Entries Tagged 'Web 2.0' ↓

I didn’t get to attend this presentation - it was one of those time-slots when I needed a few clones to attend several sessions at the same time. Through the magic of technology I can still hear and “see” the presentation! After “attending” online I am very excited about the real event!

If you will go to Mrs. Alsup’s web presence there is a link on the sidebar to 2008 TCEA Presentation which will let you download the entire PowerPoint. You can view the PowerPoint and listen to the presentation at the same time -there is also a Podcast online - just click this link and put on your headphones - the Podcast lasts about 40 minutes. Writing Safari Podcast

There were only five presentations up at Conference Connections from TCEA so kudos to some of our own for being up there!

If you go to TCEA 2008 and click on Sessions and Workshops, list free sessions you will see the entire list and the session I attend will have the session number in the post as well. You will be able to look for handouts there in a few weeks.

I like Patrick Crispen’s presenting style. He starts on time, tells you what he will cover, moves through the presentation like an east Texas wind. Before you know it he is saying we have to hurry because there are only three minutes left, ties is all up and sends you out as the next group comes in. He must have an incredible amount of energy or sleep for a week after a conference like this.

His website is NetSquirrel and if you go there and click on PowerPoint Presentations on the side you will have access to all his handouts. They are licensed under Creative Commons (he was the first person I heard even mention Creative Commons yesterday) so you are free to download his material. The presentation for this session will be udated in a few days.
Some new things I learned yesterday:

• Google free business directory assistance 1 - 800 - 466 - 4411
  • Voice, directions, maps on your cell phone. Google wants to do voice search - this is there start at getting voices saying words
• Google Notebook now datestamps your entries
• Google.com/educators has added discovery videos

This morning I found a new little snippet in my reader about Google docs - they have added a new little tool. When you share a spreadsheet you now have three choices - collaborator, viewer, and now “to fill out a form”. You can create a form in Google spreadsheets, share it with people and as they respond to the form, the data is automatically added to your spreadsheet.

posted at Thoughts Have Wings

Next week I am planning on attending TCEA 2008 in Austin. Dale is doing well and I will be a cell phone call away. I am looking forward to learning some new things and meeting some folks that I have till now known only through blogging.

I plan, as I did last year, to blog my notes. If you do not blog and are going to be attending this year from PISD, I would love to have you as a “guest blogger”! Just let me know if you are interested and we can arrange for your notes/reflections on the conference to appear as a guest post by you to share with the rest of the district.

If you are a blogger I have a few tips for you. Take good notes making sure you have the session name, presenter name, and school district if applicable. Check out HitchHikr - a site that will aggregate posts that are tagged for specific conferences. There is no tag yet so you might want to check back - it will be something like TCEA08. If you tag our post with the HitchHikr tag it will make it easier for people who didn’t attend the same sessions to find your notes. As conference attendees start posting and tagging, the posts will show up on the HitchHikr site and there will be an RSS link so you can subscribe if you like and read other posts. This is a great way for all of us to get the most out of the conference and share the information with folks in the district who couldn’t attend.

There is a great post at Lunch Over IP on tips for conference blogging with links to other articles if you are interested in reading more about this. They have even created a PDF booklet you can download. There are two versions and I have included one here.

conferenceblogging_zuckerman-giussani_a4_color_booklet.pdf

Stop by Lunch Over IP blog and leave a thank you comment if you find this useful. I’m excited about the conference and can’t wait to tell you all about it!

Also posted at Thoughts Have Wings

I love Google Earth - to me it has this magic carpet feel to it. I can visit anywhere on earth in moments and often when I get there I will find that someone has taken photos of interesting sites there or I can add overlays that tell me everything there is to know about the area. I’m a Google fan anyway.

