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Show your Twitter friends on a map that can be easily added to your blog's sidebar. There's more information at http://www.mmmeeja.com/blog/social-networking/twitter-followers-map.html
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Good discussion about QR Codes – what they are and potentially where they may be used.
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It is a common-known fact that teaching is a labor of love for most educators. They are overworked and under-appreciated and many of them spend their own money, time and energy to improve their students’ education. With all of the new mobile tools on the market today, teachers can more easily work from satellite locations, share educational resources and access school-related data directly from their cell phones. Here are 100 mobile tools for teachers that make the grade.
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Websites that support education are limitless. Locating the sites that meet your classroom or student needs can be time-consuming.
Using refined searching with google can provide sites to meet your needs, but try some of these resources as well. -
Ever wish you could easily receive big files from anyone? Now you can!
Together with Dropbox you can setup an unique upload address with password protection.
DROPitTOme is your one stop solution when an email is just not enough. -
Mac OS X security flaw publicized after Apple fails to patch
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If your blog needs a face lift, the creative types who power the web are here to help. Sometimes a few well-designed, tastefully placed icons can add a little class or creativity to an otherwise neutral theme.
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Use our bookmarklet to save any video, and watch it later. It is incredibly quick
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Use these free music tracks
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18 Iconic Products That America Doesn't Make Anymore
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His topics spanned what he calls “app phones” (not Smartphones), Twitter, advertising and include plugs for the apps he loves best.
Here is what I learned captured using Conversion Sciences InstaGraph infograph technology. -
Unlike the United States (data.gov) and Britain (data.gov.uk), Canada has no open data strategy. This must change. Canadians paid for the information gathered about our country, ourselves and our government. Free access to it could help stimulate our economy and enhance our democracy.
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Turn conversation into knowledge
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Google feature lets people see pictures of websites before clicking
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Games are inherently social — we like to post our high scores, compete against our friends, or simply share our digital exploits. But “social gaming” is a relatively new genre of games that is all about interacting, sharing, and connecting with friends.
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U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan today released the U.S. Department of Education's plan for transforming American education through technology, a process that would create an engaging state-of-the-art, cradle-to-college school system nationwide.
Monthly Archives: November 2010
Western RCAC Symposium 2010
Every year, the Western Regional Computer Advisory Committee hosts a one day Symposium of teaching with technology for leaders in the South Western Ontario Region of Ontario. The plans have been finalized and we’re looking forward to the day and welcoming ~400 principals and educational leaders on Thursday, December 9.
The venue is again the beautiful Lamplighter Inn in London, Ontario. The events of the day include a couple of external perspectives through keynote addresses and then breakout sessions highlighting some of the great things that are happening in schools from Windsor to Waterloo; St. Thomas to Owen Sound.
Keynote addresses this year will focus on our students. Ian Jukes (@ijukes) will explain why today’s students are not the children that our current schools are designed for and will offer suggestions about how to address this. And, Angela Maeirs (@angelamaiers) will help us understand the “Habitudes” of a 21st Century Learner so that the table can be set for success for them.
Breakout sessions will provide ideas for motivation and leadership for schools showing actual practice in Ontario.
- Literacy is not Enough; 21 Century Fluency for the Digital Age
- iPad in the Classroom
- Tapping into Your Curiosity, Imagination, and Expertise
- Facebook in Waterloo Classrooms
- A Personal Learning Network for Principals
- Knowledge Ontario Update
- Live Scribe Pens in the Classroom TLLP Project
- Getting it Right: Aligning Technology Initiatives for Measurable Student Results
- Young Minds, Digital Times
- Getting Along Digitally – WECDSB Peer–Led Electronics Awareness Program
- The Writing Process and Assessment with Turn-It-In.com
- Read Alouds and the Interactive Whiteboard
- Have you seen the OERB lately?
We are excited by the program this year and know that the audience for the day will leave inspired and motivated. Registration is now open and complete details about the day are available on the Western Regional Computer Advisory Committee website.
links for 2010-11-09
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Put singing at the heart of every child's learning. Register with Sing Up and get the most out of our Resources:
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If you're looking for inexpensive science supplies, easy science experiments, hands-on science workshops for teachers, science toys, or eye-catching science fair projects, you've come to the right place. Steve Spangler Science offers hundreds of science experiments and science demos that inspire the imagination and make learning fun
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Welcome to our guidebook for parents! It’s designed to help you understand what Facebook is and how to use it safely. With it, you will be better informed and able to communicate with young Facebook users in your life more effectively. That's important because 1) if something goes wrong, we want our children to come to us and 2) as the Internet becomes increasingly social and mobile, a parent’s guidance and support are ever more key to young people’s well-being in social media and technology.
