Digital Passports

I was just talking with a few DEN members over dinner last night at METC about how students are spending so much time on social networking websites and how few educators there are who use them.

So my question to you today is, what social networking websites are you on?  Do you actually use them?  Have you added  your friends, both virtual and ‘real’?

Take a few minutes today, at home if they’re blocked at school, and register at a social networking website.  Then send me a friend invite!  You can find me on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and others.  If you happen to register on Facebook, don’t forget to join the Discovery Educator Network group there. 

Feel free to share links to your profiles in the comments here so people can link up with you!  Let’s try to connect each other with our most valuable resources

TechCrunch has a great comparison of the various online video editors that are available right now.  I’ve used most of them and so far my favorite is clearly JumpCut, but different tools for different purposes.  I may wind up doing some individual reviews of a few of newer sites, but if you’re looking for a web based video editor, check out the article.

Just a little fun for a dreary winter day (in Chicago). 

When I was monitoring the computer lab at my old school, it was constantly a struggle to keep kids on task, or when they were done with their projects, to make sure they were occupied with something that was even remotely educational. 

Well, here’s a site that is fun for both kids and adults, and would definitely help kids build up their vocabulary skills.  Wabble is basically an online version of Scrabble written in AJAX.  There’s not much to tell about it really.  You enter in a username, input how many players you want to be in the game and then start it up! 

It isn’t the prettiest online app I’ve every seen, but it functions pretty well and is a lot of fun.  Good clean wholesome good times for you and your students.

So I was over on the newly republished California blog and loved the way Dave Kootman chose to introduce the California Leadership Council to us.  He created a powerpoint of all the members of the council, and used a site called Slideshare to embed it into the blog post.  By using Slideshare, people don’t need to download the presentation, they can view it right there within the web page.  Not only that, but you can do it regardless of whether you have Powerpoint on your computer or not.

The site accepts PowerPoint files and PDF’s, so if you use Keynote, you’ll need to save your presentation as a PDF first.  Otherwise it’s pretty much a no-brainer.  Upload your presentation, attach keywords and a description and it’ll give you the code to copy and put in your website. 

There are only two issues with the site that I can see.  The first is that there’s no way to upload something privately.  It’d be nice if there were a "Friends & Family" feature like on Flickr, or a way it can be by invite only, like with YouTube.  Any presentation you upload is viewable by everybody.  They can watch it, they can share it, but they can’t actually download the original slides, so no worrying about someone totally stealing your work. 

The second issue is that there’s no support for animations.  In a single slide, I’ll often have three or four stages.  It’ll start off with one image, and as I click, more images or arrows will pop up on the screen and others will disappear, coordinated with what I’m saying.  In SlideShare, all of them will show up at once, which can be really messy.   It basically makes the presentation unwatchable.   So I either need to re-vamp my presentations to remove all animations, or they need to figure out how to support them :)  I’m hoping that they get to work on that because I like my animations! 

Anyway, thanks to Dave for the tip, and if you want to show off your students Powerpoints on your classroom page or blog, this looks like a great way to do so.

Got an iPod?  If so, then you’re probably the victim of an arranged marriage to iTunes.  Like it or not, that iPod really wants to hook up with iTunes, and unfortunately many schools don’t allow the use of iTunes on school computers.  So hypthetically, let’s say you wanted to add unitedstreaming videos to your iPod so that you can use them on your MegaVCR, you were out of luck.

That’s where Floola comes in.  "Floola is a freeware application to efficiently manage your iPod or your Motorola mobile phone (any model supporting iTunes).
It can be run directly from your iPod and needs no installation under Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.
Floola supports all most common used features including podcasts!"

You just drop it on your iPod in disk mode, and run it from there.  It looks and feels remarkably similar to iTunes, and has many of the same functions.  There are even some functions thrown in that iTunes hasn’t implemented yet.  No, you can’t access the music store and buy new music, but c’est la vie.  It’s a great substitute for times when you can’t get access to iTunes.

