One Word August 25, 2009
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Tools.add a comment
Of course, if 1400 words is intimidating, try your hand at a one minute write. You get a single word at the top of the page, a simple text box in which to write, and a timer to tell you when your time is up. Might be a nice warm-up for a writing class. From Langwitches Blog list of links for today.
Langwitches Blog » links for 2009-08-25
Twitter, Meet Woofer August 25, 2009
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Humor, Tools.add a comment
If you thought 140 characters of micro-blogging at Twitter was mostly pointless, try a site that requires a minimum of 1400 characters. Good thing so many people know about copy-paste. From a MacWorld UK article.
The opposite of Twitter: new site requires 1,400-character minimum – Digital Lifestyle – Macworld UK
Who Are You? Who? Who? August 21, 2009
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Data, Tools.add a comment
With apologies to The Who, MIT produced a new way to search for yourself online. Called Personas, you type in your first and last name (I’m guessing the more common your name, the less personally relevant) and after data-mining information about your name, produces a graph of how your name is perceived on the Internet. I’m not sure what the ‘Illegal” section is all about, but here’s my personagraph. From an article by Techcrunch.
Seems to work with screen names too.
I wonder what it says about me that my screen name and real name show different results.
The Personas Project From MIT Is All Kinds Of Cool
Plan B and C and… August 7, 2009
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Articles/Videos, Tools.1 comment so far
I had the pleasure to present a few Web 2.0 tools to a group of Socials Studies teachers today, intending to use a ‘Jog the Web’ collection that a colleague of mine put together. Everything looked great. The accompanying wiki was set up, links to a PowerPoint they can download and use if they want, and links to two ‘Jog the Webs’. 5 minutes before the presentation everything was working just fine. 5 minutes into the presentation and Jog the Web stopped responding. Nothing. Checked the network, other pages were loading just fine. What to do? It is kind of hard to have people explore dozens of web 2.0 tools if the links to those tools are not available.
I started bringing up some of the tools I thought were in the collection. We looked at a couple of timeline tools, like xtimeline and Dipity. We talked about YouTube and how to request a teacher override. We checked Delicious, Animoto, and Blaberize. What tools would you show if you were under pressure to present and your original presentation was not going to work?
Maybe Jog the Web will be back up by the time you read this. If not, imagine a great collection of indispensable web 2.0 tools for the Social Studies classroom. So the simple solution would have been to list the links on the wiki as well to have a backup. It was a good reminder to myself to be prepared for problems. If you are committed to using technology, you always need a plan B and C, and…
