Digital Passports

Yesterday we follow the trail of breadcrumbs left by other educators, and wound up with a treasure chest filled with del.icio.us websites.  Today we’ll be looking at blazing our own trail and how to make it all really simple.

First things first, if you’re going to use del.icio.us, you need to know how to bookmark your sites.  I’m going to share three ways.  The hard way, the easy way and the even easier way. 

First up is the hard way.  The hard way is copy the URL of a website you’re on, navigate over to del.icio.us, click on Post, paste in the URL, and then add all your keywords.  Does it work?  Yes.  However, that’s FAR too many clicks.  We can do better.

The easier way is to use what’s called a "Bookmarklet". I’ve written about bookmarklets on Teach42 before, so if want an in depth description of them, you can read it there.  But suffice to say a bookmarklet is just like a bookmark with one exception; when you click a bookmarklet, it performs an action instead of taking you to a web page. In this case, you can use a del.icio.us bookmarklet to make bookmarking a site even easier.

Here’s how you do it: Surf the web until you find a site you like, click on the del.icio.us bookmarklet, put in your tags (keywords), and continue on with your life!  Easy breezy!  If you go to the del.icio.us bookmarklets page, they have simple instructions for installing the bookmarklets on Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera.

There is an even easier way, and that’s to install extensions for your browser that build in full del.icio.us functionality!  After installing the extension, you’ll be able to bookmark sites and search through your bookmarks with ease.  There are extensions available for both Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Now that you have your del.icio.us account set up and you know the easy way to add sites to it, let’s talk about one other way that del.icio.us can become kinda magical: RSS.  If you don’t know what RSS is, don’t worry.  Suffice to say, RSS allows some programs and websites to subscribe to things.  Every page that you see in del.icio.us is chock full of RSS goodness.  But what exactly does that mean?

Here’s an example.  Alan Levine does a lot of websurfing and finds all sites that are of interest to me.   If I navigate to his del.icio.us page, I can subscribe to his bookmarks.  Everytime Alan saves a new bookmark to his account, I will know about it automatically.  I can subscribe to his bookmarks using My Yahoo, Google Homepage, an argregator like Bloglines, Firefox, Internet Explorer, or any other service that integrates RSS.  Let’s say you’re only interested in his education bookmarks.  Well, just click on the education tag and the page that comes up will have a slightly different RSS feed.  Subscribe to that and you’ll JUST get updates with sites that he tags with ‘education’.

By doing this, you don’t even have to check on people’s bookmarks to reap the benefits of all the time they spend surfing!  For example, one of my favorite del.icio.us accounts is GCPS, which is populated by the teachers of Goochland County Public Schools.  As a Director of Technology, I subscribed to their del.icio.us account and everytime they bookmarked something, I received it in my aggregator.  Then I would forward it on to pertinent teachers.  If they bookmarked a math site, I’d forward it on to the math teachers. If they bookmarked a grammar site, I’d forward it on to the Language Arts department.  I was a hero to so many teachers who kept asking me where I found the time to go off and find all of these websites.  The secret was that I didn’t have the time to do it, but I tapped in to the people who did! 

I always say, it’s not about spending more time on the internet, rather making better use of the time that you do!  By making good use of a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us, you’ll find that the good sites just keep landing right in your lap.

Have fun exploring and don’t forget to share what you find!   

Recently on Teach42, I took a little survey to find out what people’s favorite Web 2.0 websites were.  I was more than a little surprised by the clear winner, del.icio.us.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with del.icio.us, it’s essentially a place to save your bookmarks.  However, what makes it a little different is the fact that it’s a ’social’ bookmarking site.  No, that doesn’t mean you need a date to get in, it just means that your bookmarks are listed publicly for other people to browse through.

That may sound a little intrusive to some, but there’s a huge upside to allowing this to happen.  In fact, it’s kind of magical.  To show you what I mean, let’s take a little trip together and explore del.icio.us.

If you go to del.icio.us (yes, that’s the URL, no www or dot com in there), you will see some of the more popular items bookmarked recently as well as some various ‘hot’ tags.  For now, we’ll start with the search bar.  I started off with a search for "education videos".  Low and behold, about 4 or 5 hits down was a website called unitedstreaming. 

Looking closely at the entry, you’ll see that it says that it has been ‘saved by 412 people‘.  Those words are hyperlinked and if you click on them you’ll be taken to a page full of user comments about the website, as well as a list of people who have bookmarked it and what tags they used.