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When CivilizationTM IV (Firaxis Games, published by Take2) was announced, one of the most exciting features was that much of the scripting code will be in python, and the game data in XML. This tutorial attempts to teach you the basics of python programming that you could use with civIV.
Of course, this tutorial is not limited to those who want to play a slow-paced turn-based strategy game. That is what it was written for, but is perfectly useful to any person with no programming knowledge at all, who wants to learn python. But what makes this tutorial unique, is that it is written for beginners, by a beginner.
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Reading:"A product of the system | ZDNet" http://j.mp/9SYFtY
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Wondershare QuizCreator is a Flash Test maker that enables trainers and educators to make quizzes for online testing. You can integrate multimedia objects into your quizzes. Also, you can track the quiz results and analyze the statistic report with Quiz Management System (QMS).
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Our Top 40 is now a Top 10. We asked you to vote for the books you most wanted to see on Canada Reads — the Essential Top 10 Canadian Novels of the Decade, if you will
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This site saves you time and money by optimizing complex driving routes involving up to twenty-five different addresses. Often referred to as the "Travelling Salesman Problem", our logistics algorithms find the quickest route or the shortest route for you.
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I gave my students a one line google survey at the start of the year asking one question.
What should every teacher know about you?
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Mythbusters and FAQs about Google Applications for Education
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Hillarious – especially Waldo:"Funny Web Comics About Twitter & Social Media | check it out!" http://j.mp/cbrgzG
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Get addicted to social studying
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Spreadsheet data can tell compelling stories when placed into charts and other visualizations. Today we’re excited to announce a new editor for charts, redesigned from the ground up as well as a set of new chart types.
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Before George Washington University renewed its iTunes U contract, the administration wanted to know how the podcasts impacted student learning and engagement.
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DropMocks is the easiest way to create and share beautiful image galleries online.
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A Livebinders for Creative Commons resources
Evaluating My Blog
It was with interest that I read Kim Cofino’s blog entry the other day entitled "Creating a Blogging Scope and Sequence". I think that the intent was to provide a sense of academic rigour in the process. This followed on a message that an Ontario Educator, @danikabarker, had sent out indicating that she was marking blog posts.
I’ve seen a number of rubric creations that people use to assess blogs and they do serve to remind me that I’m not a teacher of English! I do understand the need for an assessment if creating a blog or responding to blog posts are part of the criteria for a course. All of this follows, of course, on a little forth and back that I had with Jenny Luca about academic rigour in terms of references, etc., for blog creation.
All of this really is interesting – after all, blogging is something that we’ve contrived relatively recently as a reading, writing, and responding mechanism. So, it does make sense that there is an attempt to put a number or letter on things for classroom reporting. I recall a conversation that I had with an A&E person who indicated that "if it wasn’t assessed, it wasn’t taught". I really had difficulty with the logic because just it was "taught" doesn’t necessarily mean that it was "learned". But, it wasn’t the first time that I had disagreed with this person.
So, if we’re going to do some sort of assessment, I guess the question should be "what for?" I can see where there may be some who would consider this a culminating activity. Perhaps the actual "words to blog" action could be. If we see a blog as an area to develop and share concepts, and an ongoing process, I would hope that it’s more of a formative assessment with the goal of making the writer more reflective and to use the tools, along with reader feedback, as an ongoing area for improvement.
As more classrooms include blogging as an academic exercise, maybe it’s time to define just what it is we mean when we say "blog". In her post, Kim quotes from Will Richardson’s Blogs, Wikis, Podcast and Other Powerful Web Tools for the Classroom book on page 32.
Now, I have great respect for all of the folks that I’ve referenced above so I thought that maybe it would be interesting to evaluate my own blog. I was all set to go when another voice who I greatly respect, Stephen Downes, comments on Kim’s original post as "For the record, the things she says are not blogging, are blogging."
So, where does one start? I go back to my A&E resource who indicated once that "there need to be clearly defined targets" that students can aim for.
