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Picnik: Web Based Photo Editing...

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Picnik is an impressive web based photo editing tool. It has many of the features of stand alone photo editors but allows you to access and manipulate images on the web. For example you can integrate it with your Flickr photos, great for editing those under exposed camera phone shots. The Flickr integration gives you the opportunity to replace the original photo with your edit, or add it as a new image. You can also grab images from stand alone sites such as a Gallery install. For example at Lewis Elementary we are starting to use Gallery to post images that student can share and use in their projects. This could be a great way for them to get to them and adjust and manipulate them. I was very impressed with how fast and responsive it feels with resizing and adjusting exposure.

Via Jim Gates and also Solution Watch...

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Google's Moon Shot

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This week, The New Yorker has an article entitled Google's Moon Shot and it details Google's plan to scan and digitize several university libraries and also to made searchable all published books. The article describes some of the challenges and objections by publishers and authors. One interesting aspect is that several of those publishers that are partners with Google in the Book Search project, are also at the same time suing Google to stop the project.

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Google's Gapminder Tool

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Last June, Alan Levine pointed me to the talk by Hans Rosling at TED. Rosling is professor of international health at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder, a non-profit group that looks at global data through visualization. In his talk he demonstrates how looking at data over time can help us challenge our assumptions and biases about conditions in the developing world. It looks as if Google has been working with him to develop an interactive web tool that takes the Gapminder data and allows you to manipulate and compare the the data in a web browser. For example you can compare life expectancy and annual income and plot the results. I created a quick video which demonstrates the timeline feature, also have a link to the Rosling talk.

I wish I had a tool like this to look at student data...

by way of Paul English...

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Google Book Search Adds Maps

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Google Book Search has added a new feature creating maps of places mentioned in the book being searched. For example the book, The Journals of Lewis and Clark, when searched on Google Book Search returns a map with push pins to denote places mentioned in the journals. The information behind the pushpin includes a snippet of text and a link to the pages where the place is mentioned.

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By way of Inside Google Book Search...

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Twitter

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In the 1972 movie, Play It Again Sam, Tony Roberts plays a business man who is constantly calling into his answering service (this is 1972 folks, long, long before mobile phones and such...) and reporting his whereabouts and leaving numbers where he can be reached. It is a running gag in the movie and is really pretty funny. Twitter is the web 2.0 answer to this.

"Twitter is a community based website where users post what they are doing at any given moment. Tell friends, colleagues or strangers what you are snacking on, your current interests, favorite websites or just plain goofy nonsense!"

Screenshot 04-20You can update your Twitter information via a web page, a mobile phone, an instant messenger client and if you are running Mac OS X, you can update via Twitterrific, an application that lets you both read and publish posts or "tweets" to the Twitter community website.

Think of this as taking your instant messenger status (Away, busy, etc...) notice to extremes. :-) While I can't see doing this all the time, I can see where at conferences and such it might be fun to play around with. You can choose to make your updates public or private. I've added the Twitter widget to my sidebar so you can see an example of how this might work.

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Drupal Weblogs For Students...

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This week with the help of Steve Burt, and with some suggestions from Bill Fitzgerald, I finally got Drupal installed and running as a student blog/writing engine. We basically set up a private Drupal space and using the UserPlus module created accounts for each 4th and 5th grade student. I then worked with each of our 4th and 5th grade classrooms and introduced the system to them and showed them how to login. We are also using Gallery as an image archive tool and Drupal has a module that allows you to incorporate the Gallery images into Drupal. There is also a plugin for iPhoto that makes it very easy to add images to our Gallery archive. I need to look around a bit and figure out how to set it up so that students can easily click on an image and incorporate it into a post. The next step is to set up teachers with RSS readers so they can easily track student work and read and respond.

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Another Snow Day...

