Diigo

I just found out about http://www.diigo.com/ . It is very much like http://delicious.com/ in that it is an online bookmark system. However, diigo has the added benefit of being able to highlight something in the favorite site that you have saved. What a bonus. A further bonus is that it will simultaneously save your favorites at diigo and delicious.
Just yesterday, I created a new free diigo account and had all my Delicious sites exported then imported to diigo. It was about 10 minutes worth of work. Now I can use my diigo account, yet keep my Delicious account active.
Lucy Gray taught me this. Thanks.

Here are my two sites. Feel free to check them out.
http://www.diigo.com/user/dsladkey
http://delicious.com/inbox/dsladkey


Dave

Wordle.net

I found a cool site on a blog the other day. The blog is called Practical Theory by Chris Lehmann. Click here to get to it. It is called Wordle. It is at http://www.wordle.net/. It makes a cluster of words that you place into the site. You can change the colors and make a new layout if you want. I love the result. It is very easy to use. Here is a wordle I did recently regarding a 350 mile, 6 day bike trip that the Naperville Central Fellowship of Christian Athletes took. Click on it to see it better. If you want more information about the bike trip see http://www.redhawkfca.org/.

Let me know what you think,

Dave

Animoto

It took me a total of about 20 minutes to make this 30 second clip. It is of my daughters and I during a daddy daughter dance in 2007. This is a free tool. It is very reasonable if you are interested in making a longer version. ($3 per video) I uploaded my pictures, and then picked some music from their selections. After that it took a few minutes to mix on their computer. Then it is finished. What a great product and very simple for students to use in their class. Give it a try at www.animoto.com.

Delicious

Actually it is http://del.icio.us/ I love this site because it is a way to organize all my favorite sites and allow them to be seen by others. Most importantly, they are all kept online so that I can use them from any computer. This site is perfect for the person who browses the web and finds a sites they like. All they have to do is click on a button (this is a quick install and goes directly into your browser) to TAG your site. This tagging system will give you suggestions of what categories to put your site in. Tagging gives you the ability to access your site through multiple names. For instance you might have a site on factoring. You would might tag this site with these names: algebra trinomials teaching factoring interactive.
There are other sites that do the same thing. I know that http://digg.com also does some of the same things. I started on delicious and like it so I will probably continue with it.
One thing that was a great relief to me was that I can import from my browser all of my current favorites. Also, I can export them back if need be.




Here is my delicious account: http://del.icio.us/dsladkey

Google Reader

I found out about Google reader at a tech conference recently (ICE). It has been awesome. I get all the updates on many of my favorite websites by only going to Google Reader. It is like a customized newspaper. You can subscribe to many different publications like your favorite newsletters, newspapers, and blogs.
Here are some of the things that I subscribe to:
Focus on the Family
Teachers Love Smartboards
The Whiteboard Blog
What is School 2.0
Bulls Basketball Update
How do sign up? Just get a free gmail account at www.gmail.com. This will sign you up for all of the google services. Once you have a Google gmail account then you just go to google.com and you will see some Google services at the top. Click on where it says more. You will see Reader as an option. Click on that and you will be ready to search for all of your favorite publications for free. Now when you go to Google Reader you will be able to see which of your sites have new posts. Check it out.

Voice Thread

I just came across the site Voice Thread. Basically, it allows people to comment in words or with audio about a picture or video. You can see from this picture that many people have commented on the sides of the visual image in the center which happens to be a picture that a student had drawn. http://ed.voicethread.com/#home I have not used it yet. However, I was listening to a great podcast about it today and it sounded really exciting. Check out the podcast at: http://teachersteachingteachers.org/?p=154The example to the right is at the link below:http://ed.voicethread.com/#q.b409.i3113