Using Web 2.0 tools often requires registering for an account at each site. Doing this with students gets to be pretty tricky since most sites require a unique email address to be used. Not many of our younger students have email addresses! There are several ways around this- and our favorite method is piggy-backing (See Susan’s post- about doing this with Gmail). Otherinbox has become a lifesaver! Here’s how it works…
1. Teacher creates an account at Otherinbox (yes, it’s free). So let’s say the teacher’s username at Otherinbox is bradpitt. That means the teacher has been assigned the email root of “bradpitt.otherinbox.com”
2. Anytime a student (let’s say SallyA) registers at any website, she can enter her email address as SallyA@bradpitt.otherinbox.com. Continue reading
Hold your breath… I’m going to violate one of my own rules that I laid out at the beginning of this blogging adventure. In the beginning, I said that I wouldn’t post things that must be purchased, downloaded, or installed as a browser plug-in. This posting violates two-thirds of the rules. Yeah, it’s free. But it’s both- a download and browser plug-in! At least it does work with PCs (Firefox, IE, Chrome) and Macs (Safari).
Simply put, this cool little plug-in/add-on turns your desktop into a cool photo and video browser. it allows you to look at a collection of images/videos either on your computer or at various websites (such as Flickr, YouTube, Google, Bing, etc.) in the form of a very cool scrolling wall of images like this (this is a wall full of images from Costa Rica via Flickr):
I embedded a wall here for you- which is another cool thing you can do with it! But it’s easier than that to use. If you are on one of the supported websites, you’ll notice a little CoolIris icon in the lower left of an image on the page. If you click on that image, it will open CoolIris and show you the wall full of photos from the site you are currently browsing.
Don’t take my word for it, try it yourself! It sure makes hunting for images a lot more fun!
This site is a God-send to teachers who want students to blog but want to protect them from giving out private information to the world. It’s also great for all you micro-managers and control freaks! The dangers of blogging are obvious, so I’m not even going to go into all that. But this free site (with phenomenal customer support) allows you to set up blogs for your students then lock down the blogs as much as you want. Check out these privacy settings:
What can students put into their blogs? Just about anything!
text
images (from URL or uploaded)
video (from URL or uploaded)
documents and other media
HTML
HTML? That’s right! Students can embed HTML created from Continue reading
Are you going to be in Denver this week? Hey, we are too! Stop by and see us at the Visions Technology booth. We will be in booth 1220 and/or 1123 most of Monday and Tuesday. We are presenting a few sessions in the booth theater as well as a few regular ISTE sessions. I don’t know the schedule yet, but I’ll revise this post as soon as I do.
We recently added Slide.com to our list of Web 2.0 resources that we demonstrate when we go to conferences (like TCEA!) Slide.com lets you create a video that looks fancy and complicated, but is soooooo easy to use.
No, not your peanut butter (though personally I prefer crunchy). If you really just have to tell us your peanut butter preference, take the poll.
Now onto the fun stuff…
Have you ever wanted to take students on a tour of a few websites where they could obtain some specific information? Having students type URLs is painful at best. Many sites will allow you to make one URL out of many. But Krunch’d does something a little different- and I like it! You enter in your URLs, then it will “krunch” them into a navigable interface by placing a banner at the top of a browser window and allow users to select the page to jump to. See my example that takes students on a tour through some sites about energy sources.
Once at the site, students can use the navigation buttons to go on to the next site and on and on.
Because it’s one of my favorite all-time movies! And the domain name was available!
No, it’s not “One-eyed Willie” we’re after here. No, we want something far more valuable!
The internet, of course, is constantly evolving. And new web applications are popping up overnight about as fast as my aquarium is filling with baby guppies. While some of these applications (all of which have lately been thrown into a mysterious category called “Web 2.0″) do some incredibly cool and useful things, many of these new “mashups” are incredibly useless. And wading through this mess to squeeze out some content that is useful for educators is much like catching guppies in the ocean (please don’t throw your guppies in the ocean- they are not saltwater fish!).
