Whether you’re just getting started with Del.icio.us or have hundreds of bookmarks, you’ll probably find something new in “The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users” at the Slacker Manager blog. Habit #3, “Use the inbox,” looks particularly interesting. It seems like it’s possible to build up a complex set of del.icio.us subscriptions that can be subscribed to in one feed. This would be a great way to track particular users, groups of users, or tags all in one place. Nothing you couldn’t do with separate feeds, but interesting nonetheless.
Category Archives: Tips and Tricks
The bulletless presentation
I resolved for my recent podcasting presentation at the TIES Conference to avoid bullet points entirely in my Keynote slides. I was motivated in part by some reading I’ve been doing at Presentation Zen, a blog devoted “professional presentation design.” Two posts in particular, “Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic” and “The ‘Lessig Method’ of presentation,” were particularly inspirational. I didn’t take it to the “Lessig” extreme (although I admire it), but it did end up being more “visual” than a typical presentation.
I couldn’t have done made it work as easily without iStockPhoto and the Creative Commons search at Flickr. I purchased a couple photos from iStockPhoto for $2 each which is much less than typical stock photo prices. The real gold mine was Flickr, however. I found half a dozen great photos licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that illustrated my talk beautifully. I simply added a small photo credit to each one and used them in full confidence that I was not violating copyright in any way. (Have I mentioned how much I like Creative Commons in the last week or so? I guess I just did.) 
I’m going to continue in this presentation mode for a while. It’s quite a nice change from the ordinary.
Secure computing on the road
I’m in Rochester, MN for a couple days this week working as a mentor at an ISTE Institute. After listening to the latest Security Now! podcast with Steve Gibson where he talked about VPNs, I decided that I should probably get my act together and get set up with a secure connection.
If you ever use a laptop in an untrusted environment you should be using a VPN. By “untrusted” I mean a setting where you’re not sure who might be eavesdropping on your communications. Coffee shops, hotel rooms, and even remote offices on wired connections are good examples. Many people these days are used to using SSL-encrypted Web access for banking or online commerce (the “https” sites), but it’s less obvious that many email connections are unencrypted. In other words, unless you take steps to avoid it, the default behavior is usually to send your email password flying across the network in plain text where it can be intercepted by someone running a packet sniffer.
After doing a bit of research online, I signed up for a month of HotSpotVPN service. After a relatively straightforward install (it’s easier on a PC), I was connected to their service and all of my Internet traffic is now running through an encrypted “tunnel” and immune from inquiring packet sniffers. The service is about $10/month and I consider it a bargain for frequent travelers or anyone who uses wifi connections in public places.
An afternoon at the improv
This caught me by surprise… We spent the first big block of time here at the ADE Summer Institute with “The Improv Lady” Rebecca Stockley learning some improvisation games and techniques. Among other clients, Rebecca works with Pixar animators to help them develop their stories and characters. She’s been a fixture at the ADE events for a couple years now helping the participants learn about the importance of listening carefully, going with the flow, and thinking creatively. In retrospect, it’s right up Apple’s alley.
There was one direct curriculum example in there. (Carlyn, this one’s for you.) Rebecca presented “The Story Spine,” an improv game in which each participant takes turns completing a sentence of the “spine” and creates the basis for a complete story in the process. If you teach the writing process then try having your students pair up and complete these sentences:
- Once upon a time…
- Every day…
- But one day…
- Because of that…
- Because of that…
- Because of that…
- Until finally…
- Ever since that day…
You don’t have to look too hard to see that these questions outline the development, conflict, and resolution of a story. It would be fun to have students work on these questions in improv style, out loud and anything goes. For more serious work teachers could create Inspiration templates that the students would complete as they work out a more complete narrative.
Technology in the math classroom
This session is called “Ideas for Using Technology in the Mathematics Classroom” and is presented by Frank Sobierajski.
He’s talking about Geometer’s Sketchpad, which is a piece of software our Hopkins math teachers have been working on since we adopted the Key Curriculum for next year in our secondary schools. He’s showing a quick demo of Sketchpad and how it can be combined with an locus problem activity utilizing a map of downtown Syracuse, NY. The activity combines circules and bisected angles to locate a hidden treasure.
Spreadsheet Sliders take advantage of a feature of MS Excel that allows you to add a custom slider to a spreadsheet worksheet that allows you to manipulate the value in a cell via the slider. It’s in the Tools menu, but I didn’t have time to note exactly where. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. This looks like a good way to control simulations and graphs as the graph updates in real time to reflect the current value of the sliders. One slider can control multiple values because you can create equations that refer to the slider values.
Technorati Tags: necc | geometers sketchpad
Homebrew document management system
I’ve been using Apple’s new OS 10.4 for over a month now and my initial impression was corrrect: the best new feature is Spotlight, Apple’s desktop search system. Since buying a Brother 7820N laser printer/copier/fax/scanner a couple weeks ago I’ve realized that if I can find decent OCR software I have the tools available to build my own document management system. Document management has been on my mind a bit lately since seeing a demonstration of a very large and powerful document management system at work a few months ago. If you get frustrated trying to locate files that are buried 10 folders deep in your Documents folder, desktop search may be the solution. It’s the “googlization” of your computer.
PC users have had desktop search ability for a while longer. Google and Yahoo! both have desktop search products for Windows users. Word on the street is that Yahoo!’s product, based on a piece of software called X1, is the better tool. These search products, Apple’s included, will search not just the name of files, but their contents too. Now I can search through MS Office documents, email messages, PDFs, chat logs, etc. and usually find what I’m looking for in seconds. This feels like a real improvement in computer usability and not just the standard feature creep.
There’s a missing link though. If I’m going to have a true document management system at home I need to be able to scan and OCR bills and other household documents so their contents can be indexed. And there’s the rub. The built-in scanning and OCR software that came with my printer is pretty bad and commercial OCR software is pretty expensive. If you’ve got Adobe’s Acrobat software I discovered a couple days ago that Acrobat has OCR built in and it seems to work very well. (Check out educational pricing for Acrobat. It’s a big discount.)
Time will tell, but I look forward to having my own little Google at home and much quicker access to the information I need.
Easy image editing
Terri Osland, my colleague at Hopkins High School, discovered a handy application that will find a place on our one-to-one laptops next fall. ImageWell is a tiny little program, but it has a bunch of handy features:
Drag images in and out of the well, resize, crop, shape, rotate and add a watermark, border, or drop shadow. No need to launch multiple applications to add text, labels, arrows, circles and squares to your image. Add a thought cloud or talking balloon. A few simple clicks, copy, paste, and send them off to your web server instantly. At the click of a button the image is sent and a handy URL is copied to the clipboard. Just like that, it doesn’t get any easier!
The software only works on Mac OS X. It’s free, but not open source.
I’ve been Tigerized
I have now emerged from the geek cave. Actually, my Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) installation went smoothly and I’ve been chugging along quite successfully since I finished the install last Saturday. There are a ton of new features, but my favorite so far is Spotlight, Apple’s system search tool. It’s lightening fast and very cool.
One interesting feature in Tiger server is the built-in blog tool based on blojsom. System administrators can enable a blog for a user with a click of the mouse. On the browser side, the newest version of Safari has some great RSS features built in. I’m still exploring the new goodies, but I won’t go into detail because Tiger reviews are a dime a dozen.