Create Class BLOG

Here is an instructional slide presentation for creating your own class BLOG.



Uploaded on authorSTREAM by jcyrus

No more 'Lively'

After only 4 to 5 months, the enterprising site, Lively, will discontinue as of 31 December 2008. There are lots of disappointed fans. See the official announcement below.



From the website:
"Lively no more

11/19/2008 05:55:00 PM

In July we launched Lively in Google Labs because we wanted users to be able to interact with their friends and express themselves online in new ways. Google has always been supportive of this kind of experimentation because we believe it's the best way to create groundbreaking products that make a difference to people's lives. But we've also always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off.

That's why, despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we've decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year. It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business. Lively.com will be discontinued at the end of December, and everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams."

Tools For Educators

This site is a bonanza for P-12 classroom teachers and classroom resource teachers. The site offers FREE templates, lesson plans, and worksheets.

http://www.toolsforeducators.com/

Parents, teachers and students have access to various learning tools. There are tools and resources for ESL (also known as ELL or LOTE) learning situations.

Notes from the website:
"Tools for Educators.com is an affiliate site of Mighty Education Systems. It contains programs for teachers to use to create worksheets, printables, games, printouts and more for their classes. You can find matching ready-to-print flashcards, games, bingo boards, worksheets, wordsearches, crosswords, board games, and phonics materials at MES-English.com."

NOTE: This site is heavily laden with Google ads on the left side of the sites. Be cautious before clicking.

Video Chat -- Google introduces 'Lively'

Google unveiled the new product in a post on its official blog — its characteristically understated way of introducing new features to the world. It can be reached at www.lively.com but is officially part of Google Labs, an area of the company’s site where it showcases projects that remain in the beta, or experimental, phase. As a part of Google Groups, Lively tries to make conversation three-dimensional, more interactive, and more fun.

Google Groups is all about helping users connect with people, access information, and communicate effectively over email and on the web. Now there's a new version on the block. With 'Lively', you can chat and interact with your friends in rooms you design.



Up to 20 people can occupy a room and chat with one another. (Text appears as cartoon-style bubbles atop the avatars.) Users can design their own virtual environments, hanging on the walls videos from YouTube and photos from Picasa, Google’s photo service, as if they were pieces of art.


With a GMAIL account, you can log in and sign up. This software requires Windows Vista/XP with Internet Explorer or Firefox.

Zaid's 101 Best FREE Learning Tools

Several lists exist offering 100+ best technology tools for learning. This is one of the better ones.

101 Free Learning Tools

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: thinking tools)

AAT Content Presentation

This is a web slide show of assistive and adaptive technology (AAT) tools and resources for educators and learners.

Custom Search Engines

When I question my students on the first or second day of class about search engines, I usually ask: “Raise your hand if you use a search engine…” I make a dramatic pause “ … other than Google and Yahoo.” In 4 years of asking this question, I never have experienced more than 2 students in any class who have ventured any further than these 2 search giants; and these brave souls usually have only ventured as far as Dogpile.

There are many reasons to try other search engines, but see if you can come up with your own. Here is a short list of 5 search engines with which to get started.

1) Giga Blast

"We've been around since 2000, and we launched the first version of our search in 2002. We quickly became known as a highly-efficient search engine with both broad and deep coverage of the growing Internet.”
http://www.gigablast.com/

2) Ms Freckles



"From the UK, MsFreckles.com provides an easy way to make professional searches for the ordinary Internet user. It also offers translation of a text, calculator, superfilter, blogsearch and more. The site is available in English, Swedish and Chinese (simplified).”
http://www.msfreckles.com/index.php?lang=en




3) Kart00





“KartOO is a metasearch engine with visual display interfaces. When you click on OK, KartOO launches the query to a set of search engines, gathers the results, compiles them and represents them in a series of interactive maps.“
http://www.kartoo.com/

4) Glimpsy




Type your request (e.g. buy books) and click to Find. You can begin with the phrase: I want to...
http://www.gimpsy.com/




5) Custom Search Engine




The directory of Google Custom Search Engines (CSE).
http://www.customsearchengine.com/

Online Community Memberships

Memberships in online communities can be extremely valuable for those who teach with technology. One such interaction for me is the Ning community of 'My Learning Space.' One has the opportunity to communicate with others from such distant places as Brazil, South Africa, France and Australia -- a treat from one who makes her living teaching on the gorgeous island of Guam.

View my page on My Learning Space

BLOGs for Technology and Education

I have found several excellent BLOGs that concern teaching with technology. I have listed them below in no particular order.

Tech Bytes http://blogs.moundsparkacademy.org/tro/techbytes
Chalk Dust http://chalkdust101.wordpress.com/
EduGeek http://www.edugeekjournal.com
iLearn Technology http://ilearntechnology.com
Craig’s TechTalk BLOG http://stream.minot.k12.nd.us/blog/craig/

Teach42 http://www.teach42.com/
21st Century Collaborative http://www.21stcenturycollaborative.com/blog.html

E-Learning Journeys http://123elearning.blogspot.com/
Classroom 2.0 http://www.classroom20.com/
Tech Ruminations http://weblog.techruminations.org/
Miguel's BlogRoll http://www.edsupport.cc/mguhlin/share/index.php?n=Blog.Blogroll

You might wish to add these sites to your 'del.icio.us' list, ed links, or your blogroll.