Right now a friend of mine and I are making some slides for a praise service using Google docs. I type or copy and paste lyrics onto slides and then “share” with him (which sends him an email with a click-able link to the presentation) which he then adds a background to and maybe tweaks the text a bit. When he is through he shares it back with me. We can work on it at different times, in different places and even add collaborators if we want. The slides can be downloaded and used in Powerpoint, Keynote, OpenOffice Impress, and even SlideShare.

I have not been so in love with Twitter. Twitter is an application that lets you constantly add a few words about what you are doing at the moment. I see how it might have it’s uses (sort of) for people who have a shared interest but mine would bore people to tears. Maybe I could make it a paid subscription for insomniacs? I signed up for a free account trying to see if I could “get it”. I have even subscribed via RSS to several of my favorite education/technology/blogger “tweets”

This morning I read how several teachers are using it and was once again reminded of how creative and resourceful teachers are.

Langwitches have started a Teachable Moments Shoutout Twitter account that you can that you can subscribe to and if you have a Twitter account you can join in. You can help other teachers with teachable moment ideas or get help yourself. If you are not familiar with Twitter, this does not mean a huge lesson plan with rubrics and worksheets - these are short messages. You can even subscribe via cell phone and get “tweets” as text messages. If you are curious you can find out more on the Twitter FAQ page or the Twitter Lingo/Help page.

This Shoutout idea was inspired by Tom Barrett and his use of Google Earth and Twitter. Tom got his Twitter network people to participate in his students’ Google Earth lesson. The students had to find these people based on a few clues on Twitter.

I asked my network to challenge the children to find them in Google Earth, to search and discover their location from a few scraps of info via Twitter. Well the challenges rolled in and in a couple of hours we had 25 different people to track down.

Some of the Tweets were longitude and latitude. Others were addresses or well-known geographical sites. As the students found the locations the sent back messages via twitter to let them know they had been found. The students got experience searching and using the different layers and even the three-D buildings feature. Because they had a real purpose the focus of the class became finding real people in real places and the technology became the tool instead of the lesson.

When I was in elementary school I had a Japanese PenPal. That was our Web 2.0.

A couple of resources I wanted to save here before they fell off the grid (my grid that is). Thanks Denise for telling me about Dr. Bishop - here is his Library 2.0 site with tons of resources. He has some awesome PowerPoints about blogs, wikis, and podcasts.

Joyce Valenza has a great library website and blogs here. There is a link on her library website that takes you toa page called Pathfinders. In her words, Pathfinders are guides to commonly researched topics. One of the rabbit trails I followed landed me at a site called When Is A Book Report Not A Book Report?

There is a list of 100 ways to do a book report besides the old fashioned written book report I remember doing in school. Many of these could be tweaked just a little to fit other subject areas and given a technology boost.

If you are casting around trying to come up wth an idea for a technology lesson plan to help fulfill your commitment for the comp day you just might get some inspiration at one of these sites.

I love this!

kwout | A brilliant way to quote via kwout

Type the URL of the page, drag your mouse to select the area you want, click the “cutout” button. Kwout then generates the code to embed the image in your blog or post directly to flickr or tumblr.

If you try it out and like it go to the bottom of the page and save the bookmarklet to your favorites or drag it to your Firefox toolbar to make it even easier to use!

You can even make a few little changes in how your image is displayed!

Home Page via kwout

David Warlick has an intriguing article on his blog about a website called TagCrowd. You can enter text, a URL, or upload a file and give it specific components such as how many tags you wish it to display, whether or not you want it to group similar words or show number of frequencies. You can tell it to ignore common English words such as an, and, or the. You can also create a stoplist to have it not display specified words in the cloud. He asks the question “What if students could create tag clouds of their textbooks?”

I went to Wikipedia and typed in Texas History, then copied and pasted the information into the text box in TagCrowd I used the default parameters except I chose to show 100 tags.  Here is a screenshot of the result.