Here’s where it starts to get magical.  What sort of person do you think is going to be bookmarking unitedstreaming?  A construction worker?  A football player?  A podiatrist?  Probably not.  More than likely, the people bookmarking unitedstreaming are going to be educators.  So, let’s choose one of these people, totally at random of course, and explore a little. 

I choose lecss1, and after clicking on the name, I’m taken to a list of this person’s bookmarks.  They’re listed in chronological order.  Along the right hand side are the tags that she has used to label them and keep them organized.  Looks like she must be an educator, since she has 52 sites bookmarked with the label "Education".  Jackpot!  By clicking on the word Education, I can filter out her bookmarks to show just the education ones.  However, there’s 52 of those and who has time to go through 52 sites?  Let’s say you happen to be a math teacher.  If you click on the "Math" tag, you’ll see the 10 websites she has tagged with that keyword.  Voila!

Wow.  Looks like a gold mine!  Interactive Mathematics, a Math Dictionary for Kids, the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives, Math 4 Kids…  If I’m a math teacher, I’m in hog heaven.  I found another educator who has at least a passing interest in math and just raided her bookmarks!  She’s done all the work, I’m just reaping the benefits.

But wait, we aren’t done yet. If you look closely, you’ll notice that each site lists how many other people have bookmarked it.  So if you really dig that website Math 4 Kids, you can click on the link next to it and see who else has bookmarked that site!  How many of the 227 people that bookmarked it do you think are Math teachers?  Follow the links along and you can go raid those people’s bookmarks as well! 

It may sound a little goofy, but I’ve found that it’s a great way to find the websites that you didn’t even know that you needed!  All you have to do is find a few people who have similar interests to you and then take advantage of all the time that they wasted surfing the internet :)  They do all the work, you reap the benefits!

Of course, we’re barely scratching the surface here.  In an upcoming post, I’ll discuss saving your own bookmarks, subscribing to other people’s, and using the Network feature.

Have fun exploring!  Oh yeah, if you have your own del.icio.us account and want to share it, add a link in the comments.  You can find my bookmarks at del.icio.us/teach42

Since tomorrow is Friday, here’s a fun site to waste some time playing with.  Aaron Smith (aka The Art Guy) shared a really fun sight with all sorts of hacks and extensions for flickr.  It’s called Pim Pam Pum and even the splash page is good for wasting about 10 or 15 minutes of your time!  Instead of a traditional home page, his has bubbles all over it that float, move and pop.  It’s interactive so you can drag the bubbles around and make them bump into each other.

Yes, I do get distracted by bright shiny objects, how did you know?

One of my favorites on the site is called Memry, hich is your basic ol’ memory game (some might know it as Concentration) where you have a bunch of cards face down that you flip over to try to find matches.  As a Kindergarten teacher, I would often use the game to teach  alphabet letters, colors and phonics sounds.  Well this is a digital version using photos from Flickr that match tags you choose.  Of course, you could just have some fun with it, like by making a Yoda Memory game.

Another fun one is Bubblr.  In a nutshell, it lets you take Flickr images and turn them into a comic strip.  OSX comes with a program that does this now, but this is web based and free, so it’s accessible even to those of you still using purple iMacs.  You know who you are. 

There’s a few really interesting ‘real time’ tools on the site as well.  What they do is monitor Flickr for current activity and represent it in some way.  My favorite is FlickrTV a picture of an old fashioned TV, where the screen displays the most recent image posted to Flickr.  As you might imagine, it moves REALLY fast.  I wish I’d known about this on Christmas!  I bet it would have been fun watching thousands of people uploading their holiday photos at the same time

Have fun!

Got a question from Lance today about a DEN member who was looking for a free way to shrink down some WMV files so that they could be posted on a website.  I use iTunes to shrink down Quicktime files all the time, but that doesn’t work for WMV.  For WMV and MPG files i usually use Adobe Premiere Elements, but that isn’t free.

So I did a little poking around and stumbled across Windows Media Encoder 9.  Have you ever heard of this thing?  I sure hadn’t.  And it rocks!  It’s a free download from Microsoft and can be used to capture and convert audio and video.  Obviously its format of choice is WMV and WMA, but it’s pretty sweet for a free utility.

