Web Tools

Google Maps

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Google MapsThis looks pretty interesting... Found this on The Tao of Mac along with posts to some other interesting map tools... Take a look at Map24. A very slick Java based map web application. More about Google Maps below...

Maps are great for getting around, but online maps could be a lot better. So Google decided to make dynamic, interactive maps that are draggable — no clicking and waiting for graphics to reload each time you want to view the adjacent parts of a map. Want to be able to type in the name of a region or neighborhood and see any part of it as easily as with a regular street map? Now you can with Google Maps.

Since these maps are draggable, you can use your mouse or the directional arrows to pan left, right, up and down to see areas that are hidden offscreen. You can also use the slider to zoom in and zoom out.

It's like having a huge map you can scroll around in.

The BitTorrent Effect

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Wired 13.01: The BitTorrent EffectWired has a great article about BitTorrent and its creator, Bram Cohen.

Last night I read this and began to think in terms of how this technology could be used in education. For example, last spring our 3rd, 4th and 5th grade students put on a production of The Wizard of Oz. One of our parents did a nice job of taping the production and then created a DVD. Copies were made and sold and such. Am thinking now of going over to school this afternoon and putting the whole thing up as a torrent. Not so much because I think many folks want to see the production, (though it was really pretty good as elementary school productions go...) but rather just to mess around with this stuff. Everyone points to illegal uses, but read the article and I believe you will see the idea behind it is brilliant. We have more and more big files that we want to share, this technology provides a very good method of doing so.

Note: I see that Alan Levine just posted about it at Cogdogblog and has some ideas of how it can be used in an education setting.

Mappr! and Flickr

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mappr imageMappr! is an interactive environment for exploring place, based on the photos people take and tag on Flickr. Right now the data used by Mappr is based on the tags that people add to the images they post on Flickr. For example, if I take a picture of my son playing in a local park and add information such as park location and city and state, the folks at Mappr can use that information to place that image appropriately on a map. Flickr already takes advantage of the EXIF meta data associated with each picture. It isn’t to hard to imagine a time in the near future where the digital camera you use will also capture GPS data and stores that along with the other meta data. I'm hoping that Mappr becomes a bit more transparent and allows individual users to map their own images. It could be a great tool for a neighborhood history project that some of my teachers are planning.

Cocoal.icio.us: A Cocoa del.icio.us Client for Mac OS X

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Cocoal.icio.us: A Cocoa del.icio.us Client for Mac OS X I can't remember where I found this, but this is a great little client for folks who use del.icio.us for bookmark management. Basically it is a client interface for your del.icio.us account. The paned window interface allows for the viewing of sites right in the application. Also it has a great search feature. I can see this being used by students to easily review sites they have gathered for research.

Interview with Caterina Fake from Flickr

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Engadget Interview with Caterina Fake from Flickr:
"Flickr is quickly becoming one of the most popular“moblog” and photo sharing site, is it the interface? The APIs? Caterina talks about this and more!

Do you plan to support video in the future?
We would like to support short-form video — like the kind of video you can take with your digital camera.

This is something I have been wondering about. Am glad to see they plan to offer this. With many of the digital cameras, short form video can be used very effectively to create short pieces for posting. I have used this when traveling to put together short little pieces that give the folks back home a bit of the flavor of my trip. Example: Chicago, July 2004

Flickr: Photo Sharing and Community Building

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Flickr: Photo Sharing and Community Building: "Flickr is a photo sharing and photo community site that delivers on the promise of building community around images. At its most basic level, Flickr allows people to upload images, describe them, and then allow others to discuss them. Throw in a bunch of features such as slide shows, notes, RSS/Atom feeds, groups, tags and weblog integration tools, and you have one of the best community building tools found on the web.

Over at Ed-Tech Insider I've added a post about Flickr, the photo sharing and community site. I'm finding Flickr to be a great tool with some interesting applications in the K - 12 world. Also it is a great way to keep up with family and friends. My daughter posts images from her graphic arts projects and I have nieces and nephews sharing images. Recently Tom Hoffman traveled to London and posted images from his trip.

Flickr Notes...

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flickr object: "

Alan Levine talks about the use of "Notes" in Flickr, the photosharing/community web space. Flickr has a feature where a user can assign notes to parts of an image. For example if you had a picture of a group of students, you could assign a note to each student which when moused over would reveal their name. A nice feature for a substitute teacher.

