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Tag Archives: tools
Twitter Stats – 2007
2007 was certainly the year of Twitter. Late last night I saw a tweet from Tim Lauer referring me to a Perl script from Damon Cortesi “that pulls down your public tweets and allows you to graph them using Numbers.” Pretty neat! Here is what it came with.
Update: Looks like someone has modified this script to work online.
Lingro – Interactive Language Learning Tool
Ewan McIntosh points to Lingro, a service which “takes any webpage and then allows you to click on any word in that page to get its translation back into English, Spanish, French, Polish, German or Italian.”
It’s the free, real-world, webpage equivalent of the interactive texts CD-Roms that we used to find handy when I was a pupil at school, but it’s got a far more interactive interface that allows you some real flexibility:
* Zip between languages in a click;
* Listen to the pronunciation of every word;
* Multiple definitions, and examples in use;
* Where a word does not exist, the social media kicks in: you suggest a translation;
* It keeps a record of all the words you’ve had to look up in your wordlist, so that you can go off and learn them yourself.
Very cool! Check out my blog via Lingro, or try Lingro for yourself. This may be the greatest website translation tool since the Web 1.0 Dialectizer.
Google Sketchup For Dummies
I noticed a few really interesting “how-to” videos from the author of Google Sketchup for Dummies. The video below demonstrates how you can make a dog-house using Google Sketchup.
I haven’t used Sketchup very much at all, but watching these videos makes me want to explore this free tool. See more videos from this series.
Top Ten Free Video Rippers, Encoders & Converters
Here’s a great list from Lifehacker. I use many of these, especially iSquint, VLC and Handbrake. I’m also a big fan of Viddownloader as it converts .flv files from streaming video sites (e.g., Youtube) right to .avi files. This bypasses the need to use another tool such as Riva to prepare video for iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, Adobe Premiere, etc.
LiveScribe – Smart Pen
Bernie Dodge just wrote a post alerting me to LiveScribe, “a smart pen combined with special (but inexpensive) paper that allows non-linear access to the sounds recorded when the notes were taken.”
Check out the sneak preview.
FotoFlexer – Online Photo Editing
I’ve been playing around with a couple of online photo editing tools. I’ve discovered Picnik and Phixr and these are both neat tools. Today TechCrunch covered FotoFlexer, another online photo-editing tool. FotoFlexer has recently integrated the much-hyped “seam carving” technology. Their implementation is called “smart resize”. Here’s a demo.
I like what FotoFlexer is capable of, and it’s an easy tool to use. However, I don’t know who their marketing department is, but c’mon, change the image on the front page of your website. I was 10 years old the last time I thought virtual breast augmentation was funny. If you ever want to break the education market, your page and product need a refocus.
Barriers to Integration: A String of Microsoft Technology Issues
I admit it, I’m biased, I’m spoiled by my Mac. I prefer to do all of my daily work on either OS X or Ubuntu Linux. Yet, when I walk into my teaching world, I get to experience the joys of the Windows environment.
My students, preservice teachers, will enter into a variety of computing environments. In Saskatchewan, we have some school divisions that are primarily Mac environments, some that are heavily IBM/Windows schools and we even have a few Sun Ray (thin client) divisions. Most of what I teach is either cross-platform, or platform-insignificant. Good pedagogical principles do not discriminate. But then, once in a while, I run into one of these days. Here’s what we tried to accomplish.
My class attempted a fairly simple activity. We are entering into a digital storytelling unit and we are using various tools to digitize stories. For the first activity, I’m taking my inspiration from Dean Shareski as we are putting together a simple “Mastercard” type commercial using Microsoft Photo Story. Here’s Dean’s example.
The process was supposed to work like this.
1) Create video in Microsoft Photo Story 3.
2) Save as .wmv file.
3) Upload to Youtube
4) Embed video into student blogs.
These are the issues we ran into:
Issue #1: The .wmv that was produced by Photo Story was rejected by Youtube. I read around, received some advice on Twitter and it seemed the that only solution was to re-render the file in another program. As I focus on free, widely-accessible tools, I chose Windows Movie Maker, a program I’ve never been really fond of, but figured it would work.
Issue #2: When you resave the file in Windows Movie Maker, the .wmv file is actually accepted by Youtube. However, for some odd reason, most of my students ran into an issue. When rendered in WMM, the beginning of the video appeared dim, and parts of the end were cut off abruptly. To get around this issue, I asked students to create a short title frame and end credits for each video. This seemed to solve the issue. Videos were sent to Youtube, and everything seemed to work so far.
Issue #3: Embedding videos into WordPress was a success, but only for some of my students. For others, the embed code didn’t work and was revealed in plain text on student blogs. The difference? Students that were successful were using Firefox, students with the technical issue were using Internet Explorer 7. Once students used Firefox, no further issues.
In summary, Microsoft tools provide a wonderful learning experience if the point of your learning is “getting around technical issues caused by really crappy software”. I think my students actually got to see real-time problem solving with technology in classrooms, and ways of getting around issues. This will certainly be common for many of my students. However, that wasn’t the intent. I was just looking for a simple way of using common, free Windows-based tools to publish stories. It eventually worked, but not nearly as well as it should have.
I’m looking forward to moving to both Mac, Linux and web-based tools to accomplish the same thing. I’m almost certain we won’t see nearly as many issues.