EDAD660 (2008)

Last year I worked with an occupational therapist in my educational technology authoring class who was interested in using technology to help teach handwriting.  She mainly wanted to explore how to create her own worksheets and handouts using a customized font that would help support letter correct formation.  I wish I had known about this site back then!

Fontifier (http://www.fontifier.com) is a site that allows you to create your own fonts using your own handwriting as a guide.  You can start by downloading and printing a PDF template that you fill out by hand.  The template contains spots for each letter, number and commonly used symbol in the alphabet.  Once you’ve filled out the form you can scan it and upload it back to fontifier’s website.  They will then create a font for you that you can download for a mere $9 US.  Pretty cool stuff!

Two things caught my eye this week, and I think that you may find them interesting too.  The first is a free software package called “Jing” that can be used to capture video and audio from your computer.  The quality is fantastic, and they have a one-click feature that allows you to post your video to the web along with an Embed link.  Here’s a quick video I just made about a project that I’m working on for a class at NYU:

If you want to see the full project feel free to visit it at http://itp.nyu.edu/~cmk380/pileup_04/applet/

The second item of note has to do with an article that CNN ran this week on Google’s plans to create vast floating offshore data centers.  These centers could be used to host Google’s various web services, such as it’s search engine, Gmail, Google Docs, etc.  The plan right now is to also take advantage of emerging energy production technologies, such as wave and tidal generation, to help power these floating computer centers.  Pretty cool stuff!

http://www.cnn.com/2008/SPORT/09/18/computer.navy/index.html?eref=rss_latest

Hey everyone, I came across this video that really helps to illustrate why Google Docs is a superior alternative to e-mail for collaboration purposes.  Might be useful for those of you who are trying to get your teachers to embrace some of these new technologies in their own practice.

As I said in class, if you want to gently introduce your staff to Web 2.0 technologies, you get the most “bang for your buck” by starting them off with a Google account!

Oh, and if you’re interested, here’s a link to my new blog that I’ll be maintaining at NYU:

http://blog.craigkapp.com

Hope all is well in your corner of the world!

Just last month we were talking about the ‘browser war’ between Microsoft and pretty much the rest of the world.  Well, the list of competitors just got a little bigger.  Hot off the press, here is a link to an article that talks about Google’s super-secret new browser named ‘ Chrome’.

The announcement was leaked today along with a 38 page comic book written by Scott McCloud that describes the changes that Chrome will bring to a person’s browsing experience.  If you’re interested in seeing the whole comic book you can follow this link.  I posted the first page since it summarizes nicely the main issues at hand and how Chrome is planning on addressing them.

This goes along with the video we watched after break this morning.  The link below takes you to the official press release from Apple regarding their new (free) iTunes service called “iTunes University” or “iTunes U”.

http://www.apple.com/education/itunesu_mobilelearning/landing.html

Good news! You can access your Google Documents offline – without an Internet connection. Check it out:

You can get started by installing the Google Gears plugin for Firefox at: http://gears.google.com/ . Gears requires Firefox and won’t run under Internet Explorer.

http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php

This exercise will demonstrate how to incorporate the “Google Analytics” feature into your blog. This feature will allow you to easily track who is visiting your blog, where they are coming from, what browsers they are using, etc. Here’s how to get started!

1. Visit: http://www.google.com/analytics/

2. Log in using your Google Identity.

3. Click “Add Website Profile”

4. Paste your blog address into the box labeled “Please provide the URL of the site you would like to track.”

5. Click Continue

6. A new page will appear with a bunch of HTML code in a white text box. Select this code and copy it using EDIT->Copy.

7. Click Finish

8. Open a new window and sign into your blog

9. Click Design -> Widgets

10. We need to add in a place to hold this code on your blog. You can do this by adding a text widget to your sidebar. Paste the tracking code information into the widget body – feel free to leave the title of this element blank.

11. Switch back to the browser window that has Google Analytics running and click “Check Status” to verify that you’ve set up your blog correctly. Click Finish when you’re done.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully set up tracking on your blog! Google Analytics tracks information on a daily basis, so you won’t begin to see tracking information until tomorrow.

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:

  View Larger Map

Here’s how you can embed a video from Teacher Tube on your blog:

1. Find a video on Teacher Tube or You Tube
2. Locate the “Embed” code on the right side of the screen
3. Copy this code by right-clicking and choosing “Copy”
4. Open up a new blog posting or page
5. Click the ‘HTML’ tab at the top of the composition window to switch to “code” view
6. Paste the embed code

And in case you’re interested in the Nintendo Wii conductor video, here you go!