Digital Passports

Learned about this from Scott’s blog, and thought it might be pretty useful.  Particularly if you use your cell phone as a video recording device!

Basically, FixMyMovie.com is an all in one movie cleaner upper.  Too dark?  It brightens it.  Too shaky?  It steadies it.  Seemed to do a decent job on their blog in their demo videos, but in my own test it didn’t work too great.    I’ve embedded two videos below, one uploaded straight to YouTube and the other run through FixMyMovie.

Original:

“Fixed” Movie:

I deliberately did it in low light and then in no light.  Unfortunately neither really came out.  I’ll be doing more tests, but I’m curious to know if anybody else has any ‘too dark’ videos and wants to try it out.  If you do, leave me some links!  Love the idea in theory, and hope it works in practice.

I am constantly amazed by how sophisticated some Web2.0 applications can be. Take for example, Mogulus. While there are several sites that allow you to broadcast live video streams, this really takes things a step further. And then another step further. And then yet another step further!

At its most basic level, Mogulus allows you to hook up a webcam and stream video to the internet. Click broadcast and you’re live! Easy enough right? However, what if you want to do something fancier… Well, with just a couple of clicks you can add text to the bottom of the page. So if you want to add a caption (who is on camera, what their blog URL is), you can just overlay that right on. You can also set up multiple messages, and change them on the fly.

That’s not the only thing you can overlay onto the screen though. You can insert in over the shoulder graphics (images only, no live video feeds over the shoulder), display full screen titles and text, but the one I really love is the Ticker. Just like CNN, you can put in a ticker along the bottom of the screen that is populated by text you designate OR you can even designate RSS feeds for it to display! Yes, that’s right, it will display your recent blog post titles. Best of all, they’re even clickable! Try that with MSNBC.

Need to integrate in some previously recorded video? Couldn’t be easier. Just import your clips in from YouTube, upload them yourself directly to Mogulus or just provide a URL to the video and it’ll snag it. Organize them into storyboards for easy access and then you can immediately cue up any clip and insert it into your live broadcast. Simple and intuitive.

Of course, nobody is online 24/7. So what happens to your channel when you aren’t there? Most channels just sit there. With Mogulus, you can queue up previously recorded broadcasts and imported clips and put them on a continuous loop! Then, when you go live it will just cut out the recording and put you on camera. You can even set up specific videos to be available on demand.

It really is an absolutely amazing service.  And even more amazing that it’s free.  They do insert in some short, unobtrusive ads, but in the options pages, you have the ability to opt out of them.  No hoops to jump through, you just need to say “No Thanks”.  Incredibly cool.

While I don’t know the details for certain, I’m thinking that this may wind up getting some extensive use at NECC this year.  What do you think, do we need a DEN TV channel?

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…

One of the great things about being a member of the Discovery Educator Network is that your fellow STARs are right there with you, exploring new horizons online, pushing the boundaries and surfing on the cutting edge. So when you explore a new site, you’ll often find that there’s a group of people for you to connect with right from the get go. Not only that, in this wild world of social networking, it’s not just WHAT you know, it’s WHO you know. So by networking with your fellow STARs, you increase your circle of contacts dramatically.

SO, with that in mind, let’s do a quick lap around the web and make sure you know a few of the many other places that you can network with your fellow STARs!

Yes, Facebook is the end all, be all of social networking sites right now. Join the DEN in Facebook group and share photos, videos and comments with other DEN members. Click here to join the DEN Facebook group.

LinkedIn is quickly becoming the ‘professional’ social networking site for the corporate world. It’s a fantastic way to find out who knows the people you want to know and get a personal introduction. I know I’ve had several requests over the last month to introduce one friend to another, and even used it a couple of times to get in contact with someone that I didn’t have any other way to connect with. If you’re a little nervous about posting a profile on Facebook or MySpace, this site is a great place to get your feet wet. Build out your profile and represent yourself professionally. The DEN group was just approved, so be among the first to join and proudly display the DEN logo on your profile!

Diigo is a social bookmarking site that is really giving the current champion, del.icio.us, a run for its money. It does everything that del.icio.us does (including simul-posting to your current del.icio.us account!) and so much more. From highlighting on a page, to adding sticky notes, to sharing bookmarks with groups, it really turns websurfing from a passive experience to a highly active one. Jennifer Dorman created the DEN group in Diigo a little over a week ago and there’s already over 50 members!

