Month: October 2018

A Hallowe’en Playlist

by dougpete, posted in Just Rambling

 

Welcome to Hallowe’en…

I dug through my memory to come up with a song for the lead-in to today’s This Week in Ontario Edublogs and this playlist came to mind.

For your listening enjoyment, here are some scary songs to get you through the day.

Enjoy.

What’s your favourite Hallowe’en song?

What would you add to this playlist?

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OTR Links 10/31/2018

by dougpete, posted in Links

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Maps, oh my!

by dougpete, posted in application, bing, Computers, DuckDuckGo, Google, learning, Maps, Teaching

I drove home from Leamington the other day and, as I put things on the counter including my phone, I noticed that the home screen game me the temperature from Marshfield, Ontario.

I mentally retraced my path and I had no idea where Marshfield was.  I thought that I knew of every place in Essex County.  So, I said to myself

Well, Google will know

As it turns out, Google didn’t.  Marshfield, ON gave me a reference to some place in Massachusetts.  Marshfield, Ontario struck out on the Marshfield part but it was able to find Ontario.

Screenshot 2018-10-29 at 06.55.06

That wasn’t terribly helpful.

I tried DuckDuckGo – it had never heard of it.  I tried Bing and got a hit!  And, a link to a map showing me where it was.

Screenshot 2018-10-29 at 06.52.18

Or, from a Vector perspective.

Screenshot 2018-10-29 at 07.01.10

OK, now it makes sense.  I had driven by it on County Road 18 or as longtimers call it, The Pike.

But, more interesting than now knowing where Marshfield was was the map that showed where it was.  The link was https://satellites.pro/

The best part comes from the pull down menu titled “Switch Map”.

Screenshot 2018-10-29 at 06.52.07

This is a definite keeper for me.  For those times when you might want a second opinion or just another look/representation of an area.

Note that Map of the World is a menu too.

Screenshot 2018-10-29 at 07.05.56

Oh my!

 

OTR Links 10/30/2018

by dougpete, posted in Links

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

What’s new?

by dougpete, posted in application, Education, Google, Links, Teaching

Actually, a number of new ways to start new documents if you’re a user of Google online services.

Until this feature came along, you probably did the same thing that I did.  Visit your Google drive (drive.google.com) and then click the new button.

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You then start whatever type of document that you want and away you go.

Or, if you’re particular about where you want your document to end up – I’m bad at this – navigate to the folder where you want it to be and then create your new document or right-click and pick the type of document to create.

Google has a quicker method now.  By registering a number of top-level domains, you can quickly create a document from the URL in your browser.

Documents

  • doc.new, Docs.new, Document.new

Sheets

  • sheet.new, sheets.new, spreadsheet.new

Sites

  • site.new, sites.new, website.new

Slides

  • slide.new, slides.new, deck.new, Presentation.new

Forms

  • form.new, forms.new

Knowing them all isn’t really necessary.  Just pick one.  If you create a number of documents in your Google Drive, you might want to bookmark that so that it’s even quicker to create that new document.

The document that you created will be saved at the top level of the Google Drive associated with the account that you are logged in to.  If you have multiple drives, you can make sure that you’re in the right one by clicking on the icon in the top right of the screen.  When you’re done, just remember that it’s saved at the top level.  If you organize your drive with folder and sub folders, you’ll have to use whatever strategy you have for making sure that it ends up in the right spot.

If you need a strategy to find things, check this out.

One of the immediate advantages I see in education is to actually embed the instruction as a link in a document that you share with students if the goal is to have them create a document in their own workspace.

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As the functionality of this gets appreciated by people, look for all kinds of tips for using it to streamline procedures.