I did not designate a stoplist so I got several words that I didn’t want included in my cloud such as article, edit, and including. I went back and clicked on edit or create stoplist and clicked on the dropdown arrow box to see if anyone had already created a list I could work with. Someone had made a list called Wikipedia. I clicked on wikipedia, then clicked on edit and added  words to the list. I saved the list and clicked visualize on the main page and it generated a new tagcloud without the words I had specified. It did however have some new ones that I wanted to omit. I simply went through the process again of editing the wikipedia stoplist and added more words. The screenshot below is my final product. You could change the number of tags you want shown and tweak the stoplist even more to fine tune your cloud.

TagCrowd also generates the html to include the cloud on your website. Here is the tagcloud for this blog article.

added already below blog box called change clicked cloud common create display dropdown english file final fine frequencies generates group history html ignor include intriguing list number ones screenshot several shown simply someone specific specified stoplist students tagcloud tagcrowd tags text textbooks tune url used visualize website wish words work

created at TagCrowd.com

Oops I can see some words I would want to add to a stoplist! After creating a stoplist called myblog and entering words I wanted to omit I ended up with this:

added arrow article blog box change chose clicked cloud common components copied create david default display dropdown edit english file frequencies generates group history html include list number omit page screenshot several similar specific stoplist students tagcloud tagcrowd tags text textbooks tune tweak typed url visualize wanted website wikipedia words

created at TagCrowd.com

This is useful and because you can edit the stoplist you can create a focus. I hope you found this helpful.

Flickr has partnered with Picnik to let you edit your pictures online. Now you can take pictures, upload them to flickr, describe and tag them and even do minor editing all in one place.

You can click the auto-fix button to have Picnik make adjustments for you or you can choose any of the tools to make changes yourself. The tools include rotate, crop, resize, exposure, colors, sharpen, and red-eye removal.

You can also click the Create button to get a list of special effects like sepia, black and white, vignette and more. You can also add shapes, text, and frames and do a little touch up.

It’s not Photoshop but it lets you do a lot for free and online. You can cancel or undo if you don’t like changes you have made or you can choose to save the changes. Once you save you cannot undo.

Most of the effects are free but there are some that are marked premium which are only available if you upgrade your account. This is a very nice addition to Flickr.

Haven’t had much time to post here but I thought this was such a neat idea. It’s called Lookybook and it lets you preview children’s book, add them to your virtual “bookshelf”, and even purchase them. You can write a review and read other reviews and share the book with someone else.

My Newsletter Maker holiday edition is a free website where you can create an attractive newsletter and print it out and/or send it via email. I created one just to go through the process which was pretty easy and the website walked you through everything a step at a time.

Layout

First you will choose your layout from a group of templates. I chose one that used two photos on the left side wiht a column for text on the right

Pictures

Click next to choose photos (jpgs and pngs are allowed)
When you click browse you may have to click on the settings for popups to allow them for this site (tested in firefox)
click browse again
A new menu window will popup to allow you to browse to your photo. This will also contain some useful information such as a chart to give you estimated upload time depending on your connection.
You will navigate to your photo on your computer and click upload
After you upload your photos you click and drag them to your layout
If you need to do some editing you can do it now. You can rotate, scale (change size) flip or change the quality. Click on the template where the photo is and there will be a little red line around the photo you are currently working on.
If you mess up, click reset and start over.
When you are satisfied with your photo click next to go to the design menu.

Design

When you have chosen a design template click next.

Text

Choose your holiday greeting font, font color, and message. If you want to type your own message just highlight the text in the message box and type your own.
You then click in the add message column and start typing your message. You can add a page if you like.
Click next to preview and then you can edit any of the newsletter or click “ready to share”

Complete and Send

You can then enter your email address, up to 20 recipients email addresses separated by commas and a personal note if you like. Click print or send and you are done.
I created one and sent it to myself - it had two links - one for the newsletter I created and one for the main site and it opened to the main site first. I would mention that in the personal note you send so that your less internet savvy folks will find the letter you made. I would have liked a way to change the text size in the column but it’s free and looks nice!