Read/WriteWeb: Web 2.0 Office

Read/WriteWeb: Web 2.0 Office In researching for the CED534 course - I listened to another podcast from Moving at the Speed of Creativity. Podcast #29 discussed Web 2.0, which so deeply aligned with my thoughts, it has me renaming the course (in draft at least) to Web 2.0 - the Read/Write web. This includes applications that will transform how we do things (gmail for instance) and part of these are Office suites delivered through the web. Here are a series of them.

S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System

S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System Wow! A way to do presentations based on Open Source software. How cool! I love when I stumble across this kind of resource. This one came from doing research for a new class that I am researching curriculum. In the process I stumbled across a great new podcast - "Podcast 13: Podcasting as a Disruptive Transmediation" at Moving at the Speed of Creativity - the weblog of Wesley Fryer. I have added this as another to have downloaded to iTunes automatically. So many good resources.

Technorati: Home

Technorati: Home Looking for a podcast? Looking for a Blog? Technorati has listings of podcasts to assist you in finding these and more.

Personal and small business information manager: Get organized, Backpack

Personal and small business information manager: Get organized, Backpack Another interesting concept. A way to be organized from any Internet capable computer. Add ideas, to-do's, notes photos and then collaborate with others. What a great way to do some classroom cooperative learning projects. This is a resource I will be embedding into a new class that I am working on - it has great potential.

To do list, simple, easy, fast, sharable: Ta-da List

To do list, simple, easy, fast, sharable: Ta-da List Gee - I was listening to another podcast on the way in - and they mentioned this site. It's part of BaseCamp - and when I came here I recalled that i had indeed signed up for using this at an earlier time. This is another great online resoource for helping get things done.

Bloglines

Bloglines Need a way to have web access to RSS feeds - Bloglines is a simple way to organize the Blogs or other RSS feeds you may be working with or following (hey - use it for this one!)

eHuddle™- Something every committee can agree on.

eHuddle™- Something every committee can agree on. A good friend sent me this site - and said the following: I am attending the Wisconsin Data Summit for Successful Schools next week Tuesday. The reason I mention this is that we have been using ehuddle (http://www.ehuddle.com) to prepare for the day long meeting. It is a very cool online collaboration tool that "makes your committee more efficient and effective by empowering every group member to brainstorm, express opinions, and vote without ever attending a single meeting! eHuddle allows them to do it all...online...and in their own time!" Last week we did an "estorm" (individual brainstorming) and our task this week is to escore (prioritize) all of the ideas. After the escore session ends, we will be able to see how the group rated the ideas. These results become the groundwork for next Tuesday's meeting. I thought this might be a useful tool for us as a department. What do you think? What do I think - wow - what a great idea.

Online Learning

Online Learning This site at Edutopia - explores the current state of Online Learning. As usual, this site rocks! Included are videos and more - worth a look.

Personal Technology -- Personal Technology from The Wall Street Journal.

Personal Technology -- Personal Technology from The Wall Street Journal.: "This week, Apple Computer announced that it sold a staggering 14 million iPod music players over the recently ended holiday quarter -- more than 100 every minute. But as popular and well-designed as the iPod is, it's not perfect. There are a couple of aspects of the way it works, or doesn't work, that are becoming increasingly annoying as people acquire both more iPods and more computers." When I saw this article, I thought of the number of students and teachers who may be using iPods for their ability to store and transfer lectures and podcasts. Since you cannot use an iPod on multiple computers, a flaw (in my opinion) built into the iPod by Apple to minimize the possibility that songs will be illegally shared, I found the solutions offered by 3rd party folks to be of interest. For windows users, there is CopyPod - designed to assist by letting you share music on more than one computer. For Macintosh users you may use PodWorks to do the same thing. These utilities should help teachers and students in using educational media between machines.

MECA

MECA What a pleasure to rediscover the Milwaukee Educational Computing Association (MECA). I was a member maybe 10 years ago - it's nice to know that this organization still exists and is helping teachers as a technology resource. I will need to reconnect and get active again now that I am working in the Milwaukee area.

JotSpot

In an article from InfoWorld, the discussion of JotSpot as a place to allow users to cut and paste an Excel spreadsheet onto a secure Web site for sharing of information. Imagine the collaborative learning opportunities when you start a process like this..... The site bills itself as an application wiki - what an interesting concept. This fits in with some of the web based tools that I have been exploring recently.

One Big Head

One Big Head What great thoughts by J.P. Moore on several different things - with the theme being the future of education and how change is resisted. As he gives us My 2 Cents on the Future he shares more than two cents worth of ideas. He focusses on two big ideas in this podcast:

1. Do Schools have the Power to Change? He examines this through many lenses and
2. Digital Natives - Digital Immigarants - can this really occur with the disparity of distribution of technology.

Great thoughts - worth the 20 minutes of listening time - and the hours of reflecting after listening.

The Complete Teacher

From an email forwarded to me.....

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The Complete Teacher Program is being offered, free, to the profession as a way of improving teaching skills. (This program normally sells for $105.) The Complete Teacher™ is a computer-based system for delivering training in the praxis of teaching. The program is designed around a complex clinical training model which views the teacher as an actor, developer, professional, manager, salesperson, subject expert, and writer. New York University Professor Robert Swerdlow, the program's author, has hypothesized that it is the degree of mastery, both within and among these seven performance areas that will determine a teacher's effectiveness. The Complete Teacher™ can be downloaded for free from the publisher's web site --- www.completeteacher.com "Teachers have many hats to wear during the course of a teaching day…The Complete Teacher, a new computer-based training system, addresses each of these roles through a series of training modules."--- INSTRUCTOR MAGAZINE

More from LibriVox

Well, this morning I listened to my first chapter of Notes from the Underground (by Fyodor Dostoyevsky). The sound quality in no way matches the quality one finds from a professionally read book, but the passion of the reader makes up for the microphone. I beleive this site could be a launching pad for educators in introducing some of the classics to their classes. With their request for readers, it could also fill a niche in introducing students to creating podcasts or the technologies needed. It could be a great class project as well for an english class to create an entire book and upload it.

Learning about LibriVox

As I listened to some PodCasts this morning - driving to work - a new site was mention on APM's Future Tense on Turning classics into free audio books. It features LibriVox, which bills itself as "accoustical liberation of books in the public domain". Basically this source is providing free audiobooks - with volunteers recording the chapters. It looks like a site worth visiting and investigating.