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Lewis technology lab update...

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The work to upgrade room 13 at Lewis Elementary to support our technology lab is complete. We are now waiting on some new tables and should have the lab back in order sometime next week. We had great support from my district IT Department, Facilities Department, and from our building custodial staff in making sure the work was done before the beginning of the school year. In addition, the 3 folks from Christenson Electric who did the actual electrical work did a great job. Next I would like to bust out a wall and install one of those garage doors like you see at coffee shops so that we can extend this space to the garden just beyond the wall... Need to find some funding for that...

 

Posted via email from Tim Lauer

Interesting Uses of the Ipod Series: Instapaper

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Below is my contribution to Tom Barrett's crowd sourced Use an iPod Touch in the Classroom, part of his Interesting Ways... series of guides for the use of technology in the classroom. You can read the rest of the suggestions at the link above...

Instapaper, is an application that allows you to reposition web content, and your own content, for easy reading on devices such as the iPod Touch. As you are browsing a web page, you can send the text of that page (through the use of a bookmarklet)  to your iPod Touch to read later (and offline if necessary) with the Instapaper app. This app can be used with a classroom set of iPod Touches to create a system of pushing content out to the iPod Touches with a minimal amount of work.

A teacher could use this to share with her students an article she would like them to read on the iPod Touch. By using this method, she can invoke the Instapaper bookmarklet, which grabs the text of the web page, and then have the article appear on each of the classroom iPod Touches synced to the class account. In addition when you set up your account with Instapaper, you also have access to a special email address that allows you to send the contents of an email to the Instapaper app. For example a teacher might create a handout in her email and then instead of photocopying, she sends the email to the Instapaper account and it shows up on each iPod Touch. 

I use this method at home with my son. I have his account bookmarked on my browser and when I find something I believe he would be interested in reading, I send it to him via Instapaper and he reads it on his iPod Touch. 

Posted via email from Tim Lauer

Google Font Directory and Preview Tool...

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The Google Font Directory lets you browse all the fonts available via the Google Font API. All fonts in the directory are available for use on your website under an open source license and are served by Google servers.

View font details to get the code needed to embed the font on your web site. Please also visit our quick start guide and FAQ page. For more help and suggestions, use our moderator page

via code.google.com

Google has made available 18 open source fonts for use on the web. Google hosts the fonts and they can be used with any page on the web and display properly in all modern browsers. The Google Font Preview tool makes it easy to preview the various fonts and provides code that you can embed in your page...

Posted via email from Tim Lauer