If you’re looking to jump into a virtual world, but don’t really know how to get started, our Second Life Leadership Council will see that you have a helping hand. They’ve done a phenomenal job of hosting weekly events, organizing volunteer guides and building out a truly amazing DEN presence in the virtual world. I can’t link directly to the group in SL, but if you visit the blog you can find all the information you’d ever need.

That’s all I can think of right now, but I’m sure there are others. So if you know of any I’m missing, add a comment below. See you ’round the web!

Heard about Twitter but don’t know where to start? Already using Twitter but you’d like to expand your network? Want to find a way to stay connected with other STAR Discovery Educators in between events and conferences? Have I got a solution for you!

This all started with Lee Kolbert. She decided to create a tool that STAR Discovery Educators could use to register themselves along with their Twitter names, and then see the results as an online list. That way, STARs could go through that list and add other STARs that they might not have known were on Twitter.

Brilliant idea and it didn’t take long for the list to grow mightily! However, let’s face it… For a new user, copying and pasting and following 70+ Twitter accounts is a pretty tedious task. I mused on Twitter about how handy it would be for someone to create a way to just import in a list of Twitter names! Wham Bam, there you go. An instant starter set of Twit-friends, just add water. Lo and behold, podcasting legend Tim Wilson read that tweet and said, “Hey, neat idea! I’ll just close my eyes, click my heels together, and poof! Meet the Twitterator!”

Ok, it’s a bit of a dramatization, but it really didn’t take Tim at all to take the idea and run with it. Just supply his tool with your username and password, and then give it a list of names or point it to a URL that has a list of names, and it’ll have Twitter follow all those people for you. Couldn’t be easier!

Well, maybe it could………. By throwing DabbleDB into the mix, I can have it chop up the table that Lee Kolbert created using JottForm and spit out a CSV file that Twitterator can digest easily. That gives us a static URL that will ALWAYS import in all of the STARs registered by Lee’s tool. So if I want to follow all the people who have registered themselves within the last few weeks, I just run that same URL through Twitterator again. Anybody I’m already following it just ignores!

Ok, so how do you get started? Easy as 1-2-3

1) Register a username at Twitter.com (obviously skip this if you’re already registered)

2) Register yourself in the STAR Database that Lee created. That way other people can follow you!

3) Go to Twitterator.org. Put in your username and password and in the “Enter a list of people to follow” box, paste http://tinyurl.com/4a7mnu into the URL field and click submit.’

Voila! You are now following all the STAR Discovery Educators who have registered themselves! Now tell all of us what you’re doing

The World is Just Awesome!!

Lets not trash it, heat it up or waste it. Look around you. Look around class, the school, the community and your own home. How can you make a difference? Get a little info by watching, reading and listening to the media below and other people. Then share your thoughts. The only wrong answer, is no answer.

I created an assignment in Discovery Education streaming for Earth Day, April 22. I also incorporated the use of a great site, voicethread.com. If you haven’t heard of it check out the assignment below by clicking on the link.

Teacher Printable Version: Earth Day streaming and voicethread assignment

Student link to Assignment (must have Discovery Education streaming) Shoot me an email with “Earth Day” in the subject. Include your Discovery Education streaming username and I’ll send you the link.

Direct VoiceThread link.

5 minute Jing: An quick video overview of VoiceThread.

Extension Hands-on: Trash sorting Lab
Never heard of it? It’s simple. Collect trash for a few days. (Important: No animal by-products! Don’t want to send anyone to the emergency room. Plant material perfectly ok, but put that left over pot roast in Fido’s bowl or simply another trash bag) Bring trash bag into school and have students sort it. You can give them sorting categories or even better have them come up with their own. Also throw in some process skills here, how do you measure how much? Let them figure it out.
Main Point: A lot of trash, well just isn’t. How much(grams, volume, other) needs to go to the landfill?
Extension Media:
Got DE Streaming Plus? Have them watch a Planet Earth segment. The world rocks. Any will do, but “The Future” one is on topic. Don’t have DE Streaming PLUS.

