infospot

Here is a website which gives you a quick synopsis of your system including what browser, Flash and the ip address.

Output from the website

Sometimes someone asks you for this information and it can be cumbersome to locate it all.  I would be wary of sending it via email.  There may be no problem with it, or it may harvest the email addresses to sell them.

Still useful tools, webquests allow you to direct students towards valuable information. Here is a review of some of the sites I found:

teachbabel.com: Because of its awkwardness, I would suggest you save everything in a document and paste it into the template. There are harmless annoying pop-up prompts and in the editor, inappropriate banner ads, which don’t seem to appear on the student side. I found no intuitive way to return to editor. There did not appear to be any way to force links to open in a new window, html is not allowed and it is difficult to add links because you have to use their proprietary codes. There was a reference to what seemed to be a GUI (graphic user interface) to add links, but navigation was confusing. Drop down lists were obscured by ads. The url is not intuitive: it would be a chore to direct students to the finished webquest.

Zunal.com This site offers an intuitive interface, with easily recognizable formatting tools. The site allows you to upload a wide variety of file formats. The evaluation page is rubric formatted. Although this might be restrictive, I am biased because I love rubrics. One downside is that there are 4 possible grading points with no obvious way to remove them if you only have two points. I deleted the contents of those cells and reduced the scoring to 0%.

See the trial webquest I created using this site: http://zunal.com/webquest.php?user=31516

This helpful online tool allows you to capture/print parts of a website and remove backgrounds or images to make a “clean” print. This is especially useful if you are trying to make instructional posters.

Some of the features:

• select only some text boxes or images
• resize items to make them more pronounced
• alter font (only 5 choices)

There is no signup or download, just paste or type an address into the webpage.

There are many ways to download YouTube videos, but most of them require enough technical knowledge to discourage their use. YouTube has some valuable content, but in my district it is blocked.

Enter any YouTube video address into PWN! and it downloads it in an FLV or QuickTime format.  Though I have only tried it on a Mac and with the QT format, I have great faith it would work on the PC.  On a mac, iSquint can convert it to an iPod compatible format, which can be projected from the iPod.

Although this won’t circumvent your blocking software at school, at least it will allow you to download the video and put it on a key drive or cd from outside your district.  The four videos I downloaded ranged from 2MB to 15MB.

Scenario: You want to provide students with many links for a project.  Instead of giving students a long list, you can give them a short, simple url, which when you navigate to it, expands the list again.  The url or contents can be bookmarked, or the list can be copied to a document.  In steps linkbun.ch. Very clever.

Sometimes email is not an effective way to communicate and the phone is inconvenient.  However, though the best alternative might be instant messaging (IM), most schools prohibit the download/install of a client to run IM.

Meebo is an aggregator for IM and runs in a browser window, so no download is necessary.  Clients supported via Meebo include: AIM Yahoo, Meebo, myspace, facebook, MSN, GoogleTalk, ICQ, Jabber and Flixster.  You do need a pre-existing account for each, but multiple logins are possible.

Good uses for IM?  Sending links, images and for short rapid conversations!

Are you tired of Google yet? This would be like the argument between pc users and me, when someone accuses me of being a Mac cult follower. Counter-arguement: I will stay with Apple/Mac until something else comes along which better suits my purposes. We now have excellent choices for searching, Google has pushed this process along, but let’s not be drones.

There are other search engines out there. Altavista is still going strong and of course there are others, though they don’t stand out quite as large.

But what about Metasearch engines? Dogpile is the primary one which comes to mind. Metasearch engines collect search results from many search engines and amalgamate them. Some search engines are better at searching for certain types of information. By looking at the results via a metasearch engine, you can see which results fit your bill.

Clusty is a metasearch engine which works like Dogpile, but collects the results into categories. Let’s say you put in a search for trees. We know that is a poor choice of terms, because it covers a wide range of topics, but sometimes we struggle to define a topic because we are fishing around for what keywords to use. I use this one because it is a simple example.

Clusty returns the results as a list of top ranked sites, but in addition it places categories on the left side of the screen. You can refine your search by choosing a category, such as family. You can also drill down through the categories into sub-categories.
As an added bonus, Clusty still gives you the origins of each result like Dogpile would, so you can make informed decisions. Always nice to have alternatives, especially when in an academic setting Google is occasionally (albeit briefly) blocked.

I tried out a new graphic organizer at bubbl.us

Here are some thoughts:

Pros

• copy/paste worked well
• hypertext link friendly
• multiple colors available for the symbols
• collaborate with “friends” with accounts
• share in similar way

Cons

• a moderately sized ad takes up 1/4 of the right side of the screen (pretty non-invasive otherwise)
• size of font and symbols restrict how much of the diagram can be seen at once (though zoom out is possible)
• no control over shape of symbols

Cost is an obvious advantage. You do need to create a free account in order to save your graphic organizers.

Deja-vu: so close.

Well someone has a site called pocketmod which is part of the way again to online simple creation of them. We can’t yet use cut/paste of pictures/diagrams or text, but there are pre-formated pages with tables, graph paper in various sizes, storyboard and music notation pages. Most can’t be modified online, but they might make a great template for a mini-book project. There are nice illustrations there to help you with the folding.

More tech savvy PC users can download the pdf to pocket mod converter. Although I have not experimented with it, I suspect that it would create a pocketmod from an eight page pdf. Free document to pdf converters are available on the PC platform, including a free online tool, which converts your document and emails you the final pdf. Remember to use the junk email address in case they are harvesting email addresses for spam.

Here is a site I found for sending faxes to regular numbers.  The catch is that there is an ad on the cover page. I have not tried this out, yet.  I need to look into what the ad entails.  If anyone has an answer to this before me, please post.