I am now entering the geek cave. I will not emerge until I have Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) installed on my PowerBook. With any luck I’ll have a brief review to post later this weekend. In the meantime I’ve got a lot of backing up and restoring of files to do.
Category Archives: Tips and Tricks
Taming wild URLs
I found myself needing to send a very long URL to a group of teachers today and I suspected that not all of their email clients would handle a four-line hyperlink gracefully. So I reached into my bag of tricks and paid a visit to TinyURL.com, a handy little site that takes long URLs and creates shorter ones that are much easier to email. Here’s an example from Google Maps that points to the Hopkins School District main office:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=1001+highway+7+hopkins+
mn&ll=44.933200,-93.413300&spn=0.067871,0.101722&hl=en
When converted at TinyURL, this rather unwieldy URL becomes:
http://tinyurl.com/8ww26
Isn’t that better? The service works by creating a permanent redirect from the tiny URL to the ugly one. The tiny version is never deleted and can be used over and over again. This site has been around quite a while, but it seems to be fairly unknown. Now you know!
Comics for learning
The success of Frank Miller’s Sin City in theaters has brought the comic book genre into the spotlight. As a former Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, and Daredevil fan I was quite intrigued when I heard about Comic Life on the MAKE:DIYcast podcast this morning. Comic Life is a Mac OS X application that takes photos from iPhoto and lets you drag and drop your way to a comic book. Check out the Comic Life gallery for some examples.
This software has such amazing potential with kids. Can you imagine how geared up students would be to use this? Heck, I had a blast creating my first comic. (I created it very quickly. Please forgive the rampant silliness.) Who wouldn’t be motivated to do a writing project this way? Given that iPhoto can be used to manage any kind of image and not just digital photos, my brain is racing to think of uses for this software. Here’s the first off-the-top-of-the-head list:
- Science students create lab reports combining digital photos of an experiment with hand drawn or computer generated graphics explaining what’s going on. They could include their data analysis right in the “comic.”
- History students find some period costumes and re-enact a historically significant event.
- Students use Comic Life to create a storyboard of a video project including some sample dialog and key visual elements.
- Combine digital images and hand-drawn graphics in the same panel to send characters back in time or create giant ladybugs that can crush cars.
- Students create a comic book that explains their family history and combines old and new photos.
This software would be a great addition to the student laptops in our one-to-one computing project. The cost is very reasonable (especially for site licenses) and the potential is huge. This is easily the most fun I’ve had with a piece of software in a long time. If you’re reading this and think of a good project idea, post it in the comments. Let’s see if we can get a good list going.
Software review: iFlash 2.5
As much as we’d all like our students to spend all of their time doing hard-core constructivist school work, the fact remains that a lot of the learning we ask kids to do is not much more than memorization. So until cranial expansion slots are commonplace there will be a place for software like iFlash.
iFlash is a Mac OS X application for creating and sharing sets of flash cards. Their Web site has a good description:
iFlash includes many great features to help you study. You can record audio directly into any flash-card (great for foreign languages), as well as attach images. Other features include an unlimited amount of card sides per deck, advanced importing and exporting, iPod support, quick-searching, and a beautiful interface that is strikingly similar to other iApplications (like iTunes and iPhoto).
As cool as it is to have flash cards that can include images, audio, and multiple sides per card, I love the fact that teachers can create sets of cards to share with their students and students can share cards with one another. (Practicing on your iPod is pretty cool too.) I’ve purchased a district license for this software and it will be included on the laptops in our one-to-one computing project next year.
Another potential Smartboard replacement
I guess you could say I’m a SMART Board skeptic. Generally speaking I think most interactive whiteboards (to use the non-trademarked term) are too small, too expensive, and not portable enough. I’ve found over the last year or so that most teachers’ needs are met with an inexpensive RF presentation remote like this Keyspan unit.
If the simple remote won’t do, you may want to consider the Interwrite SchoolPad. It uses Bluetooth to connect to a computer wirelessly and allows the user to annotate on top of Web pages, PowerPoint presentations, or anything else that is displayed on the computer screen. You can even have up to seven of the SchoolPads connected simultaneously to one computer. I love the portability and the price; it’s significantly cheaper than a full size interactive whiteboard.
