Wolfram Alpha — New Generation Research Tool

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Considered by many to be an evolutionary leap in the development of the Internet, Wolfram Alpha calls itself a “computational knowledge engine.” While it is Google-like in appearance, it is not a search engine. It does not return a list of indexed documents in response to a query. Rather it computes answers to questions based on established facts:

“WolframAlpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.”

You can watch an overview video of the site by clicking on the image below. Then we highly recommend you take it out for a test drive!

http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

Photo Story 3 Book Talks

Drscavanaugh Educational Technology site has excellent instructions for making a video book talk using Photo Story 3 from Microsoft. Their simple 6-step tutorial includes sample book talks for you to download.

If you are not already using Photo Story 3, you can refer to our Photo Story 3 Simple Tech to help you get started. Photo Story is delightfully simple to use, even for elementary students. It gives movement to still pictures, making it a quick and easy way to create movies including narration and music. Think beyond photographs, too. PowerPoint slides can be easily converted into .jpg images and student drawings can be scanned. Some classroom ideas include:

• Book reports or book trailers
• Digital stories
• Student presentations (e.g. how-to, timelines, biographies)
• Field trip journals

Here are some sample student projects including two from Greece Central Schools:

• Quebec City
• Sammy the Seal book trailer
• Clouds

Just remember to get permission to use any copyrighted images or music.

Read Write Think

There are many resources available at the ReadWriteThink website.
The website supplies lesson plans and resources that include printable student worksheets, interactive activities and online ‘generators’. You can search by Lessons, Standards, Web Resources or Student Materials.

The site is supported by The International Reading Association and the National Council of English Teachers. The focus is on reading and language arts, but there are literature lessons and activities for library use.

Take a look at ReadWriteThink to find something to enhance an existing lesson

or start a great new one.

Google Book Search

Love it or hate it, Google Book Search is here to stay.
At the website, you can find three types of books.
1.) In-copyright and in-print books
2.) In-copyright but out-of-print books
3.) Out-of-copyright books
There is an advanced search to narrow the results to Full View. Then you can see every page. You also have the ability to choose a language. When searching for Fairy Tales in Spanish there are three results—none published after 1920.

“We hope and expect that this leap forward with our friends and partners in the publishing industry is just the first of many. We love books at Google, and our fondest dream is that Book Search will evolve into a service that ensures that books, along with their authors and publishers, will flourish for many years into the future.” ©2009 Google

Wordle

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like.



These examples might give you some ideas. Text can be copied from a word document or a website to use. Students could analyze their own writing projects or one of a famous author. Paste in text from book reports or a list of character traits, pick colors and fonts and Wordle does the rest.

File Conversion

Zamzar is a website that supports conversions between a wide variety of different file formats. You upload the file you want converted, Zamzar converts it and emails you a link. Go to the link and download your new, usable file.
You can use Zamzar to make a document a .pdf or save a YouTube video to share at school by converting it. The website also has the ability to make an audio file work on another type of player or change a picture from a .jpg to a .png.
If you are converting video files, please be aware of the size of the file. Some school districts remove or block larger attachments so it would be hard to email it.

· Document formats
· Image formats
· Music formats
· Video formats
· Compressed formats
· CAD formats

If you want to learn more about filename extension, the suffix at the end to the name of a computer file, take a look at this Wikipedia entry.

Comparing Two Documents in Word

Did you ever have two versions of the same office document and want to find where the differences are? In Word 2003 you simply open the old document, go to the Tools menu and select Compare and Merge Documents and then select the new document. Once the new document is selected you can click on the Merge button to choose Merge, Merge into current document, or Merge into new document. If you choose Merge into new document, the new document will have annotations showing what has been changed, deleted, or added. In Word 2007 go to the Review ribbon, choose Compare Compare and the select your old and new documents.

Online Book Clubs

Why build a blog or create a wiki when there are easy to use sites that allow you to start a book club? Good graphics, ease of use and accessibility are some of the plus points for these sites.

Shelfari lets you fill a display shelf with the books you’ve read, want to read or are reading now. Then you get to be a critic by rating and reviewing your choices. It’s a social networking site devoted to reading. You can invite friends, start or join a group and share recommendations with others.

Better suited for school use is booksprouts. Your club votes on what to read next, or the founder (you!) can choose the book. You can add members by ‘Invite Only’. You can schedule a live meeting, too.

The granddaddy of them all is LibraryThing. There are more then 5500 members in Librarians who LibraryThing, a user group formed in July of 2006.

"Web application LibraryThing lets you catalog all the books you own and use tags to organize your collection. Add book titles by entering a title and viewing search results from the Library of Congress or Amazon. ... LibraryThing is an impressive cataloging app that feels like del.icio.us for books." lifehacker

Cookies

A cookie is a piece of information in the form of a very small text file that is placed on an internet user's hard drive. It is generated by a web page server, which is basically the computer that operates a web site. The information the cookie contains is set by the server and it can be used by that server whenever the user visits the site. A cookie can be thought of as an internet user's identification card, which tells a web site when the user has returned.
Cookies make the interaction between users and web sites faster and easier. Without cookies, it would be very difficult for a web site to allow a visitor to fill up a shopping cart or to remember the user's preferences or registration details for a future visit.
There are two main types of cookies:
· Session, or transient cookies: Cookies that are stored in the computer's memory only during a user's browsing session and are automatically deleted from the user's computer when the browser is closed. These cookies usually store a session ID that is not personally identifiable to users, allowing the user to move from page to page without having to log-in repeatedly. They are widely used by commercial web sites (for example, to keep track of items that a consumer has added to a shopping cart). Session cookies are never written on the hard drive and they do not collect any information from the user's computer. Session cookies expire at the end of the user's browser session and can also become no longer accessible after the session has been inactive for a specified length of time, usually 20 minutes.
· Permanent, persistent, or stored cookies: Cookies that are stored on the user's computer and are not deleted when the browser is closed. Permanent cookies can retain user preferences for a particular web site, allowing those preferences to be used in future browsing sessions. Permanent cookies can be used to identify individual users, so they may be used by web sites to analyze users' surfing behavior within the web site. They are usually configured to keep track of users for a prolonged period of time, in some cases many years into the future.

Cookies are not computer programs. They cannot be used to disseminate viruses.

Shrink Word Document to One Page

Have you ever created a document that is just a bit too long to fit on one page? Next time that happens rather than wasting the paper printing an almost blank second page, use the Shrink to Fit feature that is available in Word.

In Word 2003, select Print Preview from the File menu and click on the Shrink to Fit icon found on the toolbar. In Word 2007 Print Preview can be found when you select Print from Microsoft Office button in the upper left corner of the Word window. There you will find the Shrink One Page button. Word automatically reduces the font size in the document to make the text fit the page. Remember, if you are unhappy with the results, just hit the undo button or press Ctrl-Z.