Digital Passports

Way back in the day I seriously geeked out over a piece of software called Delicious Library.  It allowed you to use a webcam to scan bar codes off of books, cd’s and dvd’s, and then organize them on digital bookshelves.  You could see your entire collection visually and use it to keep track of what you had, what you wanted, and perhaps most importantly, who you had loaned things to! 

What ultimately stopped me from buying it and scanning in everything I owned was that there was no way to take that information and share it online (although I did just discover that a few third parties did come up with tools to do that). 

That’s why I was so excited to discover YourSharade.  While it’s currently in private beta, it looks like a Web2.0 version of Delicious Library.  It turns your webcam into a barcode scanner that lets you scan in your stuff.  Interestingly, they don’t stop at books and movies.  It looks like you can even scan in things like clothes or whatever else you might find that has a bar code!  Then your friends and colleagues can browse through it, perhaps to arrange for a little swap.

Considering how much I spend on books every year, I would love to do some trading with people to try to save myself some cash.  It looks like you can even sell stuff on there, so if I can’t trade my signed copy of Bruce Hornsby’s The Way It Is to someone, maybe I can sell it off. 

I don’t know about your classrooms, but my bookshelves always started off nice, neat and organized.  Wouldn’t it be a great summer project to scan in all of your books, and then use a tool like this for students to browse your class library and check books out?

I can’t wait till the public beta so I can give it a try!

I was reading a post by a friend of mine, Bud the Teacher, about the new Yahoo Educators Network (YEN?)  group and came to a screeching halt when I read this:

I wonder what others think about whether or not a few hours spent with a corporate cadre is a meaningful certification …

Teachers get something out of that deal, I’m sure.  Why else would so many folks become Discovery STAR Educators, or Google Certified Teachers, or Yahoo Teachers of Merit? 

Do we want to belong to something that badly?  Do we desperately crave that praise that we’re not getting elsewhere?  Or is there a deeper something there?  A greater understanding that translates into hours of free labor and word of mouth marketing for those corporations in exchange for some coupons, clothing and community?

I started to leave a comment there, but then I realized that I don’t really have the grounds to do so.  After all, I work for the company and have a vested interest in the program.  Not only that, but I wouldn’t be a part of the program if I didn’t really believe in it.

However, all of you STAR Discovery Educators out there don’t have the same baggage.  So I’d be very curious to hear what you think about what Bud has to say.  Why have you chosen to commit to the Discovery Educator Network?  For the fame and fortune?  For the ‘coupons’ and ‘clothing’?  What do you commit to the community and what do you gain from it?

Feel free to leave comments here, but also let Bud know what you think.  I think he brings up some great questions, and I’d love to see how people choose to answer it.

Recently Google added the ability to mark up Google Maps and save them.  While that’s incredibly cool, I wanted to find a way to embed them into my own web pages as a widget.  While I did discover a way to do so, and included it in the Widgets presentation last week, it was hardly easy or elegant.  In fact, to be honest, it was kind of a pain in the @$$.  So, you can imagine my excitement when I saw a newer, shinier way to do it on Tim Lauer’s weblog!

The new method can be found here, and while it’s still a little tricky, it gives you much more control of the output.  In particular, you can choose to have the zoom controls on the map, and can easily set your center point. 

As an example, I grabed Dlepoire’s Virtual Tour of Russian History, and ran it through the widgetizing tool.  The end result was the map below.  Pretty sweet, eh?  The window is a little small for this blog, but you can always make it bigger based on your needs.  It’s getting easier and easier.  Oh, and in answer to your next question, yes you can embed links to unitedstreaming images, audio and videos into your MyMaps.

Found via Miguel

Digital natives spk a dfrnt lngwij thN digital immigrants.  itz caLd txt spEch, o l33t spk & f U hav a teen @ om o teach midL schoolers, uve problE cn it scrolling ax d scrEn @ som point.

It mA L%k lIk gibberish 2 U, bt thx 2 transl8it.com, U cn crack d code!  jst entR a line of txt in2 1 side, clik transl8it-> & it wiL spit out yor transl8n.  It cn go n eithR directN t%, so f U wnt 2 swNd hip’, U cn transl8 yor kds chores in2 txt spEch & dem IM dem Ovr!

wnt 2 hav som :)?  Run yor NXT quiz Thru DIS & aLow students 2 Ans n cht lingo!

TRANSLATION:
Digital natives speak a different language than digital immigrants.  It’s called text speech, or l33t speak and if you have a teenager at home or teach middle schoolers, you’ve probably seen it scrolling across the screen at some point. 

It may look like gibberish to you, but thanks to transl8it.com, you can crack the code!  Just enter a line of text into one side, click transl8it-> and it will spit out your translation.  It can go in either direction too, so if you want to sound ‘hip’, you can translate your kids chores into text speech and them IM them over! 

Want to have some fun?  Run your next quiz through this and allow students to answer in chat lingo!

