Digital Passports

Second Life is clearly a hot topic amongst educators right now.  I have to admit, even though I’m a gamer a heart, I’m not quite sure I ‘get it’.  I haven’t spent too much time in there yet (I’m still on newbie island), but I’m trying to figure out just where it fits into elementary and secondary education.

Take it a step further, do you see a place for Discovery Education in Second Life?  How could unitedstreaming fit into it?  Would you be interested in having some webinars or group chats within Second Life?  Should the DEN have a virtual home there?

Let me know what you think!  And if you’d like to give me a guided tour or add me to my friends list, my avatars name is "Demb Oh".  Creative, eh?

Ever have a .wmv file and wish it was a .mov?  Or wish you could convert .xls to .pdf?  Or .mp3 to .wav?  Or .mp4 to .flv?

You get the picture, right?  Well that’s what Zamzar does!  It converts A -> B.  Documents, images, audio and video can all be converted from one format to another.  Just upload the file (100mb max), specify what format you want it to end up as and click submit.  Go grab a cup of coffee and by the time you get back, you’ll have an email with a link to download it from. 

Got loads of files to convert?  No problem!  You can upload a batch of files and it will convert them all.  It’ll even email you links to download them individually or zipped up as a set.  Then you have 24 hours to download them.

So what files types can you convert?  Let’s see… bmp, gif, ico, jpg, pcs, png, tga, tiff, wbmp, wmf, csv, doc, html, odp, ods, odt, pcx, pdf, ppt, ps, rtf, txt, xls, xml, aac, ac3, flac, m4a, mmf, mp3, ogg, ra, ram, wav, wma, 3gp, avi, flv, gvi, ipod, m4v, mov, mp4, mpg, ogg, rm, rmvb, rob, and wmv.  *phew* Quite a list!  How many of those do you recognize?

Of course, a handy dandy tool like this must cost a pretty penny, right?  Yeah, not so much.  Totally free.  How cool is that?

Thanks to Pat Ruffing for passing this one along to me!

I hadn’t really planned on writing about Planet Earth, the series that premiered last night on Discovery and Discovery HD Theater.  This may be blasphemous, but I’m not much of a nature show kind of guy.  I don’t watch much on Animal Planet at all, I’m more of a Dirty Jobs/Mythbusters/Future Weapons kinda person.  Since the company was making such a big deal out of it, I figured I’d watch an episode and see what all the fuss was about.

I had no idea that it was going to completely blow me out of my seat.  The footage that they have on there is nothing short of astonishing.  I didn’t know at the time, but apperantly there was an entire online aspect of the program too.  I learned about it through Jannita’s blog post.  The first link that I followed was the Google Earth link, and I’m almost embarrassed to admit how much time I’ve spent exploring!

I was never very good at geography, which is why I’m such a huge fan of Google Earth. It’s one thing for Sigourney Weaver to describe where a mountain range is, but quite another to see it on the globe embedded into the satellite imagery.  And then to be able to fly around the map and watch videos related to each location just by clicking on them, is nothing short of amazing. 

Got ten minutes free at the end of class?  Add the Planet Earth pushpins to Google Earth and check out some of the most amazing nature footage you will ever see.

This has got to be one of the more useful mashups I’ve seen yet.  What do you get when you mash Google Maps up with a database of Tutors?  TutorLinker!  Type in your address and it will show you tutors in your area, including what subjects they’re experts in, how much they change, where they went to school and so on.  You can also see what hours they prefer to work.  I looked around for a few minutes at tutors in my area and found everything from college graduates to 25 year teachers.  Prices varied wildly, so there’s something for every need. 

What a fantastic idea!  Also, if you do any tutoring on the side yourself, it can’t hurt to register there.  I don’t know how much business it will actually generate, but it’s a pretty well though out site, it looks great, and it servers a very practical purpose.  The only thing missing is the ability for people to add comments and/or testimonials. 

Now, how do I list myself as a Twitter Tutor?

I’ll warn you right now, I’m not exactly sure how this fits into the world of education, or whether it has a place at all.  But, if you also read Teach42, or you’ve spent any time in the blogosphere recently, then you’ve definitely been hearing about Twitter in the last few weeks.

So what is Twitter?  It’s an incredibly simple concept.  You type in what you’re doing right now, or any other message (up to 140 characters), hit enter, and then the ‘tweet’ goes into your Twitter feed.  Anybody who follows your feed (your friends) will get instant notification of it, through IM, through a text message on their cell phone, or just when they visit the website.

