Mechelle De Craene :: Blog
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Edcompblog/~3/285987123/crick-soft-d I'm at a Crick Soft day and the main thing they are talking about this morning is WriteOnline. It looks interesting. It is a Java based application, so it uses the power of your machine rather than relying on a remote server but has the advantages of remote storage and access to your documents anywhere you have Internet access. However, you also get offline access if you are not connected to the Internet. And it looks like a word processor with icons and standard keyboard shortcuts.
 What is good about it (apart from all the online, sharing goodies that comes from online applications) is that you get a bundle of the Crick Soft type goodies integrated with the application. For example, it can speak as you type (like Clicker), Wordbar is built in as is predictive typing. The predictive typing picks up work from the Worbar. It is a doddle to create specialist wordbars - you can paste in a chunk of text (the demo took a chunk from Wikipedia) and ask Wordbar to exclude common words and short words. An instant word bank is then generated. Very cool.
Teacher tools include the ability to comment on work by highlighting and typing a note. (Students can also added comments. Currently you can't have collaborative documents but when this feature is added, they may want to send messages to fellow authors. There are also analysis tools for the teacher. These include information about how long the student worked on the document, what words were misspelled and corrected (so you can see if the student has trouble with "ly" endings for example) and a record of pasted text (some help in checking plagiarism).
Various preferences can be set and these are saved with your profile and so follow you wherever you log on. There are for example various accessibility options for the visually impaired. The save option allows saving either online or locally.
Currently the image handling is poor, but they are working on it. At the moment, there is only the choice to save in native format or html.
Technorati Tags: Crick Soft, WriteOnline, word processing, online application, Java, DavidDMuir, EdCompBlog
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Edcompblog/~3/267115516/flickr-and-l Interesting... I think. I've just noticed (thanks to S Pipczynski's invite to her Flickr Video! group) that as well as photos, you can now upload short videos to Flickr too. Flickr describes them as long photos and seems to be pitching them as an extension of the photo service it already offers rather than as competition for YouTube. To be honest, I'm not sure how or if I'll make serious use of it. If I wanted to share videos, I'd probably use some other tool. Any thoughts as to why Flickr video might be useful in education?
Technorati Tags: Flickr, EduFlickr, video, FlickrVideo, coke, mentos, DavidDMuir, EdCompBlog
http://tipline.blogspot.com/2008/08/tips-now-this-is-going-too-far. I can't stop thinking about this. I recently heard from a person who was using the "company issued" laptop while attending a mini-conference. While at work this person is filtered from using such things as social ANYTHING sites (well, delicious is ok, but no diigo or ning, or such), personal email sites, no flickr, no twitter or plurk, etc etc. This, by the way, is a place with all adults!
But here's the killer - this person is ALSO blocked from those sites when AWAY and on another network!
What does THAT say? I'm even too angry about it to even THINK straight. This person is supposed to be a LEADER in the field of education. Yet, even when this person is away from the employer's network, the filter restricts access. What is it? Is this person not trusted? Does the network administrator, maybe, have a control issue? Is that person also making curriculum decisions for this employee?
CAN YOU HEAR ME SCREAMING?????
http://tipline.blogspot.com/2008/08/tips-did-you-know-there-were-th I knew of about ten or so of these sites, but - wow! This is a list of 30 places to go to get a free wiki. http://mashable.com/2008/07/29/wiki-solutions/
Interesting what it says about some of the favorites.
http://tipline.blogspot.com/2008/08/tips-days-with-my-father.html http://www.dayswithmyfather.com/
This is... beautiful. Very sad, but beautiful. Philip Toledano is an artist/photographer who took a series of wonderful pictures of his 94 yr old father who was suffering from dementia. He put the images together into a wonderful slideshow, along with some text. VERY touching.
As Alec Couros said in his blog (http://educationaltechnology.ca/couros/875), THIS is how to do digital storytelling.
http://tipline.blogspot.com/2008/08/tips-math-origami-ted-video.htm http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/robert_lang_folds_way_new_origami.html
What do cookoo clocks, telescopes, airbags, cockroaches, and heart stents have in common? They can all be made using Origami. Watch this video to see how a new breakthrough in the understanding of origami has made it possible to fold - just about ANYthing.
Send this one to your favorite math teachers. This is just SO cool!
(Do you think I'll ever make it to a TED conference?)
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/moodlea/~3/285602258/response-to-gua Stable Door by DavidT2006 A couple of weeks ago I answered a few questions for a forthcoming piece in the Guardian on ePortfolios. Here in Bucks we haven't committed to an ePortfolio yet, for a whole number of reasons (chief of these being a lack of clarity and guidance on what 'counts' as an ePortfolio). I was reminded of this vagueness on starting to read the article in the printed paper and 
Keywords: becta, buckinghamshire, dfes, e-learning, elearning, lea, learning, learning platform, moodle, technology, uk, vle
http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008031414 I've waxed on about fabbers and the like for some time on this blog and elsewhere, so I was suitably impressed by this presentation on open source hardware by Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone. It sets out the various aspects that make up the "source" of an object, from bill of materials to circuit design, and the standards for exchanging them. Of course this is at the rather more technical end of the fabject continuum. At the other there is the amazing Ponoko site, which enables users to create their designs from regular EPS files, pick the materials, and then have them laser-cut to order. Designers can choose to sell the cut and/or assembled product, or to sell or give away the design as EPS files.
Currently the custom fabjects are a little pricey compared to their mass-produced compatriots, and the processes limited in terms of materials and processes. But add in cheaper 3D printing and other fabbing technologies, and simple programmable wireless platforms like SPOT and Bug, and we'll soon be churning out spimes on demand.
http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008031410 Its interesting how we've gone beyond the backend aspects of OpenID and the focus is now on honing the user experience. Clickpass aims to streamline the login process by prefilling the user's OpenID URL within a single login button. Its a nice idea and seems to work pretty well, but I think that CardSpace is probably a better bet in the medium term. Clickpass gets over the "remember the URL" problem, but doesn't have anything to say on the anti-Phishing issue, whereas CardSpace could in principle tackle both at the same time. Still, in the short term this could be a really good way to increase adoption.
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A more pragmatic solution was presented by David Recordon of SixApart in a speech at EduServ last year, which is to ask users not for their OpenID URL, but for things like their AOL Screen name and other easily-remembered identifiers which can be used by a service to easily construct the OpenID URL based on the patterns that providers like AOL use to create OpenIDs.
Finally, there is also the option to have this kind of functionality built into the browser itself - put your OpenID URL into the browser preferences, and have it populate the login button rather than have Clickpass as an intermediary.
Via OLDAily
http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=2008031410 Drop.io is a service that lets you create your own dropboxes for people to send you files. They can use email, a web widget, or even their phone to pop stuff into your dropbox. An RSS feed lets you know when you have new stuff. Why is this interesting? Well, when you start to move away from using a monolithic LMS, one of the first features you miss, and which doesn't have an obvious replacement, is a way of handling assignment submissions. Drop.io lets you create any number of drop boxes, so it would be fairly simple to create them for particular lecturers, departments, or even specific essays. You can put the "drop it here" widget on the teacher's blog, the department website, or wherever you like. However, right now it is missing one major function, which is enabling "write only" functionality. Currently if you know the drop URL (or guess it correctly), you can get everything anyone else has dropped, which is an argument for using the supplied hashcodes as Drop names rather than using guessable names.
Darren Draper is keen to see educational uses of this, and so am I!
If you fancy sending me a file, here's my drop:
Via OLDaily
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