I don’t think that it’s going too far out on a limb that all of the above want to push bloggers towards #8 in the list above. As I reflect on this blog, I surely can see 2, 3, and 4 on a regular basis. In fact, it’s my goal that once a day I use this blog to share what I’m finding on the internet with the hope that it is of value to other. For the most part, I would suggest that my ramblings are 5 and 6. I guess that I just have to learn to live with the word "simple".
And yet, there is another side to all of this. It seems to me that the value of blogging is in the value that readers have to the blog itself. This manifests itself in a number of ways. There’s nothing like the thrill that comes when someone writes a reply or mentions the writing on Twitter encouraging others to read the content. From a quantitative perspective, the statistics that most blogging platforms provide real numbers as an indication of the value of the content. If the goal of blogging is to start or continue the discussion, shouldn’t the level of engagement that results be the ultimate assessment tool?
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links for 2010-11-08
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Firefox Extension BlackSheep Detects And Protects You From Firesheep
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The power of a torrent search engine for all your torrent needs.
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A Silicon Valley start-up is entering one of the most hotly contested software markets — Web browsers — with a strategy to integrate social networking and other features that have changed the way people use the Internet.
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This week, three of our teachers are giving the two morning lectures to 350 first year education students at the University of Calgary.
We are sharing the vision we have for inquiry-based learning at the Calgary Science School, and using some of our classroom projects as a way to illustrate how strong inquiry-based work is carefully and thoughtfully designed.
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One piece of job-hunting advice you’ll hear over and over again is that you have to network to land a gig. Unfortunately, networking isn’t easy for everyone and doing it badly can cause more harm than good.
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Education is all about learning through innovative solutions, and Open Access (OA) and Open Source (OS) projects drive the goal to bring educational materials to the public through technology. While we have listed some finalized resources in this compilation of the top 50 OA|OS education projects, the focus is on methodologies within OA|OS initiatives.
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Reading:"Google Spreads Free Holiday WiFi Beyond Virgin To AirTran And Delta This Year" http://j.mp/9lDjXa
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There's an App for just about anything you'd want to do on an iPhone. Just name it, and someone somewhere has probably made an application, jailbroken or otherwise, that will help you accomplish the task at hand.
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Nice collection of instructional videos for K-12
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Great Web Icons are a vital piece of any web designer’s bag of tricks… and while becoming a master icon designer can take years of practice, the good news is that there are a lot of designers that love to create high quality icon packs and share them with the design community.
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Windows 7 is the operating system from Microsoft which became so popular in very short span of time.Today I will be sharing 7 amazing tricks for windows 7 so go ahead and have a look at these 7 useful tricks.
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VideoSurf Video Search Engine | Watch Free Videos Online, Funny Videos, TV Episodes, Movies and moreSearches for the best videos from the web
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Video search engine
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World's largest video search/directory
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search millions of videos and images
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Search for videos by tags
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Laughing at:"20 Funny, Awesome and Unusual Cop Cars « OpenFreak.Com" http://j.mp/cMIkNt
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23 Resources about Personal Learning Networks (PLNs)
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A few weeks ago I had an absolutely fantastic meeting with our English Department at YIS. They asked me to come in and talk about blogging: what it is, how it works and how it can be used in English
More Breadcrumbs
I quite enjoyed messing with the Google Breadcrumb from the Google labs. It was a pretty interesting way to quickly write an application that would play well on the web or on any of the smart phones or iPod or iPad that you might have. Friend @pbeens responded to my original post and showed some of the things that he was able to do by putting some HTML in his example. The result was very interesting. Finally, a reason why in this day and age, a knowledge of some basic HTML was paying off.
The product is so new that there really isn’t any formal documentation so tooling around may be the best option. When you run the application in a regular browser, one of the things that you might be tempted to do is to view of the source of the page. At that point, you realize just how this gets displayed.
So, I decided to play around a little more because the more that you can do with something, the more functional it becomes. I tried a number of things, including trying to embed a Google Gadget with some success.
When I decided to call it a night, I had discovered:
Which generated the following.
With a little HTML knowledge, you can extend the original premise. Now, we can have Zork with pictures! Thanks, Peter for pushing me on this.
links for 2010-11-07
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Dropbox, the app we all (at least many of us) know and love, has a plethora of advanced uses to make life so much easier in managing data between multiple computers and online. We’ve posted several roundups of tips and tricks for Dropbox and now we present our ultimate toolkit and guide.
