Everything is Miscellaneous

If you have not yet read David Weinberger’s book Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, we recommend you spend an entertaining hour listening to the author summarize his book during a May 2007 Google Tech Talk called Everything is Miscellaneous.

The mass digitizing of information has upset traditional means of categorization and classification. Unlike physical objects, digital information can be cut up into smaller and smaller pieces and then put into multiple categories simultaneously to be searched in many different ways. David Weinberger explains this phenomenon and the power of this new complexity.

Google Tech Talks “are designed to disseminate a wide spectrum of views on topics ranging from Current Affairs, Science, Engineering, Humanities, Business, Law, Entertainment, Medicine, and the Arts.”

Holiday Fun

Holiday Traditions Around the World
http://www.msichicago.org/scrapbook/scrapbook_exhibits/catw2004/traditions/index.html
51 countries from Armenia to Wales from the Museum of Science and Industry

Holiday Games for Interactive White Boards: http://christmas.iboard.co.uk/




Build a Snowman: http://www.kented.org.uk/ngfl/games/snowman_v4.html

Use Blueprints to put Toys Together: http://www.history.com/genericContent.do?id=57580
Drag + drop Flash® game from the History Channel

All Santa, all the time from Canada’s Post Office: http://www.postescanada.ca/dec/santa/fun/games/default-e.asp

Education World’s December Lesson Ideas
http://www.educationworld.com/holidays/archives/december.shtml




Thanks to Donna Farren, our Distance Learning Specialist for sharing these resources!

Language Translation in Word

Both Word 2003 and Word 2007 have a built in language translation tool. You can choose to translate an entire document or just selected text. To use it in Word 2003, highlight the text you wish to translate, go to the Tools menu and select Language, and then Translate. From the drop down boxes choose which languages you wish to translate from and to, In Word 2007 you can find the translate button on the Review ribbon.
Hello
Bonjour
こんにちは
Hallo
Γειά σου
Здравствуйте!

While this feature can be useful when you are trying to figure out text in a foreign language, the translations are not usually done well enough to translate a document to send overseas. Try it out by translating a paragraph from English to another language and then back again!

20 Google Tips and Tricks

PC Magazine has a great online article called 20 Google Tips and Tricks. From searching Google Maps for real-time gas prices in your area to package tracking, there are many shortcut queries that can streamline your Google searches.

Educational Quotes

Light-a-fire has hundreds of quotes. The website is searchable by subject and author.
Personalize your email signature with a profound thought or clever saying from a famous person.

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” ~ Joseph Addison

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. ” ~ Dr. Seuss

“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” ~ Groucho Marx

Trading Cards

They don’t come with tasteless, pink slabs of gum. They don’t have batting averages or vital statistics. They are not for sale anywhere.

Big Huge Labs is the web site to use to create your custom card. It’s from fd’s flickr toys where there are tools to turn digital pictures into bead art, cubes, or trading cards. Try the ‘Wharolizer’ and make a pop icon!

More than 300 librarians have joined a flickr group displaying their trading cards.

Summer Reading

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
by Clay Shirky
Shirky gives an intelligent explanation of how social technologies like Wikipedia and blogging are changing culture by allowing people to find others with similar interests and create organizations.
Shirky is a consultant, author and adjunct professor at NYU's graduate program. The book was published in February, 2008.

Here’s a 7 minute video of Shirky at a Web 2.0 Conference comparing the Industrial Revolution's gin pushcarts to mid 20th century TV Sitcoms. “The social lubricant that kept the wheels from falling off...”
The video isn’t available on Teacher Tube.

Creative Commons: An Alternative to Traditional Copyright

Creative Commons was developed by a nonprofit organization of the same name. Creative Commons allows copyright owners to release some of those rights while retaining others, with the goal of increasing access and sharing intellectual property. The project provides several free licenses that copyright owners can use when publishing their work on the web.

You don’t give up your copyright, you refine it.
7 Things You Should Know About CC from EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit association with the mission to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.

If you are having difficulty accessing the 3 minute video through You Tube, you can also find it at
Teacher Tube

Microsoft© Photo Story 3 for Windows

“Make show-n-tell cool again”©

Photo Story 3 is an awesome tool that allows you to create movies from digital pictures. It makes digital storytelling for home or school easy and fun. The application automatically adds motion to your still pictures. You can add music, narration, text, and a variety of special effects for a truly professional finished product. Additionally it all gets packaged in a small file that can be e-mailed or configured to watch on your TV, computer, or mobile device.

To get started go to Microsoft’s Photo Story 3 website and download the application to your PC (XP operating system). You can watch sample movies and access complete instructions on this website but we think you will find this program so easy to use that you will be able to open it up, import your photos, click through the application’s six steps and be watching your first movie in less than 5 minutes!

For examples of digital stories that were created using Photo Story 3 go to this Greece Central School District web page. For complete tutorials, go to David Jakes’ Photo Story blog posting at jakesonline.org.

Copyright + Digital Content

The chances of breaking the law are greater than ever. New technologies provide a way to publish content for the world to view. It could be a Photostory® project using copyrighted images, a podcast using a popular tune, or a software purchase that is copied for use by many. This is a complex issue and one that can’t be addressed in a paragraph or two.
Carol Simpson, an Associate Professor at the University of North Texas School of Library and Information is trying to get educators to learn about and follow copyright laws. She also offers information like “How Much Material May I use in my Powerpoint ® Presentation?” on her website.
Does your district have a copyright policy? You can look at the policy of Bellingham Public School in Washington State.
The Software & Information Industry Association offers copyright information primers, guides, charts and posters. They also link to Cybersmart, a good site for K-8 educators that provides a series of lesson plans and activity sheets.

