Well, I finally finished tagging all 355 of my bookmarks in Delicious! This was one of those mind-numbing organizational tasks that just has to be done, like sorting your email into folders so you can find that important message from your principal a month from now. But something good actually came of reviewing all the sites I’ve bookmarked up until this point: I reacquainted myself with all the wonderful content that is available on the net. I took a second look at some sites I want to share with my teachers. I dusted off those plans to start a book discussion group with some of my students. And I reminded myself that the content has to drive the technology, not the other way around.
It’s easy to be wowed by all the flashy 2.0 applications that are out there. It’s easy to get so caught up in exploring all the “cool tools” that I neglect to spend time implementing what I’m learning in my media center program. And what’s worse, it’s easy to start a project like a blog or a wiki or a podcast and then fail to maintain it.
For example, ever since I learned about Google Book Search in August, I have been using it to keep a list of all the books from the Alice Drive Elementary Library collection that I’ve read since I started teaching at the school last year. It’s linked from my media center webpage so that my students can see what I’m reading and hopefully find something they’d like to check out. I realized today that I haven’t posted any new titles in over a week! This is partly because lately I’ve spent more time with the computer than with a book, and partly because I just haven’t taken the time to add the books I did read. Will the kids notice I haven’t added anything new this week? Probably not. But it’s a slippery slope when you start to let those projects slide.
So I guess this blog post is really more of a reflection on the need to keep my technology priorities straight, rather than a description of my experience with Delicious. But that’s okay; it’s just part of sharing The View From Here.
How easy it is to get sidetracked on the web! I was just working on editing my bookmarks in Delicious (one of my 23 Things this week is setting up a Delicious account, and when I imported my bookmarks I was staring at 355 sites to be tagged! But that’s a different post!) when I came across the Bubblr site. I had bookmarked it earlier when we were exploring MashUps, but hadn’t used it yet. I did a quick experiment with it so that I would know how to describe it in Delicious, and here’s what I came up with:
Unfortunately, the text is too small to read here, so if you’d like to see a larger version of my comic strip, go to: Lori’s Blog? by Lori
It was fun, and it took almost no time at all. Bubblr has a Flickr search tool right there on the cartoon creation page, so when you type in your tag(s) it immediately displays matching photos at the top of the screen. Drag and drop the one(s) you want to use into the cartoon frames, drag in a thought or speech bubble, type your text and voila ~ you’re a cartoonist!
p.s. I mentioned in an earlier post that I was having trouble embedding a flash image into my blog. I again had trouble embedding this cartoon, also flash, so this time I turned to The Edublogger for advice. For those of you using Edublogs, Sue Waters does an amazing job of posting explanations of how to do anything you might possibly want to do with your blog. I always search her posts before I go to the forum for help. Click here for her post on embedding code.
I just spent a little while playing around at ImageChef, and apart from one piece of code for a flash image that just wouldn’t work in my blog, this site is very easy to use, and you can quickly generate a variety of fun images!
Here’s an image I personalized from the Fun Category.
It’s as easy as choosing from the menu of background options and typing in the text you want. I just used the templates and images available at the site, but you can also upload your own photos for many of the projects. Registration is optional; you can create and access the resulting html code without signing in. So what are you waiting for? Go try it out!
Okay, am I the only one who found Technorati overwhelming?! My focus right now is on using Web 2.0 in education, but since “Education” wasn’t listed in the Technorati blog directory, I took a look at the “Web 2.0″ category under Technology. Boy, were there a lot of blogs for tech geeks listed there! I didn’t understand half of what I was reading!
I did find one new blog to add to my Netvibes page, though. ReadWriteWeb is a blog that provides web technology news, reviews, and analysis. It’s not something I really need to check daily, or even weekly, but it should be interesting to scan the posts every now and then to keep up with the trends and buzz words in the 2.0 world.
To be honest, most of the blogs I’m following, such as The Blue Skunk, are ones I found out about by looking at other people’s blogrolls. For example, Cathy Nelson has some great ones listed at her blog site, Techno Tuesday. By checking out the blogs she follows, I found additional links to still more good blogs. It’s good to be part of a network!
