ElasTECHlearning » Tech Tips http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers Seth Bowers Thu, 20 Oct 2011 14:36:57 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Why Wikis Still Matter | Edutopia http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2011/10/20/why-wikis-still-matter-edutopia/ http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2011/10/20/why-wikis-still-matter-edutopia/#comments Thu, 20 Oct 2011 14:34:24 +0000 sethbowers http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2011/10/20/why-wikis-still-matter-edutopia/

This is an article by Audrey Watters for Edutopia. It is a great overview & guide for teachers on the fence about using wikis with their students.

  • Why Wikis Still Matter | Edutopia

    Wiki is a Hawai’ian word meaning “fast” or “quick.” As a technology platform, Ward Cunningham installed the very first wiki on the Web in 1995. That was two years before the word “weblog” was coined (and four years before that term was shortened to “blog”). Wikis predate Facebook and Twitter by roughly a decade. At sixteen years old, the wiki predates almost every other social media tool (other than email, of course, which historians of technology say turns 40 this year). Why then, in the face of rapidly changing technology — all the new bells and whistles and Web 2.0 tools — should we still use wikis?

    tags: article wikis edutopia edtech

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

]]> http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2011/10/20/why-wikis-still-matter-edutopia/feed/ 0 Wiki.com – Google Type Search for Wikis http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/09/25/wiki-com-google-type-search-for-wikis/ http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/09/25/wiki-com-google-type-search-for-wikis/#comments Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:27:38 +0000 sethbowers http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/09/25/wiki-com-google-type-search-for-wikis/

Wiki.com is very cool. Think of it as Google for wikis. The site let’s you choose to search all wikis, just Wikipedia, all "indie" wikis, or just encyclopedia style wikis.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

]]> http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/09/25/wiki-com-google-type-search-for-wikis/feed/ 0 Entourage Tutorials http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/07/17/entourage-tutorials/ http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/07/17/entourage-tutorials/#comments Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:25:59 +0000 sethbowers http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/07/17/entourage-tutorials/

Lot’s of good Entourage tutorials here. There are step-by-step courses as well as video tutorials.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

]]> http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/07/17/entourage-tutorials/feed/ 0 Intro to our New WebMail http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/07/14/intro-to-our-new-webmail/ http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/07/14/intro-to-our-new-webmail/#comments Tue, 14 Jul 2009 19:27:41 +0000 sethbowers http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/?p=344

Click the preceding link for a short introduction to our new WebMail using Exchange Server. The video is less than three minutes & covers logging in, creating new emails, synchronization between the web & your desktop, & contacts – including distribution lists.

Let me know what else you would like covered.

]]> http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/07/14/intro-to-our-new-webmail/feed/ 0 Goodbye old friend – Appleworks http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/05/28/goodbye-old-friend-appleworks/ http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/05/28/goodbye-old-friend-appleworks/#comments Thu, 28 May 2009 21:26:11 +0000 sethbowers http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/?p=299

Starting school year 2009-2010 District 62 will no longer support Appleworks. I know this will be painful for some users, but for us to continue to move forward with new projects we have to cut loose old & outdated solutions. Appleworks falls into that category.

While some people still use Appleworks, it will not be available on district computers starting Fall ’09. The Mothership Apple does not support it. See their official page here for more information: AppleWorks Support

Those of you that still have AppleWorks documents, do not fear. District 62 has MicroSoft Office & Apple iWork. Below is a chart on how to use these software solutions to open your AppleWorks documents. Going forward please use Office to create new documents, and remember to save your AppleWorks stuff in either Office or iWork.

AppleWorks………..New Solution
Word Processing…..Open & Save in MicroSoft Word
Spreadsheet………….Open & Save in Apple Numbers (can export to Excel)
Database………………Save as an ASCII file in AppleWorks, open in FileMaker
Draw/Paint…………..Save as a jpeg in AppleWorks

I know this is going to hurt someone somewhere, and for that I am sorry. Apple’s support for this dried up around 2002 and we cannot continue to go forward while trying to support legacy software when we have better solutions available.