The screen capture program works as well as any that I’ve used.  It can capture a window, region or the entire screen and gives you options for the quality you want to record it in.  Perfect for making screencasts or training videos.  The conversion software seems pretty straightforward and will optimize the file based on your needs (streaming, download, CD/DVD, Pocket PC, etc). 

So if you’re looking to do some screencasts, or have some bloated WMV files you’d like to compress to a more manageable size, it’s worth checking out!

I’ve posted a couple of times about Vyew, a free web conferencing site that I’m pretty fond of, but recently someone referred me over to another one worth checking out.  While there’s quite a few contenders in the video/web conferencing arena, Yugma is one of only three free ones that are worth checking out right now.

Yugma is java based, so it’ll run on both Windows and Mac.  If you’re version of Java is out of date, it’s a free download to upgrade it.  Its biggest strength also happens to be its biggest weakness: it’s simple.  Really simple.  Total breeze to get running and begin a conference with other people.  Voice is handled via teleconference and all the info you need is right there at the top of your screen.  I like using teleconference for the voice because it saves you precious bandwidth that you’ll need for screen sharing.

It has public and private chat, whiteboarding, and the ability to share a desktop.  That’s it.  Seriously, that’s everything.  Of course, sharing a desktop is incredibly powerful because you can use that to do Powerpoints or Keynotes, to demonstrate websites, show images, etc…  And since that’s all there is, there’s no way to get confused.  During my test, I have to admit that sharing was pretty smooth.  Not smooth enough to share videos that way, but impressive for a free service.

Oh yeah, there are a few restrictions with the free service.  You can only have 10 people in the conference at a time.  You can’t record your sessions, nor can you make use of the 100mb of shared space that the paid accounts receive.   Then again, you can’t really complain too much about not getting every feature when they are providing the basic service for no cost at all.

Anyway, if you’re branching out into the wide world of webinars or need a way to patch somebody in remotely for a meeting or class, Yugma is worth checking out.

Now that I’ve been with Discovery for a year, it looks like I finally merit my own blog!

Well, maybe that’s not it exactly.  As we restructure things a little for the new year, we’re shifting the focus around a little.  I’ll still be posting on the National blog, but mostly it will be about DEN specific events and opportunities. I’m pretty lucky though, in that part of my job is to keep an eye out for new tools and technologies and figure out how they fit into the world of education.  Posts related to that part of the job are going to be placed here, on the Digital Passports blog.

Onwards to the obvious question.  Why Digital Passports?  There’s a few reasons.  The first is that I thought I’d get sued if I used "Chicken Soup for the Digital Immigrant’s Soul".  So that name was out.  While trying to figure out a decent name, I talked quite a bit with Hall Davidson (who’s now posting on his own blog, Media Matters).  As we brainstormed, we kept keying in on the idea that whether you’re a so called Native or Immigrant is really irrelevant at this point.  What matters is how willing you are to travel.

I know plenty of DEN members that did not grow up with the internet.  They didn’t have a cell phone during their teenage years because they hadn’t been invented yet!  High tech at the time may have been a computer that was the size of a house.  In short, they’re the typical Digital Immigrant.

However, that hasn’t stopped them.  They go to every conference they can.  They read blogs and listen to podcasts.  They boldly go where no teacher in their district has ever gone before (to places like MySpace and Facebook).  In short, despite the fact that it’s a brave new world, they make the effort to immerse themselves in a culture that’s radically different than the one they experienced growing up.  They have issued themselves a Digital Passport and are filling it with stamps that say things like ‘Flickr’, ‘Blogger’, and ‘del.icio.us’. 

The people they encounter in these places act differently (they share EVERYTHING), they talk differently (g2g PRW.  LOL.  ttyl ), they  spell differently (goodbye silent ‘e’), and they even look different (browse MySpace for endless examples).  However, that hasn’t stopped many teachers from diving right in to DSL (Digital as a Second Language).

So this blog is going to be for teachers who already have a Digital Passport or are interested in applying for one.  I’ll be sharing new technologies and websites, along with some old favorites with new twists.  I hope that you share things that you find as you journey along the Information Superhighway (I still love that phrase), so that we can all learn together as a community.

Make sure you’ve got some comfortable shoes on, because there’s quite a bit of climbing to do.  Oh yeah, and don’t forget your towel.  Let’s explore!