Twitter. I follow people who share the most amazing stuff. Follow me: Markhamster – and then follow the people I’m following (for a start). I use Tweetdeck (iPhone too).
Feedly. It’s the best rss feed aggregator. It’s a Firefox addon. I’ll list my feeds in another post.
Buzz out loud. The best podcast about all things tech (CNet). Intelligent, and heated discussions by people who really know what they’re talking about. I listen to this on my iPhone on the way to work. Best to subscribe to it from iTunes podcast directory.
Buzz report. A vodcast (also from CNet) anchored by Molly Wood (she’s great: smart, passionate & funny). I watch this on my iPhone. Best to subscribe to it from iTunes podcast directory.
GeekBrief.TV. A vodcast – Cali Lewis anchors. Gadgets, interviews, etc… I watch this on my iPhone. Best to subscribe to it from iTunes podcast directory too.
For best results, subscribe to the pod/vodcasts in iTunes so they download onto your computer (you won’t have to watch and wait while they play – they’ll just play). I download them overnight, or while I’m having breakfast.
Remove other Tweetdeck files: Library>Preferences> delete Tweetdeck folder
Go to Tweetdeck, click download – it will ask to install Adobe Air, so install it – this will also install Tweetdeck.
Launch Tweetdeck.
Enter your Twitter login details.
Tweetdeck is essential (for me) for using Twitter. IMO Twitter is tough without it. I had two months without Tweetdeck = two months without Twitter. This fix got me back into the game.
We don’t all have great internet connections. It’s particularly embarrassing if we try to show a video on YouTube to a class and our internet connection stops the video from playing. A more reliable method would be to download the video before class, then play it from your computer. Here’s how:
Over the past few days I’ve been on a mission to put our teaching centres on Google Maps. Here are a few things I’ve learnt along the way. I’m a complete newbie, but I hope this’ll be useful to someone in the same position.
First off, create a Google account that you can hand over to your web team when you’re done. The tags you create will be linked to that account (so don’t use your personal account, m’kay?).
Use Google Maps’ Local Business Centre (LBC) to create the map tags.
Start simple, with just the basic info for each tag you create. I made the mistake of writing complex descriptions for each tag and these had words in them that Google didn’t like – they got ‘flagged’ as ‘waiting for content check’. Here’s an explanation of what to do if this happens to you. To avoid this happening at all, don’t write a description to start off with. Add it later, once the tag goes ‘Active’.
Add any pics and vids later too.
Next, Google needs to verify you are who you claim to be. To do this, you can opt for: a phone call where they ask you to key in a PIN they give you; an SMS text message PIN to a mobile phone; something that uses the postal service (I didn’t try this)
If you go for the phone call option, make sure that you’re near your reception/call centre switchboard to help your receptionist key in the PIN.
You can do the SMS thing quite easily though, with a little workaround. Here’s what I did for three out of four of our teaching centres. I used my personal mobile number. Got a text message with a PIN in it. Entered the PIN myself. Then once the tag turned to ‘Active’, I edited the tag’s info and deleted my mobile number. Ok, yeah right… Now that seems like a big hole in Google’s security, but hey, it worked for me, and it saved me a lot of time too. [edit 6 Oct 09 - Our WebAdmin tells me that this doesn't work anymore. It appears that Google has now spotted this loophole and fixed it. ]
Once all your tags are ‘Active’, go back and edit them to add descriptions and stuff.
the first photo you add will be the one that appears in the listing, so add the best one first. See post on this.
If you add video, it seems to block any images from appearing in the listing. So if you want your tag to appear in the search list with a nice pic, don’t add a video to your tag. I could be very wrong here, but this is what happened to me. Any tips for fixing this, are most welcome.
In my limited experience, the whole Google Map tag creation thing seems a bit clunky. Not very slick. Too many workarounds and uncertainties. But I got it to work OK in the end.
[edit 24 March - here's an instructional video from Google, nice... but no help in avoiding the bugs. Recently 3 out of 4 of my listings on Google Maps have vanished from the Map, although they're still in the Local Business Centre lising. I'm growing to hate Google Maps. Shame really, because it's cool when it works. It's just that it doesn't seem to work very well most of the time, which is very uncool.]
Technology empowers us to do things which make us unique. In this TED talk, Neil Gershenfeld from MIT talks about “the killer app of personal fabrication”. He sprints through some breath-takingly brilliant visions of the future. But the point which hit me hardest is that we need to give students, teachers… everybody, more opportunities to move from consumers of technology to fabricators of technology. Watch the video here:
You might be prompted to choose ‘player 7′ or ‘player 8′ (Flash). Pick either one, both worked for me.
It’s a brilliant talk, but hard to follow. Quite complex, compared to other TED talks. I had to watch this one a few times to get the whole picture. But it’s awesome.
Here are some of the Firefox addons I’ve been using in an educational context for the past 5 years or so. The links take you to the pages that explain what each addon does:
MyCroft Project searchbar addon Add this to your Firefox searchbar by clicking the ‘MyCroft Project – All’ link on the page this takes you to, and then use it from your searchbar to find all the available Firefox search addons you’ll ever need. There are thousands. You can also go to the MyCroft page and find searchbar addons from there. Here’s the Mozilla MyCroft page link. Test the ones you install, because some work better than others.
Here are some of the search addons I use regularly from my Firefox searchbar. (no links here, sorry – you’ll have to find them yourself in MyCroft):
Dictionary.com
Thesaurus.com
Urban Dictionary
Wikipedia
Websters Online Dictionary
Word Reference en – definition
YouTube
HowStuffWorks
Quotation Book – Search
Google Scholar
Google Trends
Download.com
Amazon.com
Yotophoto.com
Yahoo images (better than Google Images because it has Flickr, but don’t use this in class because you occasionally get uncensored nude pics)
The searchbar is one of Firefox’s strongest features. Having the right addons greatly enhances Firefox’s functionality. I’ll write another post on this at some other time.
We’ve found that the ‘comments’ option in Ning groups gets a bit confusing for our members. All our teachers can create groups. So we encourage all teachers who create groups to disable ‘comments’, and encourage group members to use the forums instead. Not a problem for you yet?
The problem we’ve found is that group members get confused if they have to choose between writing a comment or starting a group discussion thread. Too many ways to communicate. Too many choices.
The ‘discussion forum’ in the groups works better because discussions are threaded, the comments are not, and they’re in reverse order – which is confusing.
Now, I’m sure comments are great in groups where the members know the difference between a forum and a comment wall. But in our experience, most don’t. If the comment wall gets used for something that would work better in a discussion, then any potential for developing a good discussion seems to dry up immediately.