Sounds silly, I know, but for some reason it’s oddly compelling.  Elizabeth Lane has some ideas about it.

The big "P" word in technology these days is "participatory." But I’m
increasingly convinced that a more important "P" word is "presence." In
a world where we’re seldom able to spend significant amounts of time
with the people we care about (due not only to geographic dispersion,
but also the realities of daily work and school commitments), having a
mobile, lightweight method for both keeping people updated on what
you’re doing and staying aware of what others are doing is powerful.

There’s no question, I am much more in touch now with people who Twitter, than I was when I was just reading their daily blog entries.  I feel much more connected with them.   

I’m not so sure that I buy into Andy’s idea that Twitter could be used to save lives,  but something about these little ‘tweets’ has really caught the attention of quite a few people. 

Want to see what it looks like in action?  Then check out TwitterVision.  It’s a mashup that plots public tweets on a map.   Looking for something local?  Then put your zip code into the TwitterMap and see what people are tweeting about in your area.  It’s currently the top search in Technorati and some people have written some pretty thorough articles about it.

Right now Twitter seems to be going through some growing pains and is lagging pretty bad.  But considering how many people are hitting it, I’m not at all surprised.

So what do you think?  Is there a place for Twitter in education?  Perhaps bite sized updates about what’s going on in class so that parents can follow along?  Or maybe a stream of reminders about upcoming events, concerts, and meetings?  Or is it a complete waste of time?

I created a Twitter account for the DEN already, so if you do decide to check Twitter out, be sure to add it as a friend!

Bud the Teacher mentioned in a post recently two links that every budding podcaster should have bookmarked.

The 3,000 audio clips in unitedstreaming not enough for you?  Then you need to check out the FreeSound project, a library of thousands of free sound effects.  I can just imagine your heartbeat picking up at the thought of it!  There’s a ton to choose from, and most are pretty solid.  A few that I checked out were wonky, but that seemed to be the exception not the rule.  However, do keep in mind that despite the .edu URL, it is not necessarily ed-safe.  There are a few sound clips in there that I’m sure teachers would have some issues with.  Like most sites, some degree of supervision is required.

Of course, there’s more to life than sound effects.  You also need music!  One of my favorites is Garageband.com, because there’s a ton of PodSafe music there.  But if you want to do a little mixing and matching to create your own stuff, then visit ccMixter.  Thanks to Creative Commons, music on there is kosher to download, remix and then use in your own work.  There’s even a few big names like the Beastie Boys on there!  In Bud’s own words, "I’m in audio heaven."

Oh the things I could have done with this in history class.  Or any class now that I think about it. 

Meet Dandelife.  It’s your Web 2.0 timeliner.  Register for your free account and then get rolling.  All you do is type in a title, a description and drop in a date.  It plops it down on a timeline.  Magic! 

Of course, it’s bright and colorful with a dandelion theme to it.  But what puts a smile on my face is that you can integrate in YouTube videos, photos from Flickr, and import events directly from any RSS feed.  Not only that, but you can view your timeline from within the site, via an easy to embed widget, or you can even grab yourself an AJAX version. 

So whether your students are planning out their autobiographies or they’re creating timelines for historical events, Dandelife is worth a look.

March Madness is upon us and if your school is anything like mine was, brackets are flying around the halls.  It didn’t seem to matter whether you were a student, a teacher or an administrator, everyone participated in one way or another. 

So in the words of Emeril, let’s kick it up a notch this year!

First of all, you have to build prior knowledge.  unitedstreaming has a slew of videos about basketball.  Kick off the lesson with a little multi-media.  Maybe do a little "Then & Now" comparison.  Then its time to create your brackets.

Writing utensils are just so 2006.  Have your students create brackets the Web 2.0 way, using PicksPal’s brack creator.  You don’t need to register to create your bracket, only to save it online.  So they can create their brackets on the screen and then print out a copy for themselves. 

Of course, in order to keep track of people’s progress, you may want to enter the data into a spreadsheet.  I’d recommend you go Google, and use Google Docs & Spreadsheets.   That way the entire class can enter their data into one spreadsheet at the same time!  For the record, students can register for a Google Account without signing up for GMail.  Or I believe through Google Education, you can pre-register them.

Ok, so we’ve got our brackets, we’ve got our data, now what are we going to do with it?  I say it’s time to make use of another Web 2.0 favorite, Swivel.  This site allows you to import in data sets from spreadsheets and create graphs from it.  It’s very dynamic and will allow you to filter data or create related graphs with ease.