Psst!! You can become a STAR Discovery Educator and get it for free through the end of this school year. No really, just another benefit of being a STAR. Find out how here.

After months of waiting, Adobe has finally entered into the online photo editing arena with Adobe Photoshop Express. I’ve been waiting rather impatiently for this one, since I Adobe has always been the image editing king. I obviously had rather high hopes for it. That being said, I’ve been pretty darn impressed with Picnik.com, and it has been a mainstay in my Top Ten Web 2.0 presentations. So, instead of simply reviewing the new kid on the block, I figure we ought to see how it stands up to the current king of the hill.

Categories for the throwdown are going to be: Image In, Basic Editing, Filters/Fun Stuff, Image Out, Bonus Features, and User Experience.

Image In
Photoshop: In order to begin using Photoshop, you need to create an Adobe account. Plug in the information, and then wait for the confirmation email. Unfortunately, you can’t start using Express until you get your account confirmed and for some reason, my confirmation email took over 2 hours to arrive. To be fair, this is opening day, so they may be a bit overloaded, but that was definitely an irritating way to start the demo. Once you’re in, you can bring in photos in one of 4 ways: By uploading them from your computer, by importing them in from y our photo albums (assuming you’ve already uploaded them), by choosing photos from the general community, or by importing them from other sites. The other sites options are pretty limited right now, just Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa. I would seriously hope that those options increase in the future. No Flickr? That’s just crazy. When you upload a new photo, you can choose to keep things organized by putting it into an album, which is a nice idea if you’re going to be using this often. Then you just double click to begin editing.

Picnik: Right from the splash page, you can upload a photo. No need to register at all, tho you are certainly welcome to. Bonus points for that, particularly in a school environment. Besides uploading, you can also grab a photo by providing a URL to it, doing a Yahoo search for one, using your Webcam to snap a picture, or by importing one from MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket or Webshots.

Winner - Picnik due to the ease of getting started and variety of ways to bring in pics.

Basic Editing
Photoshop: You have the usual suite of tools, red eye correction, crop and resize, , white balance, and saturation. But then you also have a few more unusual ones like Touchup, Fill Light and Highlight. When you select a tool, Tools are very easy to use, most providing you with a series of preview thumbnails that you just mouseover. When you do, the actual image you’re working on changes to reflect what it would look like if you applied it. Just click the checkmark if you like it and want to keep it. Photoshop zooms your photo in and out dynamically based on the tool you’re using, so you always have the maximum possible screen space. Also, it gives you a navigation window to move around in. There are multiple levels of undo, and you get a nice visual timeline to go back multiple levels. Most of the tools are pretty self-explanatory, but that retouch tool still has me stumped. Sort of like a poor mans clone stamp, that I can’t get to do anything productive.

Picnik: Once again, all the basics are there. Autofix, rotate, crop, resize, exposure, color, sharpen and red eye correction. With most of the tools, you can either use sliders or specify your changes numerically. Every tool has onscreen tips to go along with it, and is pretty darn self-explanatory. A zoom slider is always in the lower right, and then you just click and drag to navigate around the image. However, if you’re using a tool that uses click and drag (like crop or rotate), there doesn’t seem to be any way to navigate around the image. Just gotta zoom out all the way. Bonus points under red eye for having two settings to choose from, Human and Furball

Winner - Photoshop, for having more options to choose from and a really slick live preview interface. Close call tho.

Filters/Fun Stuff
Photoshop: Considering that Photoshop is the king of filters, I’m a little disappointed in the choices here. You have Pop Color, Hue, Black and White, Tint, Sketch and Distort. Black and white does exactly what you’d think, sketch turns your photo into a drawing of sorts. Hue and tint just mess with the colors in a pretty basic way. Pop color also messes with your colors, but in a very targeted way. In my image of the Sphinx beneath a blue sky, I could easily recolor just the sphinx or just the sky. Very Warhol-like. I’m surprised at how accurate it was in its changes. The last filter is Distort, which allows you to pinch,s stretch, and twirl the image, distorting it to your heart’s content.

