Digital Passports

One of the biggest challenges new bloggers face is finding an audience. It’s easy to say, “If you write it, they will come” but the reality is it just isn’t that simple. Everybody wants an audience. If you’re going to be putting the time in, you want your work to be seen.

One of my goals has always been to find a good way to share blog posts from other amongst the DEN community, to raise awareness of each other’s individual blogs as well as to provide a way for us to support each other. I think I’ve found a site that may allow us to do that in a very clean way that looks like it has a ton of upside.

I know many of you are probably thinking that RSS is the no-brainer way to do this. There’s two problems with doing it via RSS. The first is that it doesn’t distinguish one post from another. Let’s face it, there are some posts that we’re more proud of than others. If I were going to send somebody to my site and recommend they read something, it just might not be my most recent post. The other thing that RSS doesn’t handle well is frequency. When you aggregate dozens of feeds together, the people who post more often typically will dominate the RSS feed. Or the inverse happens, where you restrict how many items can be in the feed based on a number per blog, and some items wind up becoming stale because they aren’t being replaced by a new post.

So with all that in mind, I’ve been pretty excited by the upside I see in Adoptic.com. Essentially, it creates a widget that will scroll through recent posts by other blogs in the communities you choose to be a part of. However, as the blog owner, you have complete control over which exact posts will be pushed out into people’s widgets. You can decide which are worth promoting and which you might like to leave off. Not only that, you can assign a frequency to each post, allowing you to decide that you want certain posts to be displayed more often than others. Since there is only a limited amount of space available, for each post you must ensure that the title is brief and the summary is no more than 140 characters (Twitter users have PLENTY of experience confining themselves to that limit).

That’s all there is to it. Once you choose a few articles and join a community, your posts will then start appearing on other people’s blogs that are members of the same community. You can also hand pick members that you’d like to promote your posts on outside of your community. As I understand it, there are also ways to block specific people from promoting their posts on your blog, but I wasn’t able to find that feature when I looked.

I think this could be a great way to learn about each others blogs and to help raise awareness of the great work each of you do. So I requested that the people behind Adoptic create a Discovery Educator Network group and they agreed to!

The site is still in alpha, so dont’ be surprised if you find a few bugs. However, the great thing about being involved so early is that you have a chance to help mold the product into something that’s really relevant to your needs. It’s by invitation only right now, but if you leave a comment here I’ll send you an invitation so you can join in. As it stands right now, if you join the Discovery Educator Network community there, at the minimum your posts will be displayed on the DEN National Blog as well as Teach42.com. Of course, the more people that register, the wider a net we’ll be throwing. So help me spread the word!

Sample Adoptic widget

Thanks to Mike for sharing this one with me today.

I’ve played around with many a Timeline creator, but this one truly seems to stand out. Dipity.com can serve as a traditional timeliner, and it will work well, but it can also become your FriendFeed with benefits.

The basic view is exactly what you’d expect. Click and scroll, zoom in and zoom out, click on an event to pop up more details. However, that’s only the first tab. Second tab is list view, which just lists everything out with thumbnails in chronological order. Very clean, very easy to read. Third tab is Flip book style. Think Apple’s Coverflow. Just click and flip through events visually. Finally, the last tab is map view. That’s right, if you geotag y our posts, it’ll map them all out.

Just think about how handy that last one would be for doing timelines of biographies or historical events. The revolutionary war, both as a a timeline and then with another click you can see a map of where all the events happened. Would certainly help put things in perspective for those students who are geographically challenged.

Of course, those are available for every timeline. Dipity goes the Web 2.0 route all the way, and allows a timeline to automatically import feeds from Flickr, YouTube, WordPress, Twitter, Picassa, and any other RSS feed you care to submit. Why’s that so significant? Because if your students are studying Mark Twain, they can do blogs about his various characters and import in the posts. It can include images of them re-enacting classic scenes from his stories. It can audio of students reading aloud or discussing the book, videos of them honing their acting skills, Tweets between @NotHuckFinn and @NotTomSawyer. And so on. Use the tools that make the most sense, and then use Dipity to aggregate them all together visually. Not bad at all!