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From Boolean search strings to grammer checks, Google can help both students and teachers. There is a little-known area of Google that focuses on helping just these users. Google has been making big steps towards helping higher education these days (Google Voice Now Free For .edu Emails) but this area, known as Google For Educators, has been around for about a year and is slowly gaining momentum in terms of popularity
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Update: How They're Blocking Google TV (with Screenshots)
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The Gmail team has just announced five new themes for Gmail:
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Microsoft has opened its sixth and largest store ever (8,600 sq feet) in the gigantic Mall of America in Minnesota today, and the store is right across the aisle from the Apple Store, as previously announced this summer.
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Management speak – don't you just hate it? Emphatically yes, judging by readers' responses to writer Lucy Kellaway's campaign against office jargon. Here, we list 50 of the best worst examples.
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If you’re an innovative educator with an Android, then you might want to check out Android for Academics. The company’s focus is creating smartphone applications for educators. There are currently four applications on the Android market, and several more in the works. Most of their applications are free.
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ImgOps is a meta-tool that lets you quickly apply many online image utilities to an image.
It works best with our bookmarklet (ImgOps), or you can enter a URL above. what is a bookmarklet
You can also insert http://imgops.com/ in front of any image URL. -
Twenty-Four Interesting Ways and tips to use Voicethread in the Classroom
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The following list of ICT tools was crowd sourced from individual educationalists and not companies when the question 'What Indispensable ICT tools do you use in education' was asked and is not meant to be exhaustive in any way.
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What would it take during the production process to make you withdraw an article that had already been accepted for publication? At what point would the intrusions of the copyediting just be too much?
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Physics science fair projects deal with the study of matter and energy. Physics focuses on understanding electricity, energy, gravity, machines, magnets, and how certain materials change and combine in order to understand how the world and universe around us works. There are still many areas of the world and the universe that are unknown to man, and physics tries to understand these mysteries and see how they work.
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The ultimate music search – sort of a Shazam for a computer.
Championship Saturday…
…or … an opportunity to try out a little introduction to programming
I’ve always wanted to try to write something with Google’s Breadcrumb programming environment. This is a simple introductory programming interface for text only content suitable for display on a computer screen or your web enabled smart phone.
As an introduction to programming, it has the components for sequencing and branching to introduce the concepts without learning a great deal of the jargon required for professional programming languages. It’s all text based with just a couple of instructions and you’re ready to go. Without dating myself too much, remember Zork? You could conceivably write your own adventure game with the power of this language and run it on your phone.
Yesterday afternoon presented some perfect content for me to mess around with. Amid other household things, I enjoyed the racing from Churchill Downs. When the racing was done, I thought – wouldn’t it be handy to have all the results in the palm of your hand? I now had my impetus to do this.
Learning the syntax and how sequencing and branching worked took maybe 10 minutes and before long I had a prototype up and running. It was just a matter of gathering the results from the races and write it into the program. A sampling of the code appears below.
(1) Churchill Downs
Louisville, Kentucky
Breeder’s Cup World Championship
November 6, 2010
Mostly Sunny
High: 47, Low: 29
Will this be Zenyatta’s special day?
[Click to see results from Race 1] (2)
(2) Race 1
6 Furlongs Dirt
Purse $50,000 Allowance
Daily Double / Exacta / Trifecta / Superfecta Pick 3 (races 1-2-3) / Pick 4 (races 1-2-3-4)
8 Devils Humor
6 Speightful Lady
3 Scoring Chick
[Click to restart] (1)
[Click to see results from Race 2] (3)
While it’s interesting to look at as a concept, I’m also thinking of the value of this for students. Rather than letting all of the complications of a language get in the road, you can focus entirely on the finished product and the logic required to create it. Wouldn’t this be a handy way for students to write their own language reference summary? It would be entirely available on their cell phone for reference as they do their own programming in a more sophisticated language.
So, I created my Churchill Downs results program. The application does two other helpful things. First of all, it creates a flowchart illustrating the logic in the program. This is very helpful for logic debugging. Notice that I do have a straight line, sequential logic among the nodes as well as a branch to exit from each.
Secondly, since the most likely object of your programming will be a smart phone, a QR code is generated for your application. Scan the code below (or click it for a conventional link) to get to my program and check it out.
I like the concept for introductory programming concepts in a real world environment. If you’re reading this on Sunday morning, you’ve got a bit of time before football starts. Why not create your own application for your smartphone and show off your picks for the day? I’m sure that you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the ease with which you can create your first application.
