“If you get the dirty end of the stick, sharpen it and turn it into a useful tool” Colin Powell

To begin again…
August is coming and teachers are starting to think of the coming year. Students are trying to avoid thinking at all. I know have mentioned this before but I think it needs to be restated. Google, you may have heard of it, is really useful. I recommend trying some of the other free services that Google has to offer. Now I am going to use a teacher slant with this but it could be used for any possible business or project. First off register for a Google service because once you do you will have access to all the rest of the services right away. It is free and quick. Gmail is just the tip of the Googleverse. Gmail is their version of email. One of the reasons I recommend using it is that it is searchable just like Google. This means if a student emails you during the year you can find it fairly easily. Also it does have other abilities like IM (chatting with students built directly into it) or the ability to take all emails from a specific conversation and creating a dialogue out of them instead of scattered emails through out the system. Google calendar allows for sharing of schedules and appointments throughout a group or organization. Also these can be saved to a website to make it viewable to all without registering. Google Docs and Sites are the two most underused by teachers. These together are so easy to use and useful it is unbelievable. Docs is an online Microsoft Office like set of tools. All you do is sign in and you have something that looks like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. This alone is good but once you think of the ability to share it between others it makes it supreme. It can be viewed or editable by others at the touch of a button. Finally Google Sites is the culmination of all of these. It is creatable webpage that you can use to communicate info with groups of all sorts. As an example lets say a teacher has a book group. They can post all the info about the book they are going to read and then add photos and music from where the book is set. The great thing is that it requires no real HTML ability. If you can use Microsoft Word then you can easily use Sites. Now I know I am being very general about this post but that is what it is supposed to be. I recommend checking all the sites above and see if they fit a use. Give it a try.

" The least of learning is done in the classrooms." Thomas Merton

A week ago I received a strange question out of the blue. A woman called and explained that she had a learning disability and was trying to pass the written portion of the driving test. She knew what she needed just not where to find it. She told me that she needed to make an online testing/studying method for herself. The actions of inputting all data plus the reinforcement of information would cement it all in her brain. We talked for a while and I gave her a few suggestions that I had. After we spoke I did a bit of research looking for an easy to use and helpful application. I came across Cramberry. At its core it is a set of flash cards. All you do is hop over to the site, register, and start creating sets of flash cards for anything you want to learn or quiz yourself on. If you can type in information in predefined boxes then you can do this. When you have typed in all the questions and answers you can begin to quiz yourself. It shows the question and then you click on it to see the answer. You then tell if you were right or wrong. Wrong answer will come back to haunt you during the rest of the quizzing. I like it for its simplicity but I do wish there was either a shareable or embeddable feature for teachers to share with their students. They do have a sharing button but it only works if the other person is already registered. Why not just make regular flash cards you say? I would agree that they are basically the same however I find I can log onto the site whenever I get a free moment and quiz myself versus carrying around some cards that I may or may not have on me. I recommend giving this one a try.

The answer we discussed and she seemed happy with was that if she owned a device like the iPod Touch or something similar they have plenty of flash card applications that you can design for yourself or they have pre-done ones like for learning languages. She seemed happy with the small portable idea.

"I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues." The Lorax

Quite a ways back I posted about a great site called Freerice. It is a game site that when played earns rice to be donated to others in need. Now TreeWala is almost exactly the same concept but for trees. We all need more trees. All you do is answer questions, mostly vocab and a couple of sciencey ones, to gain leaves. For every correct answer you get one leaf and for every twenty leaves one tree will be planted. It all works through ad revenue and a co-op between the site and the Marion institute. It is one of those simple games that you can play guilt free. I mean first and foremost it is educational and second it is doing something beneficial for the planet. If you are a word buff or just trying to be green, give this a try.

Note: Yesterday I was in the lab and saw a patron using FreeRice. I asked her if she knew about TreeWala and she said she knew nothing about it but her English teacher (ESL) was making her do it to improve her vocabulary. Now I don't want to be geekier than normal but I think that is AWESOME!

“I wish he would explain his explanation” Lord Byron

A while back, at dinner, I explained to a friend about the service Twitter and he just could not get his head around it. He kept asking why would anyone want to know the day to day minutia of what happens in everyone's life. I understood why he was having trouble with it but for the life of me I could not think of way to explain it better. So as usual commoncraft has come to my rescue. I have posted about them before. They did a terrific job explaining this service. Give it a try.

“Anatomy is destiny.” Sigmund Freud

Man o Mandibula! I unfortunately never took anatomy and physiology in school but I have always had an interest in understanding the body and its workings. VisibleBody is a site that can help that understanding and investigation. It shows a human body and allows you to peel away layers to see circulation or digestive systems. Now I have seen pictures of this stuff the first time I picked up a Britannica and was fascinated by the plastic transparent pages. This however goes further allowing you to come at any organ or part from any direction including inside itself. It has the ability to pull away all unnecessary bits and focus on just what is needed. The only downfall is that you must use Internet Explorer and the initial startup is a wee bit slow. However if this is an area of study for you or a class that you teach this really is awesome. Give it a try.

“Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.” Stewart Brand

So you decided to be part of the community labeled as the “in the know”. The only problem is where to start? TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and they are one of the premier places for new ideas. For the past three years there have been a series of talk and lectures that have been looking at all the new technology and concepts. There are tons of videos to watch on every sort of category you can imagine and many of them are from the big players in the industries. To sort through all the speakers and find something interesting they have used a type of tag cloud. Meaning you can look at through a list of videos or you can turn on visualization and it will resize all the talks by things like which one was the most emailed or talked about. This makes it easy to really understand what is more popular. If you want to see the “new stuff” before it is the “old stuff” then give this one a try.

“Practice is everything. This is often misquoted as Practice makes perfect.” Periander

Many people want to improve their typing ability but do not want to buy a new piece of software. They would rather sign in to a website and do it there. Good typing has it covered. It is a simple and straightforward. You register and it starts you into the lessons. Now if you are looking for glossy and animated you will be disappointed but if you are looking for something that gets the job done this is it. It goes through 27 lessons and has simple extras like bigger text sizes for easier reading. Now if you want to just try this out without registering you can click here. I was surprised how very easy this was to use. When it comes to typing it is all in the practice so I would say give this one a try to get faster.

Personal advice: To be a faster typist keep your fingers away from table saws.

“The more we study, the more we discover our ignorance” Percy Bysshe Shelley

Do you enjoy Macbeth? OK good, do you understand it? Well a nice tool is on Spark Notes to help. It puts a selection of Shakespeare next to a translation so you get to see both and get a better feel for the original. This is just one of the services on their site. Now the goal of the site is to have you buy their printable materials, books, and downloadable iPod texts but a lot of the same info is online and free but with ads. They have info on anything from writing to history. The history section is really nice allowing you to quickly focus on an era and then go deeper to specific incidents. I have to say I come to this as a novice because the only educational aids I remember were Cliff Notes but I am taking to this one fairly easily. Give it a try and read a play.