Oh, and just to go all the way with the Web 2.0 features, it assigns each post a level of relevance, and the posts that are most relevant are displayed prominently. I’m not sure about the formula it uses, but any visitor can vote an item up or down by click on on a teeny thumb.

Of course, a timeline can have multiple editors and can even have multiple people contributing at the same time. You can also choose to keep things totally private or open to the world. Very minimal learning curve. It took me about 10 minutes to create the timeline below, which highlights blog entries from the DEN teams’ blogs as well as posts from the Leadership Councils.

Stretch your thinking, how could you use a flexible timeliner like this in your classroom?

Via Cindy Lane

As I’ve often said, sometimes the simplest sites are the best. WakerUpper.com only does one thing and it does it well. You put in your phone number, date, time and message, and it’ll call you with it at that time. That’s it! Tadaaaaahhhh!

And yet, its simplicity is its brilliance. I do a fair amount of traveling, and use hotel wake up calls quite a bit. I’m always looking for a backup tho. I can’t depend on the alarm clock on the end table. After all, I still screw my own alarm up at home, and I’ve been using it for years! I hate the alarm on my cell phone. Either I’m constantly doing it wrong, or it just chooses when it wants to go off. So the idea of just setting another wakeup call is sheer brilliance to me.

It will also read aloud to you a message that you type in, making it perfect for reminders as well. Or, if you really need to get out of that meeting, I suppose you could always set it to call you at a convenient time.

Oh yeah, no signup or login is necessary either, which is really nice. However, you can choose to register for their beta and get access to features like snooze and recurring calls. There’s a mobile version of the site, but in order to use it you need to login. So it looks like it may be part of the beta right now as well.

Neat site and one I’ll definitely be using often!

There’s on 20th Century technology skill that isn’t going away any time soon. And that’s, Typing. Yea, voice dictation is coming around, but we’re still pretty far from going keyboard-free. And while there are are hundreds of typing programs out there, there’s always room for one more. Particularly when it’s web based, cross platform, and has just neat innovative twist!

The website is TypeRacer.com and as you might be able to guess, you’re in a race against other people (Hence the ‘racer’ part of the URL). You and 4 other typists square off in a format that is reminiscent of those various races you’d find a carnival. You know, where you try to squirt water into a clowns mouth to blow up a balloon the fastest, or roll balls into numbered holes to try to get your greyhound to run across the field faster than anyone else’s? In TypeRacer, you have a VW Bug representing yourself and you try to get it to the other side of the screen first. Of course, you move your car by typing passages of text (Hency the ‘Type’ part of the URL). Wait for the light to turn green and then away you go. Type accurately and you’ll race to the other side first and get the gold and glory. Make mistakes and you stall until you correct them.

I think the most interesting thing about the site though is probably the text you type. It seemed like actual text, rather than the random characters and words that some programs make you type in. However, I couldn’t quite place what it was from until the end of the race. Once everyone finishes, it shows you the source of the text. One race of mine had me typing a quote from the movie Mulholland Drive by David Lynch. Another had me typing out some of Einstein’s explanation of his Theory of Relativity. In my most recent race, I recognized the quote immediately! It was Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction explaining to John Travolta how TV Pilots work. I really didn’t even need to look at the screen to type that one out.

Of course, you can also click on the thumbnail of the source to be taken to Amazon and purchase the movie or book. I seriously hope these aren’t random passages though, as there are some parts of Pulp Fiction that obviously wouldn’t be appropriate for students. There is a form allowing you to submit a quote, and they do say “Our only requirements are that each text be mostly grammatically correct (many song lyrics don’t fit into this category), and not be depressing or offensive. We’re trying to keep it light If the quote is thought-provoking or funny in some way, that’s a plus!”

That’s it!  Couldn’t be simpler.  Down the road, I’d love to see them allow people to custom choose sets of quotes to draw from.  How great would it be if you could specify for your students passages from the Chronicles of Narnia, or Harry Potter, or Shakespeare?  Or whatever book you happen to be reading at the time.

Have fun!  With your students I mean…