EDAD660 (2008)

Hi everyone,

Hope you all had a fun time on Friday night! Here’s a summary of what we talked about yesterday in class:

• The Web 2.0 lecture is available via the ‘Lectures’ tab above. The presentation contains links to most of the sites we talked about in class.
• We discussed the idea of syndication and RSS feeds, which allow you to separate the content of a website from it’s graphical design. We ran through a few examples of how this can be used, such as adding a feed to our Google Reader site and inserting a ‘RSS Widget’ into the sidebar of our blog to display the contents of a feed. We also talked a little about Yahoo Pipes which is a tool to help you “rewire” feeds. The example I showed in class involved merging multiple feeds and combining their output into a single feed.
• The topic of language translation came up and I showed how you could translate blocks of text or entire webpages using the Google Translate tool. Seeing the class blog translated into Arabic was pretty amazing!
• We also talked about Podcasing and I showed a website called Blogbard which can convert any text based feed into a podcast. Here’s an example using the feed from our class blog:

• We briefly talked about Springwidgets) which provides a library of free widgets to your blog.  The site also includes an ‘Express Widget’ feature that allows you to create an RSS reader tool for any feed as well as a ‘countdown’ widget that you can customize. Here’s a demo of the countdown widget:
  Get this widget!

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• Finally we talked about Google Maps which allows you to create geographic widgets and “mashups” that can be incorporated into your blog. Here’s an example using Mallorca as a reference point:

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Hi everyone, great class today!  Here’s the promised recap of today’s topics:

1. The “what to look for when purchasing a computer” lecture is available via the “Lectures” page above.
2. We didn’t cover the entire “Software Concepts” lecture, but we did talk a little about the different classifications of software (Commercial, Shareware, Freeware and Open Source).  We demoed Open Office which is a freely available alternative to Microsoft Office.  There’s a more complete listing of Open Source tools in a blog posting below.

We also spent some time this afternoon exploring some of the freely available tools that Google provides.  Everyone in the class already signed up for a free Google account as part of this exercise – anyone else can sign up for their own account at google.com.  I would recommend that you use Mozilla Firefox as your web browser when interacting with Google’s online tools – they work MUCH better here than if you were to use Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Once you have an account you can sign into your Google E-mail at by clicking on the Gmail tab at the top of the screen on any of Google’s pages.  From here you can also access your Google Documents via the “Documents” tab (if “Documents” doesn’t appar you can usually find it by clicking on the “More” button).  We explored a few different ways in which you can use Google Documents:

1. You an create a new text document (similiar to a Word document) by clicking on the “New” button and then selecting “Document”.  You can also upload Word documents from your desktop into Google Documents by using the “Upload” button.
2. Documents in Google have most of the features that you have come to expect from a standard word processing program, but with a collaborative twist thrown in for good measure.  You can “Share” any documents with other Google Document users by clicking on the “Share” button and then on “Share with others.”  A form will appear and you can type in the e-mail addresses of anyone in the world with whom you would like to collaborate.  They will be sent a message and will be able to subsequently view and make changes to your document.  You can access the revision history for a document via the “Tools” menu when a document is open – this log will show when the document was changed, who authorized the change and the content that was added or subtracted during that revision.
3. You can also create presentations a la Power Point via the “New” button on the first page of the Google Documents site.  Remember that you can always get back to the first page by clicking on the Google Documents logo at the top left side of the screen.
4. You can “embed” a presentation into your blog by opening it up and selecting the “Publish” button at the top right side of the screen.  Click “Publish Document” to make the presentation public, and then copy the HTML code in the text box using the “Edit” -> “Copy” command.  Open up a post or page in your blog and switch to HTML mode (as opposed to “visual” mode).  Then paste in the code and voila – instant web-based presentation!
5. We also played around with the Spreadsheet tool which is available via the “New” button on the main page.  Spreadsheets work a lot like Excel Worksheets and Google has implemented a pretty extensive formula system to support custom calculations.  You can “Share” spreadsheets just like documents (see above) and collaborate with others, but the coolest feature of the spreadsheet by far is it’s ability to create a “form” that you can use to collect responses.  Here’s a step by step guide on how to get started:
   1. Create a new spreadsheet in Google Documents
   2. Use the cells in row 1 to type out the questions (i.e. “First Name”, “Last Name”, “Phone Number”)
   3. Click on the “Forms” tab
   4. Click on “Create a Form”
   5. Fill in any instructions that you would like to send along with the form and then click on “Preview and Send”
   6. You can either type in the e-mail addresses of the people who you want to send the form to, or you can copy the “Embed” code and paste it into a blog posting or page.

And here are the answers to a few random questions thatn came up:

1. You can save the contents of a Youtube video using the “downloader9″ tool.  It’s available at http://www.downloader9.com/.
2. The website that I touted as the “swiss army knife” of the Internet, Zamzar, is available at http://www.zamzar.com .

Just wanted to summarize some of the blogging concepts that we went over today:

1. You can set up “Categories” within your blog.  All posts and pages within your blog can be associated with these categories, allowing your visitors to quickly access specific portions of your site at any time.
2. The “Categories” widget can be added to your sidebar by clicking on “Design” and then on “Widgets” in your Dashboard.
3. You can set up your blog to show a specific page when visitors first visit your site (versus having them see all your postings ordered chronologically) – you can do this by accessing the “Settings” -> “Reading” menu.  This can allow you to treat your blog like a more traditional website.