You get the idea, the possibilities are endless!  Of course, if you’re looking for lesson plans, there are plenty available.  Here’s just a few to get you started. 

Have fun and good luck!

I constantly get emails from people trying to figure out a simple way to put polls on their blogs or websites.  Thanks to the world of widgets, I’ve got two new ways for you to do it!

The first is called Quimble, and in less time than it takes to type that, you can have your poll created.  Type in your question, list the answers, click submit and your golden.  I really like the fact that you can create a poll without even registering an account there.  It also gives you a variety of output options including AJAX (shiny), HTML (classic), and a host of other methods.  You can even tweak the CSS to your hearts content to make it look any way you want.  End result?  Like this:

The second polling site that I tried out this week is PollDaddy.  I have to admit, the name hooked me in :)  This site is a little more AJAX-y, but it also made the interface slightly less intuitive.  It has more features, like the ability to allow multiple items to be chosen and to block repeat voters.  It also has a plethora of skins to choose from, with all the customization you could want.  However, truth be told it made me think more about things I really didn’t care about and took longer to create.  Oh yeah, and I did need to register before I could create a poll.  So while it does have quite a few more options, more options means more time.  End result?  Like this:

<a href ="http://www.polldaddy.com/poll.asp?p=22258" >Take Our Poll</a> from  <a href ="http://www.polldaddy.com" >PollDaddy.com</a>

So there you go, two choices for you to play around with.  Have fun!

Simulblogged @ Teach42.com

This is one blip on the radar to keep your eyes on.  After playing with it for half an hour, I started to get that funny feeling that this one could very well be a winner for many educators.

The site is called Ning.  I first read about it on TechCrunch, and spent some time giving it a whirl today.  The short version is that it’s a site where you can create your own social networks.  For example, you can create your own MySpace based on the theme of your choice.  And right out of the box it’s a pretty decent app.  However, the level of customization available is what really sets Ning apart. 

Let’s start with ideas.  You can choose to make your social networking site private, meaning that it won’t be found via browsing or public search.  You can also set it up to be invitation only.  That means you can set up a nice closed environment for your students to try their hand at social networking in a monitored setting.  Since it can bring in video from a variety of sources, blog posts, RSS feeds and any other embed-able code, it would make a great place for a class homepage.  It also also has a forums feature, which would come in handy for obvious reasons.  Could also be a solid place for group collaborations.  I didn’t see a wiki page, but I’m pretty sure that one could be embedded.

Ning is chock full of the best of Web 2.0.  It’s extremely fluid, with drag and drop functionality and inline updating all over the place.  It also integrates well with sites like YouTube, Flickr, and Google Video, as well as having strong support for cell phone integration.  When you want to invite people to your group, it’ll raid your Yahoo, MSN, AOL or GMail address books.  There’s also RSS support throughout the site, the cornerstone of every proper 2.0 site.  I read somewhere that there’s about 20 themes for you to choose from as well.

And that’s all straight out of the ‘box’.  The social networks you create  are incredibly customizable as well.  You can upload your own CSS file, which in itself will let you tweak just about every piece of the appearance of the site.  But beyond that, developers can actually dig through and tweak the code.  Want functionality that isn’t there yet?  Create it!  Don’t like something they show by default?  Take it out!  Pretty sweet for those that like going a few steps beyond the norm.  If you don’t want to get that fancy, or you’re just a hack like me, you can also just paste in flash objects into a text box.  That’s what I did to create a poll on my demo site.

There are also a few premium add on’s available, such as using your own domain name, customizing Ads (or removing the Ads entirely), and increasing the bandwidth/storage space. 

As enamored with the site as I am, I think I’m still barely scratching the surface of Ning.  I was browsing through other groups that were tagged with Education and came across the Discovery Bookshelf.  It’s a Ning site where people can add books that they want to read, are reading or have finished.  You can browse through other people’s shelves or add books to your own shelf.  It was actually pretty compelling to go through what other people were reading and mark off whether I’d read it already or it was on my "To Read" list.  I’m not sure how the site was powered (or coded), but it looked radically different from just a random ’stock’ Ning site.  Really demonstrated how flexible the platform could be.

This is clearly far simpler to jump into than Elgg, and you don’t need to worry about hosting.  I highly recommend that any educator looking for alternatives to MySpace and Xanga in order to teach social networking check out Ning.com.