Del.icio.us Redesigned

The website for ‘del.icio.us’ has been redesigned so that editing and revising tools are in the upper portion of the web page for easy access. The tools to save a new bookmark, create a public profile, and to create and edit tag options are easily accessible for those who use this site as a bookmark repository. Options now allow one to choose between alphabetical, recent and reverse sorts. On the Network page, we now have the option of removing people; however, I would very much like to be able to remove fans from my list.

There are also 3 different viewing options: title only, regular view and full view. By revamping the Tags page, del.icio.us has offered a much easier way to explain and demonstrate the use and function of tags to students in a classroom setting.

Of utmost important for longtime users is the domain name change from ‘del.icio.us’ to ‘delicious.com’. The change requires one to sign in again, but the old domain name should still work.

Diigo - Revisited

I originally visited and used Diigo in September 2007 and used it to deliver a presentation to teachers at a small, local teachers' conference. It worked wonderfully; but I did not use it again.

I have selected to use the software with my undergraduate students in a class for integrating technology into the curriculum. The following tutorial video will be of great assistance.

Social Bookmarking: Making the Web Work for You

SlideShare

SlideShare software is a good way to share presentations with others. This software offers the opportunity share publicly or privately.

Take a look at the final course presentation for Patti Rodriguez in the technology course for the School of Education, ED 451. Not only is it creative, but she actually delivered this presentation in the required 5-minute allotment.

With your updated browser, access the BLOG for Ms. Rodriguez at the following link:

http://shepatte.blogspot.com/2008/05/when-technology-student-collide.html

I encourage you to give her feedback on her efforts to continually upgrade her technology skills. If you have a GMAIL account, please leave her a message by clicking on the “Post a comment” button. She deserves a pat on the back.

Browser Wars - Again

“People in the industry foresee a time in which for many people, the only thing they’ll need on a computer is a browser,” said Mitch Kapor, the software pioneer who now sits on the board of the Mozilla Foundation and has created a start-up, FoxMarks, that is developing a tool to synchronize bookmarks between computers. “The browser is just extraordinarily strategic.”

That notion has helped to rekindle the browser wars and has resulted in the latest wave of innovation. Firefox 3.0, for example, runs more than twice as fast as the previous version while using less memory, Mozilla says.

The browser is also smarter and maintains three months of a user’s browsing history to try to predict what site he or she may want to visit. Typing the word “football” into the browser, for example, quickly generates a list of all the sites visited with “football” in the name or description.

Firefox has named this new tool the “awesome bar” and says it could replace the need for people to maintain long and messy lists of bookmarks. It will also personalize the browser an individual user.

Internet Explorer 8, from Microsoft, promises its own set of tricks. One new tool, Web slices, allows a user to bookmark a dynamic piece of a Web site, like an online auction or a sports score, and save it in the margin of the browser, where the user can watch as it changes.

Another new feature, called activities, allows users to highlight text on a page, click on it, then instantly send it to another site, like a mapping, e-mail or blogging service.

His group (Firefox) will have one other company besides Mozilla to keep its eye on: Apple’s Safari Web browser has a little over 5 percent of the market, according to Net Applications, and subsists mostly on the loyalty of devoted Mac and iPhone owners.

Shawn Hardin, chief executive of Flock, which is developing a browser that helps users
share photos, videos and blog entries more easily, said consumers would ultimately benefit from the new browser battle.

“We are seeing choice in the browser market really emerge as a significant force for the first time in a while,” Mr. Hardin said.

Excerpts from: Browsers Are a Battleground Once Again
By BRAD STONE
Published: May 26, 2008
New York Times

Del.icio.us -- Revisited

I tried out my brand new ‘del.icio.us’ list during the Spring 2007 semester [http://del.icio.us/jcyrus]. I was initially intrigued by the ability to have online access to my coveted bookmarked sites via any Internet-connected computer. In addition, I could have access to other lists via the tags that are used to categorize (or bundle) various groups of posts.

Now, my undergraduate students are required to have a del.icio.us list as an assignment. In the Fall 2007 semester, the pre-service teachers taking the required “Integrating Technology” course were required to have a ‘del.icio.us’ list with 35 posts, a network of 3, notes on all posts and bundles. Below are a few of the more engaging and interesting lists from that semester – several of which are still being used and updated.

Fall ‘07
http://del.icio.us/8stanley
http://del.icio.us/chatrekay
http://del.icio.us/joleengay
http://del.icio.us/luwainajoyce
http://del.icio.us/normajean71
http://del.icio.us/sgcruz

For the Spring 2008 semester, the pre-service teachers enrolled in the required ‘Integrating Technology’ course were tasked to produce 50 posts in addition to networking with 3 to 5 others and organizing the posts with appropriate tags and bundles.

The course for ‘Integrating Technology,’ entitled Education 451: Audio/Video Education, is a required course for elementary and secondary perspective teachers within the School of Education. The educational value for these beginning teachers spans several areas: information, communication, connection and collaboration. Del.icio.us users can gather information about a specific topic and keep the links in one place. For group projects, learners can communicate, connect and collaborate using the links in several ways, such as subscribing to each others’ lists. The beauty of connecting and gathering information is that one can access other del.icio.us lists to expand the area of research and fact gathering.

It’s a wonderful tool [http://del.icio.us/ed.tech] that can be used for a wonderful classroom activity and course requirement.

Spring ‘08

http://del.icio.us/jonilinlsn2
http://del.icio.us/kelliemeno
http://del.icio.us/mbolivarez (categorized posts in bundles according to courses)
http://del.icio.us/mfranquez86
http://del.icio.us/rita_rose_hualde
http://del.icio.us/sonyadahill2

There are many possibilities in which a 'del.icio.us' list assignment can be included into the pre-service curricula.