Web Tools
These include our staff bulletin, the public web page, a Flickr photo gallery, a multi-author classroom notes site, book recommendations from our library, and a weblog to power our reader board.... With a tool like FeedDigest, I can mix them into one RSS feed that will give me a chronological look at the weblog activity at Lewis, all in one place...
Read MoreAmassing a Treasury of Photography - New York Times: The Eastman House and the International Center of Photography To be completed in the fall of 2006, Photomuse, a joint project of the Eastman House and the and as both institutions work out agreements with estates and living photographers, the intention is to add tens of thousands more pictures.... For example, a Hine picture of an Italian immigrant couple could be found under the headings of "immigration," or "Italian-Americans" or "Ellis Island" or "urban photography" or under the headings of exhibitions where the photograph has been shown through the years.
Read MorePodiobooks - Serialized audio books in podcast form
"Authors receive one half of all the proceeds from the donations from listeners. The other half goes to the maintenance and upkeep of podiobooks.com."
Kind of like the Radio Reader for your iPod...
Google Map links for Unesco World Heritage Sites
Brad Templeton has created a page that links Google Maps satellite imagery to UNESCO's World Heritage sites index.
NECC Talking Points: flickr4schools...
Over at eSchoolNew ETI, Tom Hoffman discusses the use of tools such as Flickr by teachers and schools, and suggests that school district IT departments need to start thinking of providing similar services.
Tom goes on to make the point that...
"Schools need to start taking seriously their responsibility to maintain a student's digital content from K through 12."
At Lewis Elementary, we utilize Flickr to document student work and events that are shared on our web site. With my camera phone I capture images several times a week, and then post them via email to Flickr. Mainly it's just a way to easily add images to our web site, but imagine a system similar to Flickr that allowed you to capture student work and then upload it to a portfolio... Think of how a teacher could use tags to organize and categorize student work.
I'd also add social bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us and Furl to the list of tools schools should be taking a look at. A problem I run into is having students find good web resources, then lose them, or worse yet just print out a bunch of web pages. Even had one teacher having her students write down in a folder the web addresses of the pages they found. While Furl and del.icio.us are great tools, I can't have my 4th and 5th grade students sign up for these services.
We have been looking at some Open Source del.icio.us alternatives such as de.lirio.us and Scuttle. Have decided to give de.lirio.us a try, and this summer we are working to set it up on our intranet. We will also be re-imaging our computers and plan to add a de.lirio.us bookmarklet to the tool bar on our browsers. Another advantage of this is exploring with students the social aspect of these tools and seeing how they work with one another to share the resources they find.
In the main hallway at Lewis Elementary we have an LCD panel powered by an iMac that displays school images along with news and announcements. We have been using Keynote to display the images and news and announcements. This has worked pretty well, but the updates have to be done manually and I'm the one that has to do them.
I've been looking for a better solution and this past weekend I discovered an interesting piece of software called Tickershock. Tickershock is an Mac OS X application that displays RSS, RDF and Atom news feeds anywhere on your screen in a animated crawl or billboard display. As of today, I've ditched Keynote in favor of Tickershock. The updates are now handled by an RSS feed from a weblog I created for posting to the readerboard. The images are displayed as part of the desktop picture and come from a folder of several hundred images that changes every 5 seconds. Now all I'll need to do is remotely update the pictures every few weeks.
During the spring quarter I have been working with two fourth grade reading groups 4 days a week. One group has recently been reading John Reynolds Gardiner's Stone Fox. It is the story of a boy named Willie who lives in Wyoming with his ailing grandfather on a potato farm and they are facing some hard times. The climax involves a dog sled race. It is a great story and I recommend it for your younger readers.
As part of a culminating project associated with our reading of the book, one student named Samantha, chose to create a board game based on the book. The other day while creating questions for the game, she needed to find the name of Willie's teacher. Off hand I couldn't remember it and she couldn't either. If this was a non fiction title I would of had her look in the index, and that was the first thing I asked her, does it have an index? It did not. So rather than hunt for it, I suggested we try to find it on Amazon.com.
Previously I had showed her group how to get more information about the book from Amazon. This includes things such as book reviews, different versions, languages and bibliographic informaiton. A very interesting feature is the ability to search within most titles. Their Search Within The Book feature is pretty amazing. We walked over to the computer, searched for the book in Amazon, found it, hit search within the book, typed in the word teacher, and up came a listing of pages where that term could be found in the book along with an excerpt highlighting the term. We discovered that on page 43, we are first introduced to Willie's teacher, Miss Williams.
In addition to this feature, books that have been indexed by Amazon also return other interesting information. For example, click on Concordance
for an alphabetized list of the most frequently occurring words in a book, excluding common words such as "of" and "it." The font size of a word is proportional to the number of times it occurs in the book. Hover your mouse over a word to see how many times it occurs, or click on a word to see a list of book excerpts containing that word.
This comes in handy when creating a vocabulary list to accompany lessons associated with the book. In addition you will also find other information associated with the book including reading level, complexity, number of characters, words and sentences and some fun stats such a words per dollar and words per ounce.
I don't know much about the Amazon API, but am wondering if folks such as Tom Hoffman could dive into this and create some tools that would allow teachers and students to mine this type of data, but then again , as it is now it is pretty easy to use.
"Nicholas D. Kristof says the Big Apple could go the way Kaifeng, China, if the U.S. doesn't make some bold changes."
Today, The New York Times has a multimedia piece (Flash Movie) from Nicholas D. Kristof discussing the furture of New York and comparing it to Kaifeng, a city in central China that in the year 1000 would of been considered the New York City of its day. He looks at its decline and wonders about the future of New York.
It is an interesting piece, but I am writing about it because of how it is constructed. It's total length is about 4.5 minutes. It combines, still pictures, voice over narration, video, and text to explain his thesis. If you search the Times, you will find that Kristof does one of these pieces about every eight weeks. I'm wondering how he shoots the video. Who does the editing and such, and how involved he is in the production of the pieces.
Chicago crime database | chicagocrime.org: Another interesting use of Google Maps with a data set. This time Chicago crime statistics. I want to do this so I can produce a map of where my students live. Would come in handy when I have to make a home visit.
(Via O'Reilly Radar.)
Wists. Social bookmarks, wishlists, photoblogs. Category: all This looks kind of interesting. Wists is similar to del.icio.us and Furl in that it allows you to organize sites with tags. It also lets you grab an image from the page to be associated with your bookmark.
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.