So if you can’t convince your IT person that there’s actually educational reasons to use an iPod in the classroom, then take advantage of Floola!

There are times when you don’t really realize that you need a tool until you actually NEED it?  Digital whiteboards tend to fall into that category.  10 people are sitting around in a meeting, and after putting all the notes up on a physical whiteboard, everyone realizes that eventually the whiteboard is going to be cleaned off!  That’s when people start copying things down furiously.

Enter Skrbl pad (what do so many Web 2.0 websites have against vowels???).  It’s basically a digital whiteboard with very few frills.  Click on a space and it opens a text box.  Type what you need to say, and when you click somewhere else it will create a new text box.  You can also draw freehand using it’s pen tool.

Like many of these tools, its biggest strength happens to be its biggest weakness: simplicity.  It’s really easy to jump into.  In fact, you don’t even need to log in!  Even as a guest, you have full access for the most part.  Everything is clickable and draggable, and tools are intuitive.  You can save as HTML or just get a preview ready for printing.  You can also email people and invite them to edit it as well. Multiple people can all view it and collaborate at the same time.

On the down side, I’ve basically described every feature in the paragraph above.  The pen tool is the only drawing tool available.  No highlighting, no shape tools, no arrows, you can’t even adjust the thickness of the pen.  So it’s pretty bare bones.

However, as I said, this is a site that students can use to take class notes without even registering.  Then can literally jump in and a group can collaborate together in just a few minutes without wasting any time on long registration forms and email confirmations.  Plus, when you don’t have alot of frills, you generally concentrate on content, which can be a good thing.

So keep Skrbl in mind the next time you realize that having a collaborative whiteboard would come in really handy!

It seems that every site you register at asks you for a photo of yourself, so it’s really helpful to have way to handle what should be a relatively simple task at hand.  Of course, if this isn’t for a profile or buddy icon, you may need somewhere to put the image, so I’ll also be showing you a free place to upload your images in a pinch.

While there are quite a few sites that will let you edit photos online, one of my favorites for head shots and profiles, avatars and buddy icons is MyPictr.  It allows you to upload a photo from your computer and then gives you a drop down box with a bunch of common social web sites listed (Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, etc…).  Select which site you’re designing this for, and it shows you your photo along with a bounding box sized correctly for that web sites buddy pic.  Then you zoom in or out and move the box around until it’s capturing exactly what you want displayed.  Once it is, just click pictrit (aka save) and it will allow you to download it or you can provide an email address for it to send it to.  Easy Breezy!

If you want to send us your photo for the Galaxy of STARs, then choose "Blogger" for your service.  That’ll be the right size for what we need!

As I said, if you’re doing this for your YouTube profile, then you can just submit the image there.  But if you want to put it online, to insert it into a blog or to submit it to the Galaxy of STAR’s for example, then you may need a site to host it for you.   Don’t worry, I got you covered!

Webshots, a photo sharing service, also has a sister site called All You Can Upload. It’s another highly specialized site that serves a single purpose: it hosts single images online.  You choose your image, click upload and it gives you a direct link or code snippets for popular choices that you might want to use, like blogs or discussion boards.  Slap the code in and the image appears for you.  That’s it!  For a concrete example of what it does, all of the images you see in this post are being hosted by All You Can Upload.  According to their FAQ, there’s no size limit, and images are going to be hosted forever!  I have no idea how long forever really is, but I’ve been using them for quite a while and had no problems at all.  One of my ‘go to’ sites. 

To participate in our Galaxy of STARs, just go to All You Can Upload and upload your photo there.  Don’t have it resize your image or anything, you’ve already got it the right size.  Click upload.  The code you want to copy is the "Direct Link to Image" copy that, and that’s what you paste into the photo URL on the Galaxy of STARs submission page.

Hope those little tips come in handy sometime!  They’re two of the many tools that I keep handy to use in a pinch. 

