Web Tools
Geobloggers has created an web interface that takes photos from Flickr with geocoding tags and places them on maps from Google. Check out their downtown Chicago map...
(Via FlickrBlog.)
This is something I've been looking for in Moveable Type. David Raynes has created a Moveable Type plug-in called Workflow, that allows a Moveable Type editor to grant authoring privileges to authors to post drafts, which then can only be published by the editor. This will be great for those in education that seem to get very worried about teachers posting content to the web without it first being cleared by a principal or some other web gatekeeper. Of course they have no problem trusting these same teachers with a room full of 7 year olds, but for some reason the thought of them publishing content to the web gives them the willies.
I also see this as a nice tool to complement the writing process. Students can edit drafts, use the workflow process to gather feedback, and then when appropriate, a teacher or advisor can publish them to a site.
Workflow allows you to grant publishing permission to only the authors you choose (editors), while other authors (contributors) may only save entries as drafts. Once satisfied with their entries, contributors can transfer their entries to an editor who may then publish the entry to the blog.
Any author or editor in the system is notified by email when an entry is transferred to their ownership.
Listings... Paul Rademacher combines information from Craigslist with map content from Google Maps to provide a visual geographical representation of housing available on Craigslist. This is the kind of stuff I wish our school district student information system provided. Why not be able to pull up a list of students and easily have their addresses mapped to Google Maps... With the API interfaces that tools such as Google Maps provides I would love to see institutions such as school districts take advantage of these tools to provide data to their various commmunities.
(Via A Whole Lotta Nothing.)
Marcus Campbell has released Scuttle, an open source bookmark manager (think del.icio.us, but hosted on your server), built on PHP and MySQL and released as open-source under the GPL. I'm interested in this because I have been looking for a method for my 4th and 5th grade students to catalog and organize their web resources on the building network. While tools such as Furl and del.icio.us are interesting, the one thing that has held me back from using these with my students is the whole aspect of requiring them to register with a third party. By running a tool such as Scuttle (or the also recently released de.lirio.us) we can take advantage of a social bookmarking tool, but keep it on our local network.
Another interesting aspect of this is using a tool such as Scuttle with the Live Bookmarks feature of Firefox. Let's say that some 4th grade students are researching a topic. Students could tag the resources they find with a predetermined tag, and then the RSS feed for that particular tag could be baked into a live bookmark on the Firefox toolbar. We are currently doing this with a few Furl and del.icio.us feeds set up by our teachers. Adding a tool like Scuttle allows our students to take part in the sharing of resources.
Spell with flickrThis site by allows you to create a word or phrase with letters pulled from Flickr... #flickrWords .flickrImg { float: left; }
Delicious Linkbacks
Alan Taylor has built a del.icio.us comments bookmarklet that allows you to get a look at what del.icio.us users are saying about (or at least how they are tagging) nearly any web page with one click.
(Via Anil Dash.)
Search Wikipedia -- using LookAhead from SurfWaxWikiWax is quick type-ahead search for Wikipedia articles. Similar to using Google Suggest, but with Wikipedia...
Via Lifehacker
360 was not designed to be YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Service). The goal is not to amass as many "friends" as possible, unlike Friendster, Orkut, and others. It's about making it easier to share stuff with people who really are you friends--tne ones you already talk to, email, IM, etc.
Jeremy also has links to several articles about the new service and has some thoughts on ETech... Yahoo! 360 is currently by invitation only, but is expected to go live on March 29...
This past week I had the opportunity to travel to San Diego to attend and present at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference. Tom Hoffman and I presented a short talk entitled, From the Classroom: Remixing Wikis with Rendezvous, Web Services and SchoolTool. Chris Jablonski of ZD-Net has a nice summary of our talk. Tom did a great job introducing SchoolTool, the open source student information system, to the audience and pointed them to the just released SchoolBell, the stand alone calendar component of SchoolTool. Over spring break, I plan to install SchoolBell to run a web based calendar for scheduling resources (computer lab, gym, cafeteria...) at Lewis Elementary.
While I won't be able to run SchoolTool as our student information system, I am very happy to see it being developed and supported. I am looking forward to the day when I can point people to a school in the developing world that is keeping track of student information using SchoolTool, and point out how they are doing so using a tool that is customizable and extendable and is free... Take that A.L.L. ...
I'm playing around with RSS feeds from Flickr. Just about anything you have in Flickr can generate an RSS feed... Comments, tagged images... it is a pretty powerful feature... The link below leads to a display of the images I have tagged in Flickr with the term kids. I also use the tool to display my del.icio.us links on the right sidebar of this page and utilize it quite a bit on the Lewis Elementary site. To display the RSS feed I am using a tool developed by Alan Levine called Feed to JavaScript. It is web based tool that allows you to paste in the url of an RSS feed and generate a JavaScript that can then be added to your web page or to a weblog post, and the items in that RSS feed will automatically flow into your page everytime it is loaded. Kind of an automatic update. Alan allows folks to utilize the tool from his server at Maricopa Community College in Arizona, or you can grab the code and run it from your own server.