical experience on your handset.
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Columbus and Magellan had it rough. Exploration these days is quite literally an armchair activity, as high-resolution satellite images and tools like Google Earth make it possible for anyone with an Internet connection to pore over the globe with a fine-toothed comb. There are entire online communities devoted to finding and cataloging the most unusual locales worldwide, creating 21st century atlases of minutiae. It isn't just for hobbyists, either — Google Earth has helped scientists find previously unknown ruins and police locate clandestine marijuana fields. Here are 10 of the most unusual discoveries.
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Google Earth lets you fly anywhere on the Earth to view satellite images, maps, terrain, 3D buildings, from galaxies in outer space to the canyons of the ocean. You can explore rich geographical content, save your toured places and share with others. This amazing software allows you to search the whole planet right from your comfortable rooms. Fans of Google Earth have been on a virtual searching chase looking for anything interesting and amazing. Here we have collected some of the mind blowing and spectacular sights to mesmerize you. Enjoy and feel free to share it with others.
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Texas Stadium, the longtime home of the Dallas Cowboys, was demolished early this morning — and construction workers invited the public to view (and film) the event live.
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We've got easy-to-integrate hosted apps that can bring powerful new features and functionality to your site. On your domain. In minutes. No coding involved. We're compatible with WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type, and any other publishing system!
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Follow For A Day is simple. Follow a random twitter user for one day, then switch to the next. And the best part? We'll do all the work for you! Join us now!
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Create your own search stories
Self Correcting
Wikipedia takes so much abuse from “real researchers”. This is based on a number of things but one is that “not all the facts are true and verifiable” and “anyone can add or edit anything”. If you take this to its logical conclusion, you’ll get the impression that it’s a place bereft of value and to be avoided at all costs.
Those who argue in favour of its value point to the fact that Wikipedia is quick to respond to new information; yes there may be incorrect facts but look at the big encyclopedias; and the community will correct inaccuracies.
I awoke this morning to read a Twitter message from one of the folks that I follow, PragueBob, who provides interesting and insightful commentary from Europe.
My immediate thought was “Isn’t that the airplane that Lech Kaczyński was on?” So, to verify, I did an internet search and the Wikipedia was the first entry and there was an entry about this particular aircraft and its history.
The accounting is a very in-depth reporting on this model and its 40 year history. Like most aircraft, there were various revisions to the aircraft and it had been deployed in many different situations ans scenarios other than just a commercial transport carrier.
In addition to the facts about the past history of the aircraft, there was also an entry about the accident that happened this weekend. Now, this speaks so loudly to the fact that a community edited encyclopedia is fast and responsive to current events. But, formal investigations have just begun. Events like this can take a long time to get to all of the details. Part of the text from the article appears below in italics.
In January 2010, Russian national carrier Aeroflot announced the retirement of its Tu-154 fleet after almost 40 years of service (pre-production deliveries began in 1970), with the last flight operated by Aeroflot Flight 736 from Ekaterinburg to Moscow on 31 December 2009.[citation needed] As of April 2010, 28 of the type have been involved in fatal accidents, including one involving the President of Poland. According to the BBC and aviation expert Paul Duffy the Tu-154 has an average safety record for its type and length of service especially considering its heavy use in the most demanding conditions often with poor air traffic control; of the 28 aircraft lost to accident few appear to have been due to technical failure.[citation needed] 10th of April 2010 the same Tupolev has been crashed near Smolensk’s airport killing all of 96 passangers including President of Poland Lech Kaczynski, his wife and top polish government.
If you look closely, this entry is indeed topical and very responsive to this unfortunate incident. But, and it’s a big but and so worthy of note, the Wikipedia community is not going to let this entry go unchallenged and unverified. There are demands for appropriate citations. These statements are not going to be accepted as truth without proper research. The community will respond and this will be a living, breathing entry that will provide the appropriate level of detail.
I won’t name names but I did a similar search on another encyclopedia that one would normally associate as a credible source and got … nothing. It its defence, I’m sure that there are a team working on this and there will eventually be a report suitable for inclusion.
The difference between these two sources, it seems to me, is the ability to respond quickly with accurate facts.
Which source would you use? Which source would your students use? What would Google do? How do you balance accuracy with immediacy? How responsive to current events does an encyclopedia need to be?
Tupolev Tu-154. (2010, April 11). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 10:02, April 11, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tupolev_Tu-154&oldid=355301518
Social Bookmarks:
links for 2010-04-10
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Below are Bible-related maps that use the Google Maps API. The maps will load quickly with Firefox or Netscape browsers. With the Internet Explorer browser, the maps can take longer to load.
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Use TwimeMachine to easily browse through your old tweets. Read what you said ages ago.
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This cool video tracks air travel traffic over a 24-hour period. While there are regions, like North America and Europe, that are particularly crisscrossed with flights, the overall impression is this is one busy planet.
