Keeping track of data and projects is a common problem for people who work both at home and at school or the office. When I was teaching, I often used four different computers with two different operating systems in four separate places: one at home, one in my office at school, one in my permanent home in Bali, and one in the school computer lab. Keeping track of my work was always problematic. The easiest solution was to carry a flash drive with me and save the data on the drive. This solution, however, presented several problems: sometimes I would simply forget my flash drive, at other times the drive failed to work for one reason or another and occasionally I would simply forget to save the data on the drive at the end of the day. The Evernote app and web service solves the problem of keeping track of your work and allows you to access it from wherever you have an internet connection.

You can save just about anything on Evernote: text, PDFs, graphics, voice messages, webpages, etc. These are saved to the cloud. One of the cool things about Evernote is that you can then access your work from any computer, device or mobile that uses these platforms: Blackberry, Android, Windows Phone 7, iOS and Web OS.

When making notes on a computer, the Evernote Mac app allows you to save them in rich text format. You can also add links, images, attach files and use a variety of fonts with your text. When your data is saved to the Evernote servers, it is synced and ready to use with any Evernote-capable devices that you use. Evernote’s synchronizing data for all your devices and for use on the web makes it an excellent choice for users who want to know that they have the most current version of their work.

Even though most of my work is now done on one computer, I like using Evernote for organizing data in projects. Essentially, I use Evernote as a filing cabinet that I can access from anywhere with an internet connection. I particularly like the Evernote web clipper extension that you can add to the Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers. When I see something on a webpage that I want to save, I just click on the Evernote icon on the browser bar, select what I want and save it to the appropriate folder. And, I can share all my data with friends and colleagues.

The free version of Evernote has a number of limitations: a monthly limit of 60MB of data, the inability to access files offline, and slower use of the OCR with PDF images. You can get the premium version for $5 a month or $45 per year. This gives you 1GB of monthly uploads, larger individual file sizes and the ability to take notebooks offline for working with during those times when you don’g have an internet connection. There’s a few other benefits as well, but take a look for yourself over at Evernote’s website.

There are plenty of web browsers out on the market. If you’re running a Windows-based computer, you probably use Internet Explorer, although you could also be using Firefox, Chrome or even Opera. For Mac people like me, Safari is the default Mac browser, but a lot of Mac people, like me again, prefer to use another browser. Because the last two schools that I worked in during my days as an international teacher were primarily Windows-based schools, I used Firefox just because I didn’t like IE. When I retired and went back to the Mac OS, I continued to use Firefox although sometimes I used Safari. In order to use my online banking here in Indonesia, I need to use IE, so I borrow one of my children’s computers with Windows and use IE. They tend to use IE as well, although they all have Firefox installed on their computers.

According to a summary in a Wikipedia article on browser usage, IE was the leader in the browser wars for the month of March 2012. As you can see from the chart, Firefox and Chrome are basically tied for second place with Safari and Opera far behind. However, if you go over to the w3chools.com website, their stats have Firefox and Chrome basically tied for first with IE in third and then Safari and Opera.
For those of you old enough to remember the days of the World Wide Web in the early to mid 90s, you’ll remember Netscape Navigator which was the browser in those days.

OK, so now that statistics and history have been covered, let’s get to the point of this post. Since my retirement, I’ve become an avid follower of the developments in online educational opportunities. I’ve already written about the Khan Academy, Utubersity, Just Math Tutorials, TED and other websites that have free online lessons, courses, videos and more. In the next few weeks, I’ll be covering other websites in this explosion of free, educational resources. These sites offer teachers, students and independent learners (that’s me) so many options for teaching and learning that it’s becoming difficult to keep track of all of them and to sort out which sites are the best for certain situations. I hope to make some sense of this confusion in the next few weeks.

But, what does this have to do with the browser wars? Well, as I noted above, sometimes I have to use IE for specialized things like accessing my bank accounts in Indonesia. I use Safari when I want to download videos from YouTube. And just yesterday, I discovered that I have a need to use Chrome.

I signed up for a free programming course with Udacity a few months ago. I was excited about learning how to program in Python. The course focuses on creating your own search engine. (I’ll cover this in more detail in a later post.) When the start date came around, I logged in and tried to access the first lesson, but to no avail. I got a page that said loading and that was it. OK, I figured they weren’t quite ready yet, so I waited until the next day and tried again, but to no avail. This went on for a few days, and then I got involved in other projects and forgot about the course. Yesterday, I tried once again, but no luck. So, I decided to try using Chrome and Bingo. I got in. The course is almost over now, so I’m working on catching up. Yesterday, I was able to get through about half of the first unit. With the final exam coming in about four weeks, I have a lot to do, but this is incredibly cool.

So, what was the problem with Firefox and why was Chrome able to access the lessons? I haven’t got the slightest idea. I may get around to sending Udacity an email to find out what the problem was, but the main point for this point is that having several browsers on your computer never hurts and can give you the flexibility that you might need. And, as always, if something doesn’t work try several options before giving up (note to myself – why didn’t I do that weeks ago?).

Usually when I cover software, it is open source or free. Today’s review, however, is about a piece of software that is commercial and priced in what I consider to the the mid-range at around $50 (although if you wait around, you can probably get it on sale – I did). So, why am I reviewing commercial software? The answer is that I haven’t found any open source software that does what StoryMill does.

StoryMill is a niche piece of software for Mac users. It is marketed as word processing and story development software for fiction writers, but it can be used quite effectively for non-fiction writing as well.

StoryMill has a set of features intended to help writers organize their fiction, which should make it easier for them to get creative instead of worrying about what they did with that character sketch that they want to include in Chapter Four, or where they put the photo that they wanted to use for a few ideas about Gothic cathedrals in Europe. So, what are these features?

Scene-Based Organization: Scenes are the basic unit of organization in StoryMill. You write scenes that can then be organized in a variety of ways. This feature took me a bit of time to get used too, but once I saw how iI could organize these scenes in the non-fiction book that I’m writing on Islam, I understood how I could use them in my novel in a similar way. Basically, scenes are small units of text that can be put together to create a chapter, or, a large scene itself might constitute a chapter. But, if you’re having trouble in using scenes, you can opt to just use the traditional concept of chapters as the way to organize your writing project.

A Timeline View: This allows you to see how all your scenes are related to each other based on time. The time units can be set for minutes, hours, days and even millenia. I haven’t made much use of this feature yet, but I can see how useful it will eventually be in my book on Islam, which covers approximately 1,500 years of Islamic history.

Characters: This is another way to organize your writing. You can make notes about your characters, find images that play a role in the characters’ lives and save them on the character’s view page. You can add information about your characters including height, race, weight, eyes, hair color and role in the story. You can also link them to scenes and locations to keep track of where they exit and enter the story. In any lengthy writing project with many characters, this is a powerful organizing tool.

Locations: This feature allows you to work on locations as a separate entity. These