Celebrating the Year of the Dog! :

Beth Kanter has posted a very nice lesson plan (Learning Object?? ) for sharing Chinese New Year with students in her daughter’s classroom. It includes links to resources on the web and some that she has created herself.

Technorati Tags: Chinese New Year

Batchgeocode.com is free service that will bulk geocode tabular data directly in your web browser. Latitude and longitude information is returned for each address. You also have the option of creating a Google Earth KML file that will allow you to plot your addresses in Google Earth. At Lewis Elementary we are working with our city traffic department to add some crosswalks and pedestrian improvements in our neighborhood. I can now share with them specific information about our students and show them the need for these improvements based on where our students live. I plan to play with this a bit more. Am thinking I could do things like plot achievement data based on geography, not to mention helping plan bike and walking school bus routes.

Via… Google Maps Mania…

Technorati Tags: Batchgeocode, Google Earth

Just a post to note that the New York Times now is making podcasts available. Content includes a daily summary of the front page, a weekly review of science, technology and environmental news, and music reviews. The link above is to their free content. They also have more selections behind their TimesSelect subscription login… Even better news though, is that The Onion is podcasting too.

Technorati Tags: Podcasting

Google in China at The Thinking Stick:

Jeff Utecht laments the sad state of affairs when corporations, such as Yahoo Google and MSN, are willing to do the bidding of governments and deny freedom to their users ” to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful…”

When will Google amend their mission statement?

A pretty damn sad day…

Technorati Tags: tyranny

Scuttle is an Open Source tool for creating and sharing web bookmarks. It is similar to del.icio.us and supports the del.icio.us API. The great thing about Scuttle is that you can download the source and run the application on your own server. Today my friend, Dick McPartland, came by and installed the necessary software and we now have Scuttle running locally at Lewis Elementary

This means that we can provide our students with a social bookmarking tool, running locally in our building. Several teachers have asked for a tool similar to del.icio.us. I wanted to set up Scuttle so that students did not have to create a login on a remote system. As they work on projects and research they will be able to organize their sources using Scuttle.

I think this will present some interesting opportunities for both students and teachers, since the bookmarking will be in the open and easily accessed/shared by others. I anticipate teachers learning of many valuable resources by watching the RSS feed of the most recently bookmarked sites. I plan to add the RSS feed to both our student and staff pages to make these resources even more transparent. This should be fun…

Update: Todd Slater comments about ScuttlEDU… He has added additional fields to the registration process so that a teacher’s name and grade level can automatically become tags when you post a page. A great idea, and a great example of how an Open Source tool can be expanded on by others.

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, scuttle

iTunes Signature Maker…

iTunes Signature Maker (iTSM) analyzes your music collection and creates a short audio signature to represent who you are and what you listen to. After it checks your system configuration and asks you a few simple questions, iTSM will spend a few minutes analyzing your collection and generating the audio signature.

Here’s mine…

Technorati Tags: ITSM

Tony Jamesbarry pointed me to this one…

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Quote Generator Dashboard Widget for OS X.

100 random quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr…

Technorati Tags: Dr. King, Widget