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Lewis Elementary Snow Days: Jan 17, 2007 Portland Public Schools was closed again today because of the weather. (local media coverage here, here and here...) An opportunity to catch up on some work and to become acquainted again with our local transit authority, TriMet. The stop for the #75 is a nice hike from my home, but it stops right in front of my school. Of course today it stopped about 8 blocks away because the road was too slick for the bus to travel its normal route. I got to walk the rest of the way. I left my car there last night and took the bus home. Today the roads are clear enough to drive home if one sticks to the major streets. But then I don't live on a major street, so it should be interesting going home...

MLK, YouTube, Google Video

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Lots of folks are pointing to the 18 minute video of Dr. King's speech during the 1963 March on Washington. It is available on places such as YouTube and Google Video. It is great that it is available. The unfortunate thing is that every idiot with a keyboard has left a hateful or racist comment on the video pages. Luckily Google allows you to download the video file. I plan to share it with my students off of one of our internal pages, without the comments. Both YouTube and Google Video have policies on offensive materials. I wish it extended to comments on their pages.

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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

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Today in the States we celebrate the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In that spirt I share with you a web page that was created about 10 years ago. It is a timeline created by kindergarten and first grades students at Buckman Elementary in Portland. The site highlights the major events in the life of Dr. King and is based on a timeline from the book, My Dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, by Faith Ringgold. Since the time we published this on the web, I have received email and letters addressed to the students expressing appreciation for their work. Even 10 years after first being published, I still get emails this time of year asking about the work. It was something that my students and i did that first showed me the power of giving students an audience for their work.
Below are a few images from the timeline.

Schools-C Pages Buckman Timeline Maggie-1 Schools-C Pages Buckman Timeline Remi-1 Schools-C Pages Buckman Timeline March65 Schools-C Pages Buckman Timeline Jackson Schools-C Pages Buckman Timeline Ted

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World Map at Lewis

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I finally got around to ordering a large world wall map and today I got a couple of Lewis parents to put it up in the hallway near the cafeteria. The dimensions are 13' x 9' and we had to trim it up a bit on the top to make it fit. Thanks go to Pamela Kennedy and Gregory MacNaughton for their help today and again to Pamela for suggesting we do so.

Lewis Map

Lewis Map

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SmartSetr SmartSetr

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SmartSetr -

"SmartSets are sets on Flickr that are updated for you in an automated way. For example, if you have a SmartSet based on the tag "flower", anytime you add photos to flickr tagged with "flower" they will automatically be added to your flower set for you (after you click refresh on SmartSetr)."

This is pretty nice. Kind of works like Smart Folders in Mac OS X.
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By way of LifeHacker...

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Horse is Out of the Barn...

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Lots of folks (will, tom, danah) today are talking about mobile phones and use by students. I don't have a whole lot to add to his except to note that besides the Wii, the most sought after and received gift of upper elementary students at Lewis Elementary this holiday season was a mobile phone. Parents see them as a necessary tool in an age of latch key kids going home alone. Also I'm finding an increasing number of families that are going through domestic issues, where one parents buys a phone for their child as a way to keep in contact because of the domestic situation such as where the parents have split up.

One more story... Today a 5th grade student and her younger brother were out in front of the school after dismissal. I asked her if she was waiting for her mom. She said yes but that her mom had just sent her a text message saying she would be a few minutes late. One of my teachers observed this exchange and said she bet that I liked that, and I said yes I did.

I already have teachers using cell phones to call parents and or have students call parents regarding homework of forgotten band instruments. (This in a school where we have only 3 outside lines and none of them available from a teacher's classroom...) I think it is only a short time before my teachers realize that by using some pretty unobtrusive (email to SMS gateways...) tools they will be able to connect with their students/families to remind them of assignments or inform them of events related to class work. I must say I'm very proud of my staff. They embrace the change because many are parents themselves, and they see the benefit of this type of communication. Of course there will be issues and concerns, but there are with just about anything. Teach responsible use and deal with those that are irresponsible just as you would do with any other rule or procedural violation. I'm also proud of my students. To date we have not had any issues with inappropriate mobile phone use.

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