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No commentary needed from me.  Just watch it.

Chris Ryan sent me a link today showing off something he had created in Yahoo Pipes.  Basically, he took the DEN Illinois feed, ran it through babelfish, and got a new RSS feed translated into Spanish.  Just the very thing for your class blog, particularly when you parents don’t speak English.  He was thinking about taking it a step further.  You could quickly and easily create a custom feed for every language that is spoken by families in your class.

I’ve dabbled in Yahoo Pipes before, but had some trouble with it the first time around. This time I had a lot more success.  In a nutshell, Yahoo Pipes is visual interface for ripping, mixing, and mashing feeds together.  You can include queries, scripts, and all kinds of interesting parameters, and the end result is going to be a new feed to your specs.

I also created a Pipe combining all of the current DEN blogs into a single RSS feed.  Didn’t take long at all to do and will be pretty simple to keep updated.  Much easier than what I had been using before. Hardest part about it was doing all the cutting and pasting!  Since so many state blogs had recently posted the same article about the deadlines for the institutes coming up, I had it filter out blog posts with the exact same title.  That way the feed won’t be bogged down by 13 posts of the exact same content (unless the title has been changed of course).

This is a great way to combine an entire class’s worth of student blogs into a single feed.  Or think about mashing up a Flickr feed, del.icio.us bookmarks, and YouTube channel along with the class blog to create a multimedia feed encompassing your class’s presence throughout the web!  Your class DOES have a presence on all of those, right? 

Regardless, if you feel like taking RSS to the next level, do some exploring in Yahoo Pipes!

I learned about WikiSky today via a blog post by Tim Lauer.  WikiSky is sort of like a Google Maps version of the universe.  You can click and drag your way around the cosmos, zoom in and out of constellations, and click on any star to pull up information about it.  You can even click on SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey) and replace the basic map with real satellite imagery.  While it didn’t look like just anybody could edit anything, like in a traditional wiki, users can feel free to submit in their own articles, updates, and images to supplement what they already have.  I’m not much of an astronomy nut, but I was pretty impressed.  I particularly liked the feature allowing you to type in your location to see what stars are over your head right at this very instant.

Of course, after spending some time flying around the universe, I was hungry for something a little more hands on.  So I jumped into Science Connection to see what we had in there.  I popped in the code for the free trial and was off! 

I know, I know.  Science Connection is intend for middle school students.  Well, I’ve heard firsthand that quite a bit of it is applicable to elementary, as well as secondary.  And as I’ve recently discovered, I’m not smarter than a fifth grader.  So the stuff in there was at a perfect level for me.

There’s two units in there on astronomy, one focusing on our solar system, and one keying in on the rest of the universe.  I loaded up a virtual lab called Star Light Looks Bright, which helps you discover why some stars are brighter than others.  Are stars brighter because they’re closer to us, they’re bigger and more powerful, or perhaps because the Earth’s atmosphere is filtering their light somehow?   Only  one way to find out, and that’s to experiment!

After experimenting with the different variables, things started to click and before long I was tweaking the settings like a pro and figuring things out.  There was no single correct answer, it was only when you combined the different circumstances available that you were able to match things up.

Well, that’s it for this special science edition of Digital Passports.  Check out WikiSky as an appetizer and then head over to Science Connection for the main course. 

Today I discovered what just might be the closest thing to Photoshop Online until Adobe throws its stick in the ground.  The site is called FauxTo (yes, I think it’s pronounced like ‘foto’), and is remarkably similar to Photoshop, or at least Elements. 

Anyone who has used any version of Photoshop will be at home.  The palettes are on the right, tools are on the left.  They have the usual icons in the usual places.  Like most other online image editing apps, you can crop, resize, rotate, and adjust the levels.  However, this is the first I’ve seen with features like gradient support, the eraser tool, the smudge tool, and an eyedropper tool for color selection.

But what’s really got me salivating is that this one has the feature that really sets the boys from the men in the image editing world: LAYERS.  With FauxTo, you’ve got layers to work with!  While they aren’t nearly as robust as the desktop version, you can name them, re-arrange them, show or hide them, and even apply basic effects to them (like bevels, shadows and such). 

I do have to admit that I found some parts of the interface a little wonky.  For example, after you moved a layer around a bit, you had to click "Apply Move" before you could do anything else.  That little extra step is a little irritating to someone who’s used to working in Photoshop already, considering how closely this mirrors the desktop application.  Same thing goes for things like adding text.  First you type up your text, then you click on the screen where you want it.  If you want to move your text though, you better click on the move tool first, because if you click anywhere else on the image, it will create a new text layer instead of moving or editing what you have.  I could get used to it of course, but it’s a little irritating.

Other than that though, I think FauxTo is just about tied with my current fav, Picnik (which I wrote about here).   PicNik is a little cleaner and quicker, and has much better support for other Web2.0 sites like Flickr.  But having layers….  well, that about evens things out!

Give it a try and let me know what you think!