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links for 2010-11-06
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LiveBinder of Streaming Music! (For Workshops, Work, or Classroom use!)
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This post takes a bit different focus: it attempts to make it clearer for everyone which Flickr photos they are allowed to re-use and how to easily find and credit them. Anyone who has a blog may have used images published on Flickr but not everyone knows how to properly do that.
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Wylio automatically sizes the image, hosts the image, and builds the photo credit into the code.
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Live binders approach to sharing Web 2.0 tools
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To make the experience as productive as possible, we strongly recommend that you review this document prior to working with Google Breadcrumb
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Reading:"Joho the Blog » Identifying the Internet" http://j.mp/amR8WJ
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Sketch, draw, and paint online. Great for SMART Board.
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By working your way through this web site and taking part in the exciting challenges and activities, you will learn all about the Internet. Good luck!
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Google is certainly one of the largest technology companies in the world. But just how massive exactly it is?
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Just like on Windows, there are quite a few ways to break into a Mac, but many of them are variations on the same thing, so we're going to highlight the two easiest ways—one with a Mac OS X installer CD and one without—and show you how to keep yourself protected.
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The CSI Effect: Fact vs Fiction Infographic
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The world has become tightly connected since the internet. The web itself has replaced the practice of reading newspaper. Most of us now communicate through e-mails instead of paper and pen. We now watch networks or movies online, it has even become a wide business venture, so much so we can now make purchase and pay our bills through the internet. The web has also transformed friendships through various social media.
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In 1916, Kennard Thomson, consulting engineer and urban planner for New York City, wrote an article for Popular Mechanics in which he advocated (among other things) filling in the East River to merge Manhattan with Brooklyn.
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Poster with some search tips for using Google search.
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Monkey Machine is a free online drum machine for creating drum loops and providing rhythmic accompaniment for musicians.
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Collection of resource for the use of SMART Boards
Dangers in Public Browsing
I think that we’ve all heard about the dangers of connecting to open networks. It’s the stuff that spy stories thrive on. You’re at your local coffee store doing some internet activity and a bad guy attaches to the same network and steals your identity. After all, you’re both sharing the same wireless connection. Futuristic, eh?
Not any more.
If you have the Firefox browser and an appropriate add-on, you can do it yourself. A great deal has been written about the Firesheep add-on lately. It’s reportedly a proof of concept utility that Mozilla allows to be downloaded and installed to hijack http connections. Once installed, the curious can monitor the connection for logins and passwords so that you might assume someone else’s account.
In this day and age, I think many of us are quite comfortable with online banking or shopping. We’ve all been trained to “look for the lock” or whatever the equivalent is for your browser. That is a visual that you have a secure connection with the other end for the purposes of doing these sorts of things. You may notice that increasingly more websites are using the same technology for just regular use. If you head to the Mozilla web presence, it’s all presented securely for you. So, what’s the issue?
Check out this story. Watch the CBC report here.
Increasingly, we’re using social networking sites that do require a logon and a password. The issue becomes one of security. Is the connection secure or is your logon/password combination open to anyone who happens to be listening. An article that I read yesterday from the Digital Report Card provides a nice summary of some popular services like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, etc. The report card is an eye opener and the descriptions about SSL and hijacking are important reads for anyone who wants to go online and use these services. You need to open the link about and read the article, focussing on your own online habits.
Thankfully, the online services involved are responding. Here’s a report on Facebook‘s concerns. The claim of over 500,000 downloads is kind of scary. Especially, if one of the downloaders enjoys the same coffee as I do.
What can you do about it? FireShepherd (and a tip of the hat to the humour of programmers) is a utility designed to jam Firesheep with random data to make it useless. But, a better solution is to be aware of the type of connection that you’re making with these services. More and more of them are offering secure options which you should always opt for. To help the cause, the Electronic Frontier Foundation offers its own solution – an add-on called https Everywhere which should take the guessing out of the process and force a secure solution when you access the services thereby protecting your credentials. There is a startup switch that you can apply to Google Chrome to force https connections as well. That’s been around for a while.
It’s not just coffee shops that you should be concerned about these things happening. How about a school network where you invite guests to attach? Not necessarily related, but this report from London should give some pause for thought. Can we ensure that everyone who is attaching to the network is playing nice? How about a hotel with complimentary internet access? How about a conference centre like you’d find at an ISTE Conference?
Do we take our online sessions seriously enough?