Picnik: Many of Picnik’s filters and fun features used to be available only to premium subscribers. They’ve changed their revenue model to be ad supported for the free version, and put all of the fun stuff back in! Consequently, you have a TON of filters to choose from, including sketches, neon outlines, blurs, mattes, frames, color changes and so on. I’m not kidding, there are a slew of them in there. And you have full control over each of them, to make them mild or max them out. In addition to that, you can add text to images, stamp on shapes or clip art, whiten teeth, blur out ‘blemishes’, or add frames to your photo. At the premium level, they’ve recently added the ability to adjust the levels and curves of your image, exactly the same way you could in Photoshop (the offline version). Once your students discover this section of Picnik, the rest of the period is going to be wasted as you won’t be able to pull them away!

Winner - Picnik, in a landslide.

Image Out
Photoshop: When you’re all done and you click Save, it saves it back to your library. From there, if you click on the image, you can choose to download it, embed it, get the URL, or email it. For both the embed and copy url commands, it just copies them straight to the clip board. You don’t see the code until you paste it. While that’s fine for advanced users, I think so basic users who have a peripheral understanding of how the clipboard, copy and paste works, may have difficulty with that. Email allows you to email the image once you provide a message and address (or you can use one from an addressbook you can populate). Download gave me the option of choosing one of two sizes for my image before I actually saved it to my computer.

Picnik: When you click the Save & Share tab, you get a series of options that includes save to computer, email photo, Flickr slideshow, email to website, print photo, and then the option to export it directly to MySpace, Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, Photobucket and Webshots. The options under each of them are what really set Picnik apart tho. Under Save to Computer, you can choose the dimensions for the image (just type in the numbers), what format you want (TIFF, JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP or PDF) and what quality you want the compression to be if you chose JPG. Under email photo, you can pick from several different image sizes as well, and choose what email address you want the photo to be coming from. Email to website allows you to send the photo to Typepad, Costco, Walmart, Kodak, AOL, or any other site that allows you to import photos via email. And then of course, you could always just print it out

Winner - Picnik, in another landslide.

User Experience
Photoshop: One the whole, it’s fairly easy to use, altho I’ve noticed that it seems to be a bit pokey. It takes a really long time to upload, save, or bounce between sections of the site. The ability to store photos in albums is really nice, as is the dedicated space, but when you just want to get in, edit a photo and get out, it really gets in the way. There is one feature in particular that’s absolutely incredible though. As you apply changes to the image you’re editing, a check box appears next to each feature you’ve used. At any time, you can uncheck that box to turn off that effect. Essentially that allows you to undo anything you’ve done, in any order. That’s incredibly slick. Major points for including that. However, some of the features are a little obscure. I had to play a little while before I figured out what they did. Not only that, after about 20 minutes I noticed that some tools had a little wrench in the lower right of the tool bar. Clicking that opened up advanced options I hadn’t seen before. Doesn’t do you much good if you don’t know they’re there! The interface itself has a black background, and to be honest, is pretty dreary. For lack of a better way of describing it, using Photoshop Express feels like work.

Picnik: Picnik has been through several changes, almost all of them improvements. This version has a huge banner ad at the bottom of the page though, which I’m really not thrilled with. Admittedly, they need to figure out a way to make a buck off of this, so I can’t really complain too strongly, the site is still largely free. Picnik loads up quickly, and is very self explanatory. I think teachers of almost any level could just jump right into it and get started. That being said, there are also some pretty powerful features. While curves and levels are at the premium level right now, those are impressive new additions to an already powerful editor. The interface itself really feels like you’re on a picnik. flowers everywhere, bright colors, and in general it just feels friendly and cute. Where Photoshop feels like work, Picnik feels like fun.

Winner: Picnik. It just feels comfortable to use without any real learning curve.

Conclusion
Well, there you have it. While Photoshop may do the dirty work just a little bit better th, there’s no question that if I have a quick edit to do, I’ll be heading over to Picnik. It has more features, a friendlier interface, feels snappier, and gives me way more options for getting my images in or out of their site. Admittedly, this is Photoshop Express’s first day on the job, whereas Picnik has been around the block a few times. That being said, Adobe is the big gorilla, and Picnik would have be considered an underdog by comparison. After putting them both through their paces though, this underdog just happens to also be the reigning champion.