Joyce Valenza wrote an article “Fair use and transformativeness: It may shake your world” for School Library Journal’s April issue.

A Vision of Students Today

Michael Wesch, a professor of anthropology at Kansas State University creates videos that “explore mediated culture, seeking to merge the ideas of Media Ecology and Cultural Anthropology. “ In “A Vision of Students Today” the students of his Introduction to Cultural Anthropology Class of Spring 2007 present the results of this collaborative survey of over 200 students.

Also, if you have not already seen his earlier video, “The Machine is Us/ing Us,” we recommend that you do. It is excellent.

If you are having difficulty accessing any of these videos through You Tube, you can also find them at the Kansas State University website.

Where in the world?

It’s gray and gloomy outside –how about a brief view of someplace far away to brighten your day? Earthcam has more than a dozen sites. The Empire State Building, Trafalgar Square and the Boston Aquarium were recently featured. The best is

If you’d like to stay closer to home try Rochester area web cams. The Charlotte Lighthouse has an invigorating view of the lake. Click on the 30 day option at the bottom of the screen to enjoy the variety of weather we have right here in Rochester.

When you visit webcams, you’ll see that some need maintenance– like this one blocked by an awning in Key West. Travel can be troubling, even from the comfort of your chair.

You’ll find that most of these sites will give you a popup bar to ‘allow Axis Cam control’ Click ok. It is a safe product.

Kindle

The Kindle from Amazon was released last year with front-page publicity.
Amazon touts it as a revolutionary wireless reader with more than 100,000 books and newspapers available for “less than one minute delivery. You can you can simply click, buy, and read.”

For the more tech minded of our readers, 15 Things I Learned About Kindle

My Places

“My Places” is a handy toolbar that shows up on the left-hand side of the dialog box that opens whenever you Open or Save an office document. Did you know you can customize “My Places” to include your frequently used folders? It is a great timesaver and you only need to customize it one time for it to take effect for all your office products.

TO ADD A CUSTOM LOCATION TO “MY PLACES,” open a blank office document, such as Word. Select File > Save and when the Save As dialog box opens, navigate to the folder you want to add to “My Places” and highlight it. Then click on Tools and select “Add to My Places.”




If you want to rearrange the order in which your folder appears, right click the folder and select Move Up or Move Down. If you wish to rename the folder shortcut, right click it and select Rename. Finally, if you wish to delete a shortcut, right click it and select Remove.

What’s on the Horizon?

The New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) jointly produced The Horizon Report. It describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on higher education within the next one to five years. The 2008 Horizon Report was released at the ELI Annual Conference in San Antonio in January. The 2008 report focuses on the following topics;
· Grassroots Video
· Collaboration Webs
· Mobile Broadband
· Data Mashups
· Collective Intelligence
· Social Operating Systems

The Horizon Project Wiki links to the workspace used to develop the report.

Scratch

Are the students in your school using Scratch yet? Watch the 30-second video below to find out why they will want to be.

Scratch was designed to “help young people (age 8 and up) develop 21st century skills that will be critical to success in the future: thinking creatively, communicating clearly, analyzing systematically, using technologies fluently, collaborating effectively, designing iteratively, learning continuously.” With it students can create and share their own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art.

Scratch was developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab in collaboration with the UCLA Graduate School of Education and financial support from the National Science Foundation, Intel Foundation, and MIT Media Lab Research Consortia. It is available free of charge and can be downloaded from the Scratch website.

If you want to learn more, watch the video below where Mitchel Resnick and other members of the Development Team explain the project. An amazing 60,000 student projects have been shared on the Scratch website since its inception last year.
And don’t miss the Educator’s Page where you will find instructional videos and resources.

Tag Clouds

A tag cloud (or weighted list in visual design) is a visual depiction of user-generated tags. The tags are typically listed alphabetically, and tag frequency is shown with font size or color. The more popular the tag, the larger the font. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with a tag. A tag cloud is an image that communicates information in a single glance.

It’s a new approach to text.

Here’s a link to the Librarything tag cloud.
http://www.librarything.com/tagcloud.php
OCLC Project Tag Cloud Builder
http://tagcloud.oclc.org/tagcloud/TagCloudDemo
Build a tag cloud to insert on a webpage
http://tagcrowd.com/

Desktop Navigation--Diminish and Restore Windows

Did you ever have numerous windows open and suddenly need see something on your desktop? Rather than diminishing each window, one-by-one, you can use a simple keystroke to diminish them all at once.

“WINDOWS KEY”—”D” will diminish all open windows. Even better, it is a toggle key combination so when you are through with the task on your desktop, hit the same key combination again and all your windows are restored.

Mashups—the power of partnership

Maybe you have heard the term mashup or have used one of the thousands of cool mashups available on the Internet without realizing how these useful websites came about.

Bob Rankin, who hosts a website called Ask Bob Rankin, does a great job of explaining them in his article, “What is a mashup?”

Tech Learning’s article “Use Google Maps Mashups in K-12 Education,” shows some fine examples including one called “Earthquakes in the Last Week.”

If you want to see some examples how mashups are being used for digital storytelling, there are examples at EdTechie—Resources for Teachers blog.

And last but not least, Google Lit Trips demonstrate a whole new approach to teaching literature.