mind42.com is a web based mindmapping tool that recently came out of beta. I find their web interface intuitive and easy to use. Features include the ability to collaborate with others and to publish your maps via a direct link, or embedded in web pages.

Dan Meyer has produced another great video, this time documenting his experience using a data projector and video to help his students understand algebra. In the process he discusses his teaching process and how it has changed because of these tools. I plan to share this with my staff when we come back in August.

dy/av : 002 : the next-gen lecturer from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.

[From dy/dan » Blog Archive » dy/av : 002 : the next-gen lecturer]

Stanza, currently in beta, is an electronic book reading application for Mac OS which also allows you to export content for use on a variety of portable devices. It features the ability to customize the display of text in multiple column layouts or in full screen mode. Scrolling can be set to advance automatically, like a teleprompter, based on your reading speed, or manually. You can import content from a variety of sources including directly from the Project Gutenberg site. It also provides for the ability to export content to mobile devices such as the iPhone and the Amazon Kindle.

I spent some time this morning playing with Stanza and went to the Project Gutenberg site and found the listing for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. I copied the url for the full text version and used the Open Location feature in Stanza to download and display the book. Stanza went out and got the file and displayed the book in the default view. I then used the export feature to create versions for my iPhone and for my Kindle.

The export to the iPhone is accomplished by converting the content to a .plist file (bookmarklet file) and then importing the bookmarklet into Safari. Once imported the content is transfered to your phone on your next sync. Once it is on your iPhone you can customize the reading experience including the ability to auto-scroll the text at various rates of speed based on your reading speed. As noted in their FAQ, very large books, or documents can slow down your the iPhone browser when initially opening the document.

I tried to use the open location feature to display a print friendly article from the New York Times, but ran into an issue with authenticating on the Times site. I worked around this by displaying the print friendly version of the article and then selecting and copying the text of the article. Stanza has an import form clipboard command that then imported and displayed the article.

Stanza is an interesting way to display and read text on your Mac. It’s ability to export in various mobile formats makes it a great tool for getting content on your mobile devices.

Technorati Tags: ebook, ebooks, iphone, kindle, Stanza

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody:

Clay Shirky has a post up this morning that is a transcription of a speech he recently gave at the Web 2.0 conference. He discusses the social surplus that for the last 50 years has been consumed by television watching and is now being used by people to create, share and interact using technology. His arguments about “finding time” are something to think about as we work with our colleagues who are constantly asking that same question…

“From now on, that’s what I’m going to tell them: We’re looking for the mouse. We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?” And I’m betting the answer is yes.”

Update: Here is the video…

Technorati Tags: shirky, social surplus

Joe Luft is blogging again at BrooklynJoe. He also has a Drupal site set up for his school, Flushing International High School. With the ongoing New York transit strike, it is a good example of how a school can use a site to provide timely information to its community.

Technorati Tags: Flushing International High School

Tim Wilson points to Stellarium an open source desktop planetarium for Linux/Unix, Windows and MacOSX. I took his advice and downloaded the application. It is quite impressive. I’ve wanted to include an astronomy tool like this on our disk image at Lewis, but could not afford to pay the licensing fee for something like Starry Night. Thanks for the pointer Tim…

Technorati Tags: astronomy, planetarium, stellarium

Don Leu and the members of The New Literacies Research Team at the University of Connecticut have created a web site to document their work.

The New Literacies Research Team at the University of Connecticut is a continually evolving consortium of professors, graduate research assistants, school districts, organizations, policy makers, teachers, and school leaders who seek to prepare students for the new learning and literacy skills required by information and communication technologies such as the Internet.

I have known and worked with Don since my days as a kindergarten teacher at Buckman Elementary and I look forward to learning more about the work of his team and following their New Literacies Team Blog…

Technorati Tags: New Literacies, Don Leu