Herman Wood

top 10 free web 2 point oh web sites

Steve Dembo is sharing his favorite web 2.0 sites. Here's a link to his site: http://top10freesites.pbwiki.com/

Bloglines is his start point. He seems to be using it in a similar way as delicious. Speaking of... A reminder that you can RSS a person's bookmarks. Collaborative- getting the most of others efforts! What if we do this as a staff or department and share it with parents as resources for our students.

He really likes voicethread- imagine photostory3 online. You can even have it call you & then you can call back to add audio comments. You can even embed a voice thread into your blog or site, as well as download and save locally. A cool use would be to do book reviews here.

flickr is a social photo sharing site, designed to be social. People can build things to add on to it. Free & pro versions, differing limitations. The tagging and annotation tools are pretty helpful. There's tons of services that can connect to your flickr account and create stuff! I especially liked: http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/ Here's another creator for wordpress blog headers: http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/blogheader.php

Note- check out the cogdogblog- I keep hearing that blog mentioned at the conference.

Picnik is Photoshop for most of what we actually need- all online, & free: http://www.picnik.com/

More Google!

Googlebots with Patrick Crispen: http://www.netsquirrel.com/

His materials is available at the website above under the PowerPoint Files area. The purpose of his presentation is to bring us up to date with all the new things Google has done in the past year.

Google image search can now search with face detection or within the past 30 days. Cool! Finance.google.com is another cool tool. Stock quotes aren't delayed 15 minutes here.

Google Earth can be used on Window in the browser. Go to: code.google.com/apis/earth & download the plugin.

Sky.google.com is now a separate website. It's actually a little more user friendly than Google Earth, at least IMHO.

code.google.com/doctype/ is a great wiki for web security. Lots of CSS, dom, html reference guides.

Speaking of foreign languages, translate.google.com supports loads of languages!

Great trick- Go to Google home pages, preferences, change the interface to another language- specifically Elmer Fudd. Save the preference & when they go to google it'll be in that language. Of course the best use of the tool is language translation- never as good as a human, but it could help.

Google.com/support is now their centralized help site. All help for Google in one place!

Google 2001 is in honor of it's 10th anniversary. They've put the search engine database from 2001 up. The pages aren't there. http://www.google.com/search2001.html

Need info on a business on your phone for free? 800-goog-411 They'll give you info, connect you, or have a text message sent to your cell phone. No residential yet.

Most cell phones can do Google Maps. You go to google.com/gmm in your cell phone's browser. They'll figure out what your phone can do and help you do it!

Google's personalized homepage: google.com/ig Available to everyone with a Google account. To set it for your phone, go to google.com/ig/settings. For iPhone, google.com/ig/i

Mobile.google.com points you to all the google goodness for your cell phone.

books.google.com let's you search for books and inside books for information. The goal is to help you find a book in a library or bookstore. Books out of copyright can be downloaded as pdf.

In advanced search, you can go to the more link and look for things that are in under Creative Commons.

Google Suggest fills offers to fill things in as you are typing slowly in the search box. You can also ask questions in plain english in the search box. There is a limit to how much you can type into the search box.

Google can also calculate, dictionary (define: whatever you want to define), weather (weather then zip code), movie then zip code, translate followed by a word in another language (translate put the word here).

To see what's new at Google:
labs.google.com
googlepress.blogspot.com
googleblog.blogspot.com

Anita Rocks (The Google Classroom)

Anita Foster, one of my colleagues, presented at GaETC on all that is Google and how she envisions using it in a classroom. As expected, she rocked!

Go see for yourself at: http://sites.google.com/site/gaetc08/Home

Projects with Images

In recent posts, I've talked about creating slideshows and other products in iPhoto. One question that always comes up is where to find images. Don't forget the databases already available to you that have been purchased with county funds!

http://cvl.cobbk12.org/ There are amazing resources here!
There is a link to Nettrekker in there, but here's a direct link: http://www.nettrekker.com
From school, just click login, choose the school you're located at & start searching! (Students can create their own account and use it from home with their login.)

There are some great resources for images that don't require you to go Googling:
http://www.gigapxl.org/
http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photogalleries
http://www.loc.gov/index.html

But what if you want to unleash Google on those sites? Well, you can with a custom search engine I built with Google's help: http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=000201137543463009160:t8ddzopkqte

You can also build your own set to search sites of your choosing:
http://www.google.com/coop/cse/

Put a link to it in your blog, take your students to it in class or for homework and have a go at it!

Problems Embedding into Posts or Pages

Some folks are running into problems embedding pictures or calendars into their posts or pages in their TypePad blogs.  I can't isolate the problem, as there is no problem on some PC's, but there is on others.  Seems to be no problem on our Macs in Safari.  Anyway, here's the fix:

On PC's, and in FireFox on Macs, there is a tab called Edit HTML that is visible to the top right of the editable area of your post/page.  If your code is showing (oh my!) instead of your picture or calendar, then edit your post/page.  Copy the code again.  Click the Edit HTML button:

Paste the code you copied a moment ago back in and save your post.  So far, it's worked every time!

Let me know if you need any help!

PS- Happened to me on this post in FireFox on the Mac ; )

Google's Calendar

Google Calendar is a great way to share important dates and times with your students and parents!  As always, you have to have a Google account.  See my prior post on PICASA for more info on creating an account.

Google gives you all the info you need to get started:  http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/topic.py?topic=8556

Once you have some events added, you can go through the process of embedding it into your blog.  Again, Google really comes through:  http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=41207&topic=8573

The help at Google will allow you to paste the code from Google into a TypePad post so that your calendar will appear in a post. If you want it always in the same place, you could give your calendar its own Page, if that has been enabled and set up for you. (Example in the right hand column of this blog under Pages.) Other options include putting it in the sidebar of your blog as a Notes Typelist. An example of that is on this blog on the left hand side. It's a public calendar for Dowell Elementary.

It takes some time and you have to change some settings, but it's a tremendous help to your parents and students.

Calendar for your blog

Google is a great resource. If you think it's just about searching, then you need to look again. One resource of particular interest for management of your classroom is an online calendar. One of my esteemed colleagues has posted info in her blog about this. Go to: http://tiscobb.typepad.com/marcia_ellis/2007/02/so_you_want_a_c.html

I'll be happy to help you get set up!