Flickrfox is an extension for Firefox (version 1.0) that lets you browse your Flickr photostreams in a Firefox sidebar. You can choose streams to display including everyone's, friends and family, contacts and groups... Keep up with new photos while you work on the web...
(Via Lifehacker.)
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.
NPR : Wikipedia's Growth Comes with ConcernsThis morning National Public Radio's Weekend Edition had a piece on Wikipedia, its growth over the past four years, and the usual pros and cons concerning accuracy and editorial control. I have a longer post about this over at eSchoolNews....
iPod Shuffle Hint From My Daughter Karina
Originally uploaded by timlauer.
My daughter makes a pitch for an iPod Shuffle...
Gates Crew
Originally uploaded by timlauer.
The Gates Project
A lot being written and said about the Christo, Jeanne Claude installation in Central Park. From the New York Times today...
Even at first blush, it was clear that "The Gates" is a work of pure joy, a vast populist spectacle of good will and simple eloquence, the first great public art event of the 21st century. It remains on view for just 16 days. Consider yourself forewarned. Time is fleeting.
The Times also has a special section with all of its coverage. One of the parents from my school is in New York working on the project. She was part of an installation team.
A sweeping narrative from the transatlantic slave trade to the Western migration, the colonization movement, the Great Migration, and the contemporary immigration of Caribbeans, Haitians, and sub-Saharan Africans. Told in historical texts, rare visual materials, and contemporary photo-journalism.
This site from the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture provides access to 8,300 images, 17,000 pages of texts and over 60 maps. In Motion focuses on the self-motivated activities of peoples of African descent to remake themselves and their worlds. Includes a section of educational materials for teachers and students.
A good example of an institution making their collections available to others through the web.
#2
Originally uploaded by lydiamaria.
My oldest daughter is a graphic design student at Seattle University. She uses Flickr to post some of her work. Her is a draft of a submission for one of her classes...
Flickr Graph is a visualization tool that looks at the social relationships inside flickr.com. It lets you visually see contact connections between yourself and others. Type in a username and see a display of their contacts. Click on contact and see their connections. Another example of someone taking advantage of the API's built into Flickr.
Something Less Than A CadillacTim Stahmer has a great post today about a computer based literacy program that Los Angeles Unified invested over $50 million dollars in and found that their results are less than stellar... Tim asks some very good questions...
Is it really a good thing to have five and six-year olds sitting in front of computers drilling their reading skills? Is this kind of drill and practice software the best use of $50 million? Couldn’t that money have been spent on programs that put the students in contact with people instead of machines?
I have to agree with him. I'm a firm believer that access to technology is something that needs to be appropriate and developmentally sound. Having five year olds sit in front of a computer screen for over 30 minutes a day seems just crazy to me. There is a difference between using technology as a tool for research and self expression, and using technology to bypass the interaction between student and teacher. I wonder how many additional teachers $50 million could of bought that could of lowered class size?
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.