We’re in testing mode with the SchoolPad now. I’ve got some science teachers who have previous experience with interactive whiteboards trying it out to see how it compares. If they like it I’m pretty sure that there are a bunch of other departments who will be interested.
Building custom searches for Firefox
Here is a pretty simple little Firefox hack that nearly any semi-geeky person could implement. If you are using Firefox you may have noticed that the search window that is built into the browser can be extended to include a variety of search engines and Web sites. The screenshot below shows the list of search plugins that I have installed in my copy of Firefox. If your school Web site has a search form, there is a good chance that you could build a plugin that students, staff, and parents could use in their own browsers.
There are hundreds of little search plugins that can be downloaded from the Mozdev site. After doing a little reading in the documentation, I discovered that it is remarkably easy to create custom search plugins. I immediately made one that allows our tech support people to do searches in Request Tracker, our tech support ticketing system. Since none of you can search our trouble ticketing system, I thought I would show you the code for a plugin to search the WordPress support forum. It looks like this:
# WordPress Support Forum Search by Tim Wilson # Created: Jan 20, 2005 # <search version="7.1" name="WordPress Support Forum" description="WordPress Support Forum - Search forum threads and posts" action="http://wordpress.org/support/search.php" searchForm="http://wordpress.org/support/" method="GET"> <input name="q" user> <input name="sourceid" value="Mozilla-search"> </search>
This technique only works with search engines that use GET to send the queries, but that seems to cover most of the interesting ones. Once you get this code, just add a 16×16 pixel image for the menu and put the two files in your Firefox search plugin directory. (See these instructions to find the proper directory on your computer.) If you want to get really fancy, you can create a Web page that includes a little Javascript so that the search plugin will be installed automatically with a single mouse click. I did that for our tech support staff so the install would be the same whether they are running Windows or OS X.
This little hack and the dozens of other extensions make Firefox the most customizable browser available and a great choice for schools.
Big word processor in a small package
There’s nothing glamorous about a word processor, but it’s an indispensible tool. Although nearly every computer sold today has at least a rudimentary word processor, compatibility with Microsoft Word, the de facto standard, is hit and miss. Since the days of handwritten assignments are waning fast, students need a cheap and Word-compatible word processor.
AbiWord to the rescue. Version 2.2 of AbiWord was released earlier this month and now has a native OS X version to accompany the Linux and Windows versions that have been around since the early days. Lots of people know about OpenOffice.org, but AbiWord has some advantages. They’re both free and open source, but AbiWord is a much leaner application that will run well on an older machine. I’ve used OpenOffice.org on Linux and Windows in the past, and it’s a great set of applications. Unfortunately, the lack of a native OS X version of OpenOffice.org makes it a non-starter on my PowerBook.
With AbiWord’s ability to read and write all of the major word processing formats including Word and WordPerfect, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to keep a copy around just for file conversion purposes.
Firefox 1.0 has arrived
The news is all over the net today, but I figured I would join the chorus and point out that Firefox 1.0 has been released. The quickest way to get a copy is to grab it from the mozilla.org ftp server.
So why should you care? Standards, performance and security. The gecko rendering engine (the underlying browser technology behind Mozilla and Firefox) is arguably the most standards compliant. Proponents of the Opera browser will disagree, and they have a strong case, but Firefox is free and it costs $39 to get a version of Opera without the banner ads. Users accustomed to IE will notice a much quicker browsing experience when using Firefox. It’s not that the pages are downloaded more quickly, just that the page is rendered more quickly. It makes a difference. Finally, by separating the browser from the rest of the system the user is insulated from most of the really nasty IE security vulnerabilities. I know of many individuals and even entire businesses who are switching all of their users to Firefox for the security protection alone.
Give it a try. If you find that you like it, do yourself another favor and explore the many Firefox extensions that are available to add all sorts of additional capabilities to the system. But that’s a topic for a future post.