Alan talks about creating learning objects with Flickr. I think Flickr is a very interesting platform for education. For example at Lewis, some classrooms will soon be involved in the Flat Stanley Project. Flat Stanley is a book character and a rich tradition has grown up of students creating a paper version of Stanley and then sending him via postal mail to another school for a visit. In the process students at both schools share email (or a weblog post, or now, Flickr posts...) about Stanley's adventures at the visiting school.

Newsmap: Google News Displayed as a Treemap

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newsmap Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe. [Via The Tao of Mac]

The visual representation of the Google News page. Larger text indicates more news articles, lighter color represents most recent updates. Requires Flash.

SXSW...

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SXSW /interactive/panelsAm in Austin for SXSX (South by Southwest) Today's panels look very good. Last night I had dinner with Mike Sloan, the organizer of the panel that I'll be taking part in on Sunday.

Am now in a session being conducted by Mike Werbach, SXSW /interactive/panels

WiFi is just the tip of the iceberg. We're in the midst of a fundamental transformation of wireless communication, which has the potential to foster massive innovation, revitalize the technology industry, and dramatically lower barriers to connectivity everywhere. This presentation will provide an overview of the technological, business, and policy implications of this revolution, which challenges basic assumptions about wireless technology, interference, and regulation.

Will be nice to spend some time thinking about technology and how people can use it to communicate and share their work... more later...

Edit CSS Mozilla/Firefox Plug-in

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Russell Beattie NotebookRussell Beattie points to a very nice Mozilla/Firefox extension...

It allows you to edit your web page's CSS in the left sidebar and watch the change in realtime in the browser pane.

I installed this on Firefox and it works very well. Just call it from the Sidebar submenu and the CSS of the page that is currrently in the browser window shows up in a pane to the left. Start to edit the CSS and see the changes instantly. This is great for experimenting on the fly.

Opera Browser...

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Opera's Small-Screen Rendering(tm)

The Opera web browser for Smartphones and PDA's is really amazing. Just about any page I have pulled up on it looks good and is readable. Much more useful than the default browser that came with my Nokia 3650.

The Windows version of the Opera browser has a very nice feature that will preview any web page as it would show up on the Opera handheld browser. For example, the image to the right is how this site looks on my Nokia 3650.

Moveable Type Spam Vulnerability

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movabletype.org: News

The "Email this to a friend" functionality in the mt-send-entry.cgi script is vulnerable to being used by spammers to send spam messages. In principle, all "email this to a friend" programs are vulnerable to being used by spammers, because they allow the user to specify a To: address and a message body. But in practice, MT's implementation of this is not as robust as it should be, and a new version is available below.

This fix is already included in all versions of MT 2.64 downloaded from today on.

More About Advance Template Building with TypePad

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TypePad Education Weblog Portal: TypePad as Template Builder for MT Sites Al Delgado asked for more information about template exporting from TypePad to Movable Type. The Typepad help section explains this pretty well... Note: I believe access to the help area is limited to Typepad members... Also note that it is available to those that have purchased a TypePad Pro account.

Q: What are Advanced Template Sets?

A: Advanced Template Sets are templates that can be customized through direct editing of HTML, CSS and TypePad template tags. Advanced Template Sets are created when existing template sets built by the TypePad Template Builder are converted. Only TypePad Pro users have access to Advanced Template Sets.

There also an entry that gives step by step instructions for creating advanced template sets. Again, I believe access to TypePad help section entries is limited to TypePad members...

Mastering the Tools...

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Weblogg-ed Vol.2: Using Weblogs in Education Will Richardson points to a response by Seb Fiedler to Liz Lawley's experiments with MT as a CMS for one of her courses. I found Seb's point about mastering easily transferable tools (Examples include MovableType, Manila, Typepad... ) to be very similar to my own thinking.

I would rather spend my time mastering skills for the use of personal Webpublishing technologies than working my way through one of the industry packages that I will never be able to afford for any small scale project I might be interested in. Personal Webpublishing is about the empowerment of the individual and small teams... what do you personally get from mastering WebCT, BlackBoard, etc.? Will they travel with you? Will you be able to use them for your own interests once you have left your R1 institution?