Archives for “Web Tools”

What I would like to see is a school district take this personalized Google page and provide XML data or modules that would tie into its student information system. For example as a principal I would like to create a page that pulled in content such as our average daily attendance, a listing of absent students, tardy students, GPS routing information for school busses, a list of the most current reading assessment scores.

With Google Transit you can easily access schedules, routes, and plan trips using their local public transportation options. The first release covers my city, Portland, Oregon and the TriMet system, but they plan to expand to more systems soon, and are actively seeking out other transit organizations to partner with.

This got me thinking of something I read of in September when a post by Cory Doctrow on BoingBoing lamenting the fact that the items in the Library of Congress' American Memory project were locked in a Web .5 interface that made navigation and retrieval of information cumbersome. Simon Willison read the post and quickly came up with a Greasemonkey script that renderered the American Memory pages in a much more visualizing appealing manner.

Contributors first find their location on a Google Map, then they contribute their story, picture or other file (am thinking this could be an audio recording, size is limited to 5 mgs, but if you have a larger file you can send them an email and make arrangements for upload...), then they provide some general information about themselves and upload the information.... This is a project of The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University and the University of New Orleans in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History and the Louisiana State Museum.

Gizmo -Advanced Features - Call Recording: Gizmo is a voice over IP application that is similar to Skype, but that has a few interesting features that look attractive...... Callers can dial one of these access numbers from a conventional phone and connect to your Gizmo account free of charge...

TextMarker allows you to highlight various sections of text on a web page and then copy the various pieces of text to the clipboard for pasting into another document.... A student reading an article can highlight selected paragraphs while reading the article and then when finished, copy the highlighted sections with one action.

Google has introduced Reader, a web based RSS reader.... You can search Google for content and if the content you find also has an RSS feed you can subscribe to the feed.

Google Talk: Google's entry into the voice over IP world...

The Focus on Effectiveness web site brings together research about effective instructional practices, and carefully selected technology tools and recommendations for their use. Created by the Northwest Educational Technology Consortium and the Learning Innovation & Technology Consortium, the site builds on the work of educational researchers Robert J.

Citation Machine is an interactive Web tool designed to assist teachers in modeling the proper use of information property.... David indicates that he plans on making the code available so that schools can host the Citation Machine on their own servers if they like...

These include our staff bulletin, the public web page, a Flickr photo gallery, a multi-author classroom notes site, book recommendations from our library, and a weblog to power our reader board.... With a tool like FeedDigest, I can mix them into one RSS feed that will give me a chronological look at the weblog activity at Lewis, all in one place...

Amassing a Treasury of Photography - New York Times: The Eastman House and the International Center of Photography To be completed in the fall of 2006, Photomuse, a joint project of the Eastman House and the and as both institutions work out agreements with estates and living photographers, the intention is to add tens of thousands more pictures.... For example, a Hine picture of an Italian immigrant couple could be found under the headings of "immigration," or "Italian-Americans" or "Ellis Island" or "urban photography" or under the headings of exhibitions where the photograph has been shown through the years.

Podiobooks – Serialized audio books in podcast form “Authors receive one half of all the proceeds from the donations from listeners. The other half goes to the maintenance and upkeep of podiobooks.com.” Kind of like the Radio Reader for your iPod… (Via Jon Udell’s del.icio.us affinity feed)

Google Map links for Unesco World Heritage SitesBrad Templeton has created a page that links Google Maps satellite imagery to UNESCO’s World Heritage sites index.

NECC Talking Points: flickr4schools… Over at eSchoolNew ETI, Tom Hoffman discusses the use of tools such as Flickr by teachers and schools, and suggests that school district IT departments need to start thinking of providing similar services. Tom goes on to make the point that… “Schools need to start taking seriously their responsibility to maintain [...]

In the main hallway at Lewis Elementary we have an LCD panel powered by an iMac that displays school images along with news and announcements. We have been using Keynote to display the images and news and announcements. This has worked pretty well, but the updates have to be done manually and I’m the one [...]

During the spring quarter I have been working with two fourth grade reading groups 4 days a week. One group has recently been reading John Reynolds Gardiner’s Stone Fox. It is the story of a boy named Willie who lives in Wyoming with his ailing grandfather on a potato farm and they are facing some [...]

Kaifeng-on-the-Hudson: “Nicholas D. Kristof says the Big Apple could go the way Kaifeng, China, if the U.S. doesn’t make some bold changes.” Today, The New York Times has a multimedia piece (Flash Movie) from Nicholas D. Kristof discussing the furture of New York and comparing it to Kaifeng, a city in central China that in [...]

Chicago crime database | chicagocrime.org: Another interesting use of Google Maps with a data set. This time Chicago crime statistics. I want to do this so I can produce a map of where my students live. Would come in handy when I have to make a home visit. (Via O’Reilly Radar.)

Wists. Social bookmarks, wishlists, photoblogs. Category: all This looks kind of interesting. Wists is similar to del.icio.us and Furl in that it allows you to organize sites with tags. It also lets you grab an image from the page to be associated with your bookmark.

Geobloggers has created an web interface that takes photos from Flickr with geocoding tags and places them on maps from Google. Check out their downtown Chicago map… (Via FlickrBlog.)

This is something I’ve been looking for in Moveable Type. David Raynes has created a Moveable Type plug-in called Workflow, that allows a Moveable Type editor to grant authoring privileges to authors to post drafts, which then can only be published by the editor. This will be great for those in education that seem to [...]

Listings… Paul Rademacher combines information from Craigslist with map content from Google Maps to provide a visual geographical representation of housing available on Craigslist. This is the kind of stuff I wish our school district student information system provided. Why not be able to pull up a list of students and easily have their addresses [...]

Marcus Campbell has released Scuttle, an open source bookmark manager (think del.icio.us, but hosted on your server), built on PHP and MySQL and released as open-source under the GPL. I’m interested in this because I have been looking for a method for my 4th and 5th grade students to catalog and organize their web resources [...]

Spell with flickr This site by allows you to create a word or phrase with letters pulled from Flickr… #flickrWords .flickrImg { float: left; }