I was doing a quick Google search recently using the built-in search of Firefox 2.0. I don’t remember the search query exactly, but it had some numbers in it and I noticed that Google Suggest was operating in calculator mode. How cool! I did some more playing with it and found that the unit conversations work too. (For a blast from the past check out one of my first blog posts which happens to describe Google’s calculator feature.)
I believe this requires Firefox 2.×.
Blake Ross is something of a wunderkind. He starting working for Netscape at age 15 and cofounded the Firefox project soon after. Not content to stop there, an article in IEEE Spectrum describes Ross’s latest project called Parakey. Parakey is an attempt to obviate the need for separate desktop and online applications. For example, I use iPhoto to manage and edit photos on my Mac and Flickr to share some of those photos with the world. According to the article:
Parakey is intended to be a platform for tools that can manipulate just about anything on your hard drive—e-mail, photos, videos, recipes, calendars. In fact, it looks like a fairly ordinary Web site, which you can edit. You can go online, click through your files and view the contents, even tweak them. You can also check off the stuff you want the rest of the world to be able to see.
Ross is the prototypical digital native. He says, “We all know people…who have all this content that they are not publishing stored on their computers. We’re trying to persuade them to live their lives online.” If this is how young people think, is it any wonder that their digital immigrant teachers don’t understand them?
It looks like Flickr has started expanding its features by integrating more tightly with its parent company Yahoo!. They’ve recently added the ability to geotag photos by dragging and dropping onto a Yahoo! Maps interface. Once you’ve got some photos geotagged you can see links to all your photos on a map and find other photos that were taken in the same vicinity. I’ve just started playing with it, but you can check out my photo map to see how it works.
I can imagine a science teacher using this feature to help document a field study. Wouldn’t it be cool for a group of students to take photos around their town and post the resulting map on their school’s Web site? You can explore all of the geotagged photos at the Flickr Map page or zero in on a particular tag. For example, if you were studying butterflys with your students, you could show all of the geotagged Flickr photos tagged “butterfly” and do a world tour of butterfly species.
Good news for OS X users. Google just released an updated version of Google Earth and Mac-compatible update of SketchUp. Lots of good stuff in both programs. They have tremendous potential as learning tools. If anyone has some good examples of using either one with students, please post in the comments.
My district is evaluating options for a new system to maintain our Web pages. We had a demo of SchoolCenter a couple days ago and it didn’t look too bad. I found their templates to be pretty unattractive, but they’re probably better than most schools’ Web pages. While poking around I discovered an open source alternative called Site@School. I haven’t tried it, and I’m not sure if it would scale up to an entire district, but you can’t beat the price. I found some good examples on their Websites using Site@School page.
I’ll never forget when I first figured out why Microsoft was scared of the Internet. I had just built my first Web application, an online event scheduling system for my old school district that would display information about upcoming sporting events, concerts, etc. That was the moment when I realized that the Web made the underlying operating system nearly irrelevant.
One of the best recent examples of a Web-based application that directly challenges the traditional software model is Writely, an online word processor. Writely allows you to share your document with other authors nearly in real-time. I used it to collaborate with a co-author on an article recently and it worked great.
The big news of the day is that Google has just purchased Writely. Google’s been on a bit of a buying spree and this latest acquisition is yet another indicator that the future is on the Web.
I feel the need to geek out and do some programming every once in a while. My recent days off providing a great opportunity so I decided to implement an idea that’s been rattling around in my brain for a while. We’ve got seven elementary schools in my district and, not surprisingly, the teachers don’t communicate between schools as much as they would like. We’ve got electronic mailing lists for each building, but what if you’re a 6th grade teacher and you want to send a quick message to all the other 6th grade math teachers about a cool Web site you discovered? What if you want to send a message to all 5th and 6th grade teachers who teach social studies? Maintaining your own private mailing list for every permutation is obviously not a viable option.
So I figured that I could build a simple Web application to do this. It’s really just a proof of concept at this point because I’m still testing some things, but so far it looks promising. If you look at the screenshot you can get an idea how it works. Just check the boxes to determine the recipients and type the message. We’ll have a database on the backend that knows the school(s), grade(s), and subject(s) for each teacher.
I see great potential here for encouraging easy sharing of all kinds of information across schools. Even if no one uses it, I had plenty of fun flexing my Python programming muscles.
Dan McCreary has been around the block a time or two in his years of working in the technology industry. He’s worked at cutting edge technology companies and started companies of his own. His latest project was building a data dictionary for the Minnesota Dept of Education.
Our conversation centered on metadata and interoperability issues. Many of you are familiar with SIF, probably the most widely known effort to build a standardized framework for communicating about education data. Dan explains a lot of the background information about metadata, XML, OWL, ISO 11179, and other alphabet soup acronyms that, once you understand a bit about them, make SIF more comprehensible. We also discuss how interoperability fits into the future of online learning, student transcripts, and standardized testing. Finally, Dan’s got some tips for school technology leaders as they evaluate vendors who claim that their products interoperate.
This one’s more technical that most of my podcasts, but there’s some good stuff in there. Let your inner greek out for recess and give it a listen.
Download: STP-DanMcCreary (16.2 MB, 35:10)