This next little nugget comes directly out of my Top 10 FREE Web2.0 Sites presentation that I did at PETE&C on Sunday.  It was also noted by Tim Lauer and Will Richardson recently, who agree that it’s a gem.

Picnik.com is a basic photo editing application that is so clean and easy to jump in to that it has quickly jumped up the lists to become one of my favorite Web 2.0 sites. It’s just your ordinary average no frills editor, but it has some really nice little features and isn’t cluttered with garbage you don’t want or need. 

When it comes to editing, I’ve found that 90% of the time all I need to do is crop, resize and rotate.  On rare occasions, I might need to adjust the brightness or contrast, but mostly it’s just those three that I mentioned.  Well, Picnik does those as well as allows you to sharpen the image, adjust the exposure and mess with the color balance.  That’s it!  Let’s face it though, what else do you need?  If you need more than that, then you really do need to get a copy of Photoshop Elements. 

Picnik does integrate really nicely into Flickr, which I think is fantastic.  Put in your info and it’ll pull up your image library to draw from.  When you’re done editing, you can also export directly back into your Flickr account, with tags description and all.  You can also search Flickr to find photos that you might want to edit and use.  And get this: You can restrict your search to just Creative Commons images that allow derivatives.  That means you can have it search for photos that you actually have the RIGHTS to edit.  How’s that for copyright friendly?

Anyway, once you’ve edited your image, you can save it to your computer in a variety of formats including JPG, PNG, GIF, PDF, and TIFF, in the size of your choice.  You can also choose to email your photos to a person, or send them to another service, such as Photobucket Walmart, or Kodak EasyShare. 

While this isn’t the end all be all of photo editing, for simple tasks I’ve found I can load up a photo, edit it and save it in less time than Photoshop loads up on my computer!  Definitely a keeper for the ol’ toolbox. 

Remember when 3 megabytes used to be a huge amount of space?  Heck, that was two FULL floppy disks!  Nowadays, even our digital photos can be up to 3 megabytes, but for some reason most mail systems haven’t quite kept up to speed.  When I was Director of IT at my school, we were pretty darn liberal in allowing people to attach files of up to 10mb.  However, if you want to send somebody even a very short video clip, more than likely your email system will spit it back out at you.

Enter YouSendIt.com.  Here’s how it works.  You upload a file (up to 100mb for the free version).  You put in the email addresses of the people you’d like to receive it.  Then they get an email containing a link to download the file.  Email servers are happy, your IT Directors are happy, and your file gets delivered quickly and securely!  I use on it on a pretty regular basis and have yet to experience any problems.

One other little tidbit for ya.  With the free version, that file can actually be downloaded 100 times.  Yes, that’s right, 100 times.  So, if you have a video clip or audio file that you want your students to download, you could actually use YouSendIt and not have to worry about posting it to the school servers at all!  Pretty sweet.

Anybody remember Pop Up Video on VH1?  They’d show a music video, but add in all these interesting facts and comments through the use of pop up bubbles.  Ever wanted to do the same thing for your digital stories or educational videos?  Then BubblePly is for you! 

You enter in a link to an online video (yes, it has to be online.  YouTube and Google Video work fine), and then it gives you an editing window that you can use to add in Bubbles.  You can choose from a variety of styles, shapes, colors and set then to last as long or short as you like.  It’s a simple interface so it doesn’t take long to dive right in. And after you’ve created a project, it gives you a link and some HTML code to copy so you can embed it in a web page.

Would certainly make for an interesting classroom project.  Take a basic education video and have the kids supplement it with other pertinent facts.   Much more interesting that just watching the video.  Gets them engaged!

Now I know what you’re all wondering.  Does it work with unitedstreaming?  Well, yes and no.  No, you can’t just paste in a unitedstreaming address because of the password protection.  You’d need to download a video, and upload it to one of your own servers.  I’d play it safe and just use editable clips as well.  I’m not positive whether this constitutes editing, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it did.

Have fun and share URL’s if you create any!