Voicemail in your email...

I have often found myself wading through the voicemail on my mobile phone and wishing I could visually see a list of the messages and listen to them in a non linear fashion. The Apple iPhone will have this feature, but now through a free service called CallWave, you can accomplish the same thing with your mobile phone.

CallWave is a service that allows you to hear and respond to your mobile phone messages in your email. The free service sends a copy of your mobile phone message to your email, allowing you to:

  • Sort and prioritize messages from your email in-box - viewing caller names and message lengths in the subject line.
  • Listen and respond to messages instantly with powerful text reply and call back features.
  • Be notified of new messages via detailed SMS alerts on your handset.
  • Permanently save your messages on your computer.

I've been looking for something like this. Basically all your voicemail now comes to your email account. You can still access voicemail from your phone, but now also get a detailed email message indicating who called, the length of the message, and the option of listening to the message from your mail. You also have the option to call back the number that left the voice message. The service will call your mobile phone and connect you to the number that left the message. If the call came from a mobile phone, you also have the option to send a text message to the caller.

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By way of Photo Matt

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Post From IMified...

I am posting this from my iChat client using a service called IMified.

Imified is an instant messenger buddy that works across all major IM networks and offers access to a growing number of web applications, as well as productivity tools like notes, reminders, and todo's. Imified helps you get things done faster.

Basically IMified gives you access to various web services (Google Calendar, Wordpress, Basecamp, blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal, Remember the milk...) via your IM client. So this post is coming from iChat on my MacBook, but it could also be posted from my phone using my AIM client, or from Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, or Google Talk. At Lewis we have a reader board that displays an RSS ticker of upcoming events. The events are powered by a WordPress.com weblog. I can now update the events ticker just using my IM client.

From reading their support forums, it looks like they are at work on a metaweblog api implementation which means I should be able to add my Drupal sites and post to them too. A pretty nice little tool...

More BatchGeoCoder...

Cross posted on TechLearning.com...
In my school district we are beginning our staffing and enrollment planning for the next school year. In the case of my school we have a new boundary change which has added a new level of uncertainty based on the fact that while kindergarten aged students in the new area are automatically slotted for my school, students living in that area already enrolled in our district have the option of staying at their current school or moving to my school. The process for this decision making plays out over the next six weeks so I will have to make some staffing and grade level configuration decisions based on the best information available at this time. To help with with this decision making process I have plotted the addresses of the students in question in Google Earth. By visually seeing where these students live I can get a better idea of how close they live to my school and how likely they are to make the move based on things like walking distance and transportation options. To do this I took the addresses of the students in question and plotted them with tool called the batchgeocoder (batchgeocoder.com). This web tool created by Phillip Holmstrand allows you to...

"map any kind of street address list, for example copied from Excel, and geocode the addresses to get latitude and longitude coordinates using the tool below. The data can then be mapped in your browser, downloaded into Google Earth, saved to a web page, or transferred back into your spreadsheet. You can also use this tool to calculate distances to multiple addresses from a single point, or get quick driving directions to multiple destinations. Mapping multiple locations with your own custom data takes seconds, just follow the 6 steps below to plot your own data on a fully interactive multi-point map..."

By using this information, along with other information from my school district, I can begin this process with a few more educated assumptions and in the process make better decisions for my program and students.

Screenshot 02-36

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Picnik: Web Based Photo Editing...

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Picnik is an impressive web based photo editing tool. It has many of the features of stand alone photo editors but allows you to access and manipulate images on the web. For example you can integrate it with your Flickr photos, great for editing those under exposed camera phone shots. The Flickr integration gives you the opportunity to replace the original photo with your edit, or add it as a new image. You can also grab images from stand alone sites such as a Gallery install. For example at Lewis Elementary we are starting to use Gallery to post images that student can share and use in their projects. This could be a great way for them to get to them and adjust and manipulate them. I was very impressed with how fast and responsive it feels with resizing and adjusting exposure.

Via Jim Gates and also Solution Watch...

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Google's Moon Shot

This week, The New Yorker has an article entitled Google's Moon Shot and it details Google's plan to scan and digitize several university libraries and also to made searchable all published books. The article describes some of the challenges and objections by publishers and authors. One interesting aspect is that several of those publishers that are partners with Google in the Book Search project, are also at the same time suing Google to stop the project.

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