]]> http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/05/28/goodbye-old-friend-appleworks/feed/ 1 10 YouTube URL Tricks You Should Know About http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/05/11/10-youtube-url-tricks-you-should-know-about/ http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/05/11/10-youtube-url-tricks-you-should-know-about/#comments Mon, 11 May 2009 14:44:36 +0000 sethbowers http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/05/11/10-youtube-url-tricks-you-should-know-about/

From MakeUseOf.com comes this list of handy YouTube URL tricks. Probably of most use to educators are the ability to post directly to a specific section of a video, hiding the search box, and disabling related videos. They’re all pretty cool, & hopefully some make your life easier.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

]]> http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/05/11/10-youtube-url-tricks-you-should-know-about/feed/ 0 iPod Educators http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/04/06/ipod-educators/ http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/04/06/ipod-educators/#comments Mon, 06 Apr 2009 19:28:20 +0000 sethbowers http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/04/06/ipod-educators/

This Ning site is a great resource for using iPods in class.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

]]> http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/04/06/ipod-educators/feed/ 0 Google Tips http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/04/01/google-tips/ http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/04/01/google-tips/#comments Wed, 01 Apr 2009 21:19:01 +0000 sethbowers http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/04/01/google-tips/

  • Creating temporary or fake emails for students
  • Embedding Google Calendars in your web space
  • Using Google docs as webspace

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

]]> http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/04/01/google-tips/feed/ 0 Google Earth Goes Under… Water! http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/02/03/google-earth-goes-under-water/ http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/02/03/google-earth-goes-under-water/#comments Tue, 03 Feb 2009 21:10:27 +0000 sethbowers http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/?p=223

With the release of Google Earth 5 beta Google is giving us a heaping helping of watery goodness. The oceans get the same treatment that land has gotten in this update. And why not, since more that 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by oceans. Download Google Earth 5 & check it out.

Also, this once again underscores the need for faster network speeds, lcd projectors, & new computers in our classrooms.

Links:

Google Earth Download

Google Earth Ocean Overview

Google Earth Ocean NYT Article

Google Earth Users Group

]]> http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2009/02/03/google-earth-goes-under-water/feed/ 0 Delicious Education http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2008/11/21/delicious-education/ http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/2008/11/21/delicious-education/#comments Fri, 21 Nov 2008 05:26:23 +0000 sethbowers http://blog.d62.org/sethbowers/?p=157

I was in a meeting today (IIC! – get it?) and Principal Swanson said he had a link that he would email all of us. I saw my chance & I took it. You see, John has blog – but John doesn’t have a Delicious.com account. I said (piped in, really) that if John had a delicious.com account he could just tag the link he intended to email us & we’d have instant access to the information.

This is pertinent to us. Everyone in district has been calling for both better communication & more time to get our work done. There are a ton of Web2.0 sites that help automate our everyday tasks to save us time, stress, et cetera.

Delicious is a social networking site for bookmarks. Instead of saving them on your machine you save them  in an online account. That is one advantage. The bigger advantage is the social thing. Your account is public so you can share it. You can see other people’s Delicious account. You can network with like minded people quickly & find resources you never would have time to find on your own.

But back to John – I said you can share bookmarks on Delicious, but it’s elegance with which you can share information that I think is the site’s real power. Delicious takes full advantage of both ‘Tags’ & ‘RSS’.

Tags are a Web2.0 concept that works as sort of a method to catalog information. On blogs authors ‘Tag’ their own post & following conventions of the Read/Write web to help people find their stuff. For instance, I’ll tag this post with the following words: delicious, edtech, web2.0, collaboration. I know that other ed bloggers use those same tags & since we want to spread these concepts we use tags to make our information easier to find.

RSS stand for Really Simple Syndication. It’s what allows all these sites to work together, to pull in content, to share information, even to send your podcast to iTunes – for free! As an example I have set up an RSS feed to a tag from my Delicious account. If you go to the left navigation & scroll down just past the badge for Classroom2.0 you’ll see an RSS feed for Web2.0. Click on it. All that comes from my Delicious account. The beautiful thing is that I set it up once and from now on when I tag something ‘web2.0′ in Delicious it will automatically be feed to this spot here at ElasTECHlearning.

Link: Delicious

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