Using a newsreader is actually something I’ve been doing for awhile now. I took a look at the Bloglines website, but I confess I didn’t spend too much time on it because I am extremely happy with my Netvibes page. Netvibes is actually a personalized start page which allows me to put all of my web content in one place, using customizable tabbed pages to keep everything organized. Through the use of widgets I can easily add RSS feeds for podcasts, blogs, and news, but I can also include photos, bookmarks, webpage modules, html, pop e-mail, and more.
Netvibes allows me to have a public page to share with the world in addition to a private page that only I can access. I have transferred some of my private items to my public page, Keeping An Eye On…, to show just a little of what you can do with Netvibes, and you are welcome to take a look at it.
I have been working on another Mash-Up project this past week, this time using Flickr and Google Earth. I’m creating a Google Lit Trip for the book How to Bake an Apple Pie and See the World by Marjorie Priceman. Google Earth is a free download that lets you fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, 3D buildings and more. You can explore, save your toured places, and share them with others. Google Lit Trips use features of Google Earth to plot the events in a book so that students can take a virtual tour of the setting and happenings of the story.
The premise of the book I’m using is that when the market is closed one day, a young baker must travel the world to gather the ingredients she needs for her apple pie. I searched Flickr CC (which is an invaluable site for finding Flickr photos released under the creative commons license) for images to include at each stop on my Google Earth journey, so that students can see not only where each country is on the map, but also a photo of the actual area, as well as the animal or plant providing the necessary baking ingredients. For example, at one point our heroine travels to France to get eggs, and I was able to find this photo of a freshly laid egg, actually taken in Bretagne, to include in my trip.
I am currently working on the last step of the project, which is to create a path to link all of the destinations together. Once I have the Lit Trip completed, I will update this post.
(Flickr Photo “Speckled White Egg” by hugovk)
Boy, there are some really neat Flickr Mash-Ups out there! This was actually another one of those humbling assignments that made me realize just how much I *don’t* know about the tools that are available on the web. I just keep repeating to myself, “How do you eat the elephant? One bite at a time!”
The first application I played with is Montager, which creates mosaics from Flickr photos that are searched out based on a tag name of your choice. At first I didn’t see a practical use for it, but the more I played with it, the more I realized what a neat tool it is. It would be a new and creative way to compile photos from a particular event and display them on a website, or you could use it on a school webpage to display photos of your faculty and staff. (With their permission, of course.)
Next I looked at the Big Huge Labs website and tried out the Captioner application, which allows you to add speech and thought bubbles to your photos. This caught my attention because I thought students would enjoy seeing photos turned into cartoons. (In fact, back in the day, I used to buy caption bubble stickers to use on the “real” photos I displayed on my media center bulletin board!) Here is my creation:
Original Image: ‘Yummy Apples‘
www.flickr.com/photos/23078991@N05/2796325875
Mash-up created with Flickr Toys.
I have two caveats for those who want to use this tool. First, you cannot upload or import Bitmap photos to be captioned; they need to be in the JPEG format. The apple photo that I found at Flickr CC was originally a bitmap image, so I had to convert it in order to caption it. I used my Microsoft Paint program to do that by opening the photo in paint and then saving it, choosing “jpeg” from the Save drop-down file type menu. Easy and free!
Second, you need to start with a large image because the caption bubbles are too big to fit onto a small photo. You can shrink it down after you’ve created and saved it to whatever size you want to use. I had originally saved my apple photo using the “small” option, so I had to go back to the Flickr site and re-save it as a large photo.
I was listening to the latest podcast from the Tech Chicks this week and found out about a new URL shortening service: MooURL! This cute little cow does the same thing TinyURL does, which is to shorten an outrageously long URL into a shorter one. Both sites also give you the option to add the suffix of your choice to the end of your short URL, rather than using the randomly assigned letters and numbers provided by the sites’ URL generators.
So why choose Moo over Tiny? I wanted to shorten my media center URL and use my school abbreviation (ADE) as the ending. That suffix was not available at TinyURL, but Moo came throooo!
Using Moo, I went from this: http://ade.sumter17.k12.sc.us/group_profile_view.aspx?id=3a98f222-34d4-4609-95cb-e0150f0905fd (93 characters!)
To this: “http://www.moourl.com/ade (only 25 characters!)
Thanks, Tech Chicks!
p.s. I captured the Moo header (at the top of this post) from the moourl website by right clicking and using the “save picture as” option. Next, I uploaded it into my Flickr account, then used Flickr’s “blog this” feature to create this post.