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Finding free iPod Touch apps and games to use in Math classes can be a frustrating and time consuming venture. Many have limited functionality or are littered with ads for the paid versions. However, not all apps are like that. The following are my pick for the top 10 iPod Touch apps. All of them are free, and all have legitimate uses for Math teachers and their students.
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Dvolver creates creativity tools. Have you ever wanted to direct your own movie? No problem. Our MovieMaker helps you make a movie in a few simple steps. When your opus is complete send it to a friend. Or, post it to your website or myspace page.
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Our selection of the 10 most popular YouTube videos about the Web is of course based on page views. But we also filtered the results for videos that are most true to explaining the big-picture version of what the Web is. The selection includes some of the most creative ways the growth of the Web has ever been explained
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I've always had one pet peeve — when designing onlines courses, we instructional designers often try to do everything within a Flash-based elearning course. Somehow I feel we need to think beyond the Flash shell and rather design learning 'experiences' than just courses. When we start appreciate the concept of learning experiences, it automatically helps us think beyond the context of the elearning shell
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Fun activity to find out what happened during the year you were born.
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notapipe.net is a web service that allows you to edit text files in a realtime collaborative environment, from everywhere
multiple users can edit the same document simultaneously and changes are near instantly dispatched to every connected user.
Enjoy a new way of working together on the same text and increase your team productivity.See Plans and Pric
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One of the things I love about instructional design is that it engages me both analytically and creatively.
The up-front analysis and the evaluation components allow me to flex my analytical muscles. The challenge of applying evidence-based practices to a defined set of performance requirements prompts me to stretch creatively.
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One of the ways of getting your business (or yourself) out there to the masses is with business cards. Whether you're passing them out at conventions, conferences or business lunches, your business card can make a great first impression.
Some of the most innovative, creative business cards just so happen to be the geekiest. So check out these 10 geeky business cards that are sure to leave a lasting impression:
It’s just an add-in or is it?
I’ve expressed my thoughts and hopes for the future and HTML5 before. Like many people, I get frustrated with the flurry of requests for updates to Flash that seemed to come quite frequently a while back. To be fair, I haven’t been nagged to update for a little while so I’m hoping that the security issues, etc., have been resolved. Performance has always been a concern (my MacBook Pro fires up the cooling fans for intense Flash experiences) but I can reconcile it knowing that the resulting interactive experience will be worth it. I think that ultimately HTML5 will win out unless Adobe does something big and develops a new interactive paradigm that keeps Flash as a viable alternative.
That’s all in the future though. At present, there are options like YouTube that let you flip into HTML5 for your browsing experience but you’re warned going in that it’s still beta and you are limited to a certain set of browsers in order to run it. The interactive experience is still largely supported by Flash. Of that, there is no doubt.
Unless you’re using an Apple portable device, of course.
The iPod and its family do not support Flash. I’ve bemoaned that for a while but it’s the reality if you’re using that platform. This article from Cnet provides some insight into the thinking that has gone into the deliberate design not to allow Flash support. Yesterday, hot and heavy, was reference to a blog post from an Adobe evangelist from the other side of the situation. From my perspective, it’s pretty sad to see two industry leaders duking it out so publically.
I really enjoy the portability of my iPod and the ability to pull it from my pocket and use it so seamlessly in my daily life. From an end user perspective, though, it is frustrating to see the “little blue box” indicating that there’s a missing add-in element. Throughout my own web publishing, I do have Flash elements like this from our Student Reference Portal. It’s not a terribly big issue; I had written some of this a few years back when I was learning Actionscript and it was handy to include that element in any page that I wanted. Fortunately, few of the public pages are totally written in Flash and so I’ll have to plug away at compatibility over the next while. I had put off doing this awaiting the release of the iPad and insights to OS4 for the iPod but Flash support doesn’t appear forthcoming.
Overall, I’m really disappointed that the support for Flash isn’t there and not indeed not forthcoming. Without it, the complete web experience isn’t there. It’s frustratingly not there for education. I keep hearing that the iPad is a game changer. It begs the question “what game?” At $499US, I get a limited access to the game. For fewer dollars, I can go to a legitimate computer and get it all. With these other devices, I have to pick and choose.
For example, check out Stonehenge or the Sistine Chapel or this great Prezi “Math is not linear” or the “Interactive Period Table of the Elements” or any other interactive learning environment. Right now, you’re relegated to developing a “Plan B” if you had planned to incorporate this into a lesson.
I’m certainly further removed from the situation than Lee Brimelow. But, I’m close enough to try and weigh my needs. No doubt, there are issues on all sides of this discussion. In a few years, it may be that this has all been resolved and we’re all happy again. Right now, you’re forced to make the decision about whether Flash capabilities are just an add-in that can be worked around or whether it completes the web experience for you and you have to have it. As of the news this morning, 450,000 folks have decided the former.
Social Bookmarks:
