As I’ve often said, sometimes the simplest sites are the best.  WakerUpper.com only does one thing and it does it well.  You put in your phone number, date, time and message, and it’ll call you with it at that time.  That’s it!  Tadaaaaahhhh!

And yet, its simplicity is its brilliance.  I do a fair amount of traveling, and use hotel wake up calls quite a bit.  I’m always looking for a backup tho.  I can’t depend on the alarm clock on the end table.  After all, I still screw my own alarm up at home, and I’ve been using it for years!  I hate the alarm on my cell phone.  Either I’m constantly doing it wrong, or it just chooses when it wants to go off.  So the idea of just setting another wakeup call is sheer brilliance to me.

It will also read aloud to you a message that you type in, making it perfect for reminders as well.  Or, if you really need to get out of that meeting, I suppose you could always set it to call you at a convenient time.

Oh yeah, no signup or login is necessary either, which is really nice.  However, you can choose to register for their beta and get access to features like snooze and recurring calls.  There’s a mobile version of the site, but in order to use it you need to login.  So it looks like it may be part of the beta right now as well.

Neat site and one I’ll definitely be using often!

There’s on 20th Century technology skill that isn’t going away any time soon. And that’s, Typing. Yea, voice dictation is coming around, but we’re still pretty far from going keyboard-free. And while there are are hundreds of typing programs out there, there’s always room for one more. Particularly when it’s web based, cross platform, and has just neat innovative twist!

The website is TypeRacer.com and as you might be able to guess, you’re in a race against other people (Hence the ‘racer’ part of the URL). You and 4 other typists square off in a format that is reminiscent of those various races you’d find a carnival. You know, where you try to squirt water into a clowns mouth to blow up a balloon the fastest, or roll balls into numbered holes to try to get your greyhound to run across the field faster than anyone else’s? In TypeRacer, you have a VW Bug representing yourself and you try to get it to the other side of the screen first. Of course, you move your car by typing passages of text (Hency the ‘Type’ part of the URL). Wait for the light to turn green and then away you go. Type accurately and you’ll race to the other side first and get the gold and glory. Make mistakes and you stall until you correct them.

I think the most interesting thing about the site though is probably the text you type. It seemed like actual text, rather than the random characters and words that some programs make you type in. However, I couldn’t quite place what it was from until the end of the race. Once everyone finishes, it shows you the source of the text. One race of mine had me typing a quote from the movie Mulholland Drive by David Lynch. Another had me typing out some of Einstein’s explanation of his Theory of Relativity. In my most recent race, I recognized the quote immediately! It was Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction explaining to John Travolta how TV Pilots work. I really didn’t even need to look at the screen to type that one out.

Of course, you can also click on the thumbnail of the source to be taken to Amazon and purchase the movie or book. I seriously hope these aren’t random passages though, as there are some parts of Pulp Fiction that obviously wouldn’t be appropriate for students. There is a form allowing you to submit a quote, and they do say “Our only requirements are that each text be mostly grammatically correct (many song lyrics don’t fit into this category), and not be depressing or offensive. We’re trying to keep it light If the quote is thought-provoking or funny in some way, that’s a plus!”

That’s it!  Couldn’t be simpler.  Down the road, I’d love to see them allow people to custom choose sets of quotes to draw from.  How great would it be if you could specify for your students passages from the Chronicles of Narnia, or Harry Potter, or Shakespeare?  Or whatever book you happen to be reading at the time.

Have fun!  With your students I mean…

SO, with that in mind, let’s do a quick lap around the web and make sure you know a few of the many other places that you can network with your fellow STARs!

Yes, Facebook is the end all, be all of social networking sites right now. Join the DEN in Facebook group and share photos, videos and comments with other DEN members. Click here to join the DEN Facebook group.

LinkedIn is quickly becoming the ‘professional’ social networking site for the corporate world. It’s a fantastic way to find out who knows the people you want to know and get a personal introduction. I know I’ve had several requests over the last month to introduce one friend to another, and even used it a couple of times to get in contact with someone that I didn’t have any other way to connect with. If you’re a little nervous about posting a profile on Facebook or MySpace, this site is a great place to get your feet wet. Build out your profile and represent yourself professionally. The DEN group was just approved, so be among the first to join and proudly display the DEN logo on your profile!

Diigo is a social bookmarking site that is really giving the current champion, del.icio.us, a run for its money. It does everything that del.icio.us does (including simul-posting to your current del.icio.us account!) and so much more. From highlighting on a page, to adding sticky notes, to sharing bookmarks with groups, it really turns websurfing from a passive experience to a highly active one. Jennifer Dorman created the DEN group in Diigo a little over a week ago and there’s already over 50 members!

If you’re looking to jump into a virtual world, but don’t really know how to get started, our Second Life Leadership Council will see that you have a helping hand. They’ve done a phenomenal job of hosting weekly events, organizing volunteer guides and building out a truly amazing DEN presence in the virtual world. I can’t link directly to the group in SL, but if you visit the blog you can find all the information you’d ever need.

That’s all I can think of right now, but I’m sure there are others. So if you know of any I’m missing, add a comment below. See you ’round the web!

Highlight of the day has been the networking taking place. Sheryl Nussbaum Beach set the right tone with her opening keynote, encouraging the attendees to spend time today building out their own personal learning networks. And without a question, people have been taking it to heart. Tweet’s have been flying all over, sessions are being uStreamed and recorded for podcasts, and the networking has truly been exemplary. Of course, there are about half a dozen STAR Discovery Educators or so around, who are leading by example!

As promised, here is a link to my afternoon presentation dealing with AUP’s, Social Networking and Internet Safety. It’s a messy topic to be sure, but we had a great discussion and there seemed to be many lightbulbs switching on above people’s heads.

Great stuff, and I was glad just to be a part of it.

This all started with Lee Kolbert. She decided to create a tool that STAR Discovery Educators could use to register themselves along with their Twitter names, and then see the results as an online list. That way, STARs could go through that list and add other STARs that they might not have known were on Twitter.

Brilliant idea and it didn’t take long for the list to grow mightily! However, let’s face it… For a new user, copying and pasting and following 70+ Twitter accounts is a pretty tedious task. I mused on Twitter about how handy it would be for someone to create a way to just import in a list of Twitter names! Wham Bam, there you go. An instant starter set of Twit-friends, just add water. Lo and behold, podcasting legend Tim Wilson read that tweet and said, “Hey, neat idea! I’ll just close my eyes, click my heels together, and poof! Meet the Twitterator!”

Ok, it’s a bit of a dramatization, but it really didn’t take Tim at all to take the idea and run with it. Just supply his tool with your username and password, and then give it a list of names or point it to a URL that has a list of names, and it’ll have Twitter follow all those people for you. Couldn’t be easier!

Well, maybe it could………. By throwing DabbleDB into the mix, I can have it chop up the table that Lee Kolbert created using JottForm and spit out a CSV file that Twitterator can digest easily. That gives us a static URL that will ALWAYS import in all of the STARs registered by Lee’s tool. So if I want to follow all the people who have registered themselves within the last few weeks, I just run that same URL through Twitterator again. Anybody I’m already following it just ignores!

Ok, so how do you get started? Easy as 1-2-3

1) Register a username at Twitter.com (obviously skip this if you’re already registered)

2) Register yourself in the STAR Database that Lee created. That way other people can follow you!

3) Go to Twitterator.org. Put in your username and password and in the “Enter a list of people to follow” box, paste http://tinyurl.com/4a7mnu into the URL field and click submit.’

Voila! You are now following all the STAR Discovery Educators who have registered themselves! Now tell all of us what you’re doing

As promised, here are the presentations that I shared while in Bucks. Very much looking forward to my next visit to the area, whenever that may be.

Learning to Speak Native

The New Permanent Record - Parent version

Policies, Safety, and Social Networking

The World is Just Awesome!!

Lets not trash it, heat it up or waste it. Look around you. Look around class, the school, the community and your own home. How can you make a difference? Get a little info by watching, reading and listening to the media below and other people. Then share your thoughts. The only wrong answer, is no answer.

I created an assignment in Discovery Education streaming for Earth Day, April 22. I also incorporated the use of a great site, voicethread.com. If you haven’t heard of it check out the assignment below by clicking on the link.

Teacher Printable Version: Earth Day streaming and voicethread assignment

Student link to Assignment (must have Discovery Education streaming) Shoot me an email with “Earth Day” in the subject. Include your Discovery Education streaming username and I’ll send you the link.

Direct VoiceThread link.

5 minute Jing: An quick video overview of VoiceThread.

Extension Hands-on: Trash sorting Lab
Never heard of it? It’s simple. Collect trash for a few days. (Important: No animal by-products! Don’t want to send anyone to the emergency room. Plant material perfectly ok, but put that left over pot roast in Fido’s bowl or simply another trash bag) Bring trash bag into school and have students sort it. You can give them sorting categories or even better have them come up with their own. Also throw in some process skills here, how do you measure how much? Let them figure it out.
Main Point: A lot of trash, well just isn’t. How much(grams, volume, other) needs to go to the landfill?
Extension Media:
Got DE Streaming Plus? Have them watch a Planet Earth segment. The world rocks. Any will do, but “The Future” one is on topic. Don’t have DE Streaming PLUS.

Psst!! You can become a STAR Discovery Educator and get it for free through the end of this school year. No really, just another benefit of being a STAR. Find out how here.

Categories for the throwdown are going to be: Image In, Basic Editing, Filters/Fun Stuff, Image Out, Bonus Features, and User Experience.

Image In
Photoshop: In order to begin using Photoshop, you need to create an Adobe account. Plug in the information, and then wait for the confirmation email. Unfortunately, you can’t start using Express until you get your account confirmed and for some reason, my confirmation email took over 2 hours to arrive. To be fair, this is opening day, so they may be a bit overloaded, but that was definitely an irritating way to start the demo. Once you’re in, you can bring in photos in one of 4 ways: By uploading them from your computer, by importing them in from y our photo albums (assuming you’ve already uploaded them), by choosing photos from the general community, or by importing them from other sites. The other sites options are pretty limited right now, just Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa. I would seriously hope that those options increase in the future. No Flickr? That’s just crazy. When you upload a new photo, you can choose to keep things organized by putting it into an album, which is a nice idea if you’re going to be using this often. Then you just double click to begin editing.

Picnik: Right from the splash page, you can upload a photo. No need to register at all, tho you are certainly welcome to. Bonus points for that, particularly in a school environment. Besides uploading, you can also grab a photo by providing a URL to it, doing a Yahoo search for one, using your Webcam to snap a picture, or by importing one from MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket or Webshots.

Winner - Picnik due to the ease of getting started and variety of ways to bring in pics.

Basic Editing
Photoshop: You have the usual suite of tools, red eye correction, crop and resize, , white balance, and saturation. But then you also have a few more unusual ones like Touchup, Fill Light and Highlight. When you select a tool, Tools are very easy to use, most providing you with a series of preview thumbnails that you just mouseover. When you do, the actual image you’re working on changes to reflect what it would look like if you applied it. Just click the checkmark if you like it and want to keep it. Photoshop zooms your photo in and out dynamically based on the tool you’re using, so you always have the maximum possible screen space. Also, it gives you a navigation window to move around in. There are multiple levels of undo, and you get a nice visual timeline to go back multiple levels. Most of the tools are pretty self-explanatory, but that retouch tool still has me stumped. Sort of like a poor mans clone stamp, that I can’t get to do anything productive.

Picnik: Once again, all the basics are there. Autofix, rotate, crop, resize, exposure, color, sharpen and red eye correction. With most of the tools, you can either use sliders or specify your changes numerically. Every tool has onscreen tips to go along with it, and is pretty darn self-explanatory. A zoom slider is always in the lower right, and then you just click and drag to navigate around the image. However, if you’re using a tool that uses click and drag (like crop or rotate), there doesn’t seem to be any way to navigate around the image. Just gotta zoom out all the way. Bonus points under red eye for having two settings to choose from, Human and Furball

Winner - Photoshop, for having more options to choose from and a really slick live preview interface. Close call tho.

Filters/Fun Stuff
Photoshop: Considering that Photoshop is the king of filters, I’m a little disappointed in the choices here. You have Pop Color, Hue, Black and White, Tint, Sketch and Distort. Black and white does exactly what you’d think, sketch turns your photo into a drawing of sorts. Hue and tint just mess with the colors in a pretty basic way. Pop color also messes with your colors, but in a very targeted way. In my image of the Sphinx beneath a blue sky, I could easily recolor just the sphinx or just the sky. Very Warhol-like. I’m surprised at how accurate it was in its changes. The last filter is Distort, which allows you to pinch,s stretch, and twirl the image, distorting it to your heart’s content.

Picnik: Many of Picnik’s filters and fun features used to be available only to premium subscribers. They’ve changed their revenue model to be ad supported for the free version, and put all of the fun stuff back in! Consequently, you have a TON of filters to choose from, including sketches, neon outlines, blurs, mattes, frames, color changes and so on. I’m not kidding, there are a slew of them in there. And you have full control over each of them, to make them mild or max them out. In addition to that, you can add text to images, stamp on shapes or clip art, whiten teeth, blur out ‘blemishes’, or add frames to your photo. At the premium level, they’ve recently added the ability to adjust the levels and curves of your image, exactly the same way you could in Photoshop (the offline version). Once your students discover this section of Picnik, the rest of the period is going to be wasted as you won’t be able to pull them away!

Winner - Picnik, in a landslide.

Image Out
Photoshop: When you’re all done and you click Save, it saves it back to your library. From there, if you click on the image, you can choose to download it, embed it, get the URL, or email it. For both the embed and copy url commands, it just copies them straight to the clip board. You don’t see the code until you paste it. While that’s fine for advanced users, I think so basic users who have a peripheral understanding of how the clipboard, copy and paste works, may have difficulty with that. Email allows you to email the image once you provide a message and address (or you can use one from an addressbook you can populate). Download gave me the option of choosing one of two sizes for my image before I actually saved it to my computer.

Picnik: When you click the Save & Share tab, you get a series of options that includes save to computer, email photo, Flickr slideshow, email to website, print photo, and then the option to export it directly to MySpace, Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, Photobucket and Webshots. The options under each of them are what really set Picnik apart tho. Under Save to Computer, you can choose the dimensions for the image (just type in the numbers), what format you want (TIFF, JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP or PDF) and what quality you want the compression to be if you chose JPG. Under email photo, you can pick from several different image sizes as well, and choose what email address you want the photo to be coming from. Email to website allows you to send the photo to Typepad, Costco, Walmart, Kodak, AOL, or any other site that allows you to import photos via email. And then of course, you could always just print it out

Winner - Picnik, in another landslide.

User Experience
Photoshop: One the whole, it’s fairly easy to use, altho I’ve noticed that it seems to be a bit pokey. It takes a really long time to upload, save, or bounce between sections of the site. The ability to store photos in albums is really nice, as is the dedicated space, but when you just want to get in, edit a photo and get out, it really gets in the way. There is one feature in particular that’s absolutely incredible though. As you apply changes to the image you’re editing, a check box appears next to each feature you’ve used. At any time, you can uncheck that box to turn off that effect. Essentially that allows you to undo anything you’ve done, in any order. That’s incredibly slick. Major points for including that. However, some of the features are a little obscure. I had to play a little while before I figured out what they did. Not only that, after about 20 minutes I noticed that some tools had a little wrench in the lower right of the tool bar. Clicking that opened up advanced options I hadn’t seen before. Doesn’t do you much good if you don’t know they’re there! The interface itself has a black background, and to be honest, is pretty dreary. For lack of a better way of describing it, using Photoshop Express feels like work.

Picnik: Picnik has been through several changes, almost all of them improvements. This version has a huge banner ad at the bottom of the page though, which I’m really not thrilled with. Admittedly, they need to figure out a way to make a buck off of this, so I can’t really complain too strongly, the site is still largely free. Picnik loads up quickly, and is very self explanatory. I think teachers of almost any level could just jump right into it and get started. That being said, there are also some pretty powerful features. While curves and levels are at the premium level right now, those are impressive new additions to an already powerful editor. The interface itself really feels like you’re on a picnik. flowers everywhere, bright colors, and in general it just feels friendly and cute. Where Photoshop feels like work, Picnik feels like fun.

Winner: Picnik. It just feels comfortable to use without any real learning curve.

Conclusion
Well, there you have it. While Photoshop may do the dirty work just a little bit better th, there’s no question that if I have a quick edit to do, I’ll be heading over to Picnik. It has more features, a friendlier interface, feels snappier, and gives me way more options for getting my images in or out of their site. Admittedly, this is Photoshop Express’s first day on the job, whereas Picnik has been around the block a few times. That being said, Adobe is the big gorilla, and Picnik would have be considered an underdog by comparison. After putting them both through their paces though, this underdog just happens to also be the reigning champion.

That’s I’m trying out FriendFeed right now.  It gives them one place to check to see what I’m doing across just about all of my social sites.   The end result is a steady stream of everything that I’m doing, as I’m doing it, regardless of the site.  You can also subscribe to other people’s FriendFeeds and see what’s going on amongst your friends all in one steady stream.  Of course, you can subscribe to those feeds via RSS, but I can see how that could get overwhelming really quickly.

I’m planning on passing the URL around to some of my non-Web2.0 friends to see if they actually visit it to keep up.  We’ll see what the results are in a few weeks.  But this could be a great way to bring a class blog page, Flickr account, YouTube account and bookmarks all together into one central location for parents to keep an eye on.

What do you think?  Have legs or just another flash in the pan?  There’s a few other competitors just waiting in the wings already!

When you register for an account with Drop.io, you get a website where you can store files. Depending on your settings, other people can get access to those files as well. Or add files to it. Or delete files from it. It’s basically a drop box with a whole lot of extra features.

What sorts of features?

*takes a deep breath*

URL, email, voicemail, conference call, fax, upload, rss, email alerts, bookmarks, widgets, links, notes, blog, interactive views, password protection, account control, free and premium limits, and zip downloads.

Not bad! But let’s go into more detail and see it first hand. Below, I’ve pasted in the Drop.io widget.

drop.io: simple private sharing

From there you (and other visitors) can add files to the ‘drop’. Nice clean interface, easy to embed, everything you expect and want from a widget. There’s a few other ways to add files though.

If you go directly to my drop, drop.io/den you can see and add files as well. You can actually add Files, links (straight up hyperlinks with no file), or notes (type text, click submit). Once again, it’s a clean, simple page. Always clear what you can do. But here’s where we start to get interesting.

You’ll see in the upper right corner a unique email address (den@drop.io) and a unique voicemail number. Using those, people can send in files via email, or they can leave audio messages that will be saved in the drop as audio files (anyone else see any podcasting implications here?). But that’s not all! They also allow you to print out or email to yourself a FAX cover sheet so you can fax yourself documents as well! Fax in a document, it winds up in your box saved as a PDF.

Interestingly, they also provide each drop its own private conference call code. The calls are not recorded, so how does this fit in? Quite simply, one incredible use for these drops would be as repositories for teams spread out over a distance. Or for collaborative projects between groups. With that in mind, having a default bridge would certainly come in handy. I couldn’t find how many people the bridge would support, but you certainly can’t argue with free.

With all these different people adding files, it might seem hard to keep up with everything. If you’re thinking to yourself, “Boy, it’d be really handy for this drop box to have an RSS feed,” give yourself a cookie. You can subscribe to updates via email or via RSS. And of course, there’s the usual social bookmarking widget that will allow you to easily send it to it del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, MySpace, Facebook, and so on.

All in all, it’s one heck of an interesting site. It’s currently free up to 100MB of space, but if you want to bump that up to 1GB, it costs $10 for a year. Rather nominal considering the functionality you get. When you create your drop, you get to specify whether you want it to be up for a day, week, month or year. At the end of that period, you’ll have the option to renew it and keep it going. But if you need to exit in a hurry, they have one last feature that I think is fantastic. There’s a link that says “Create Zip File” that will allow you to download a zip containing every file on the site.

Take a look! I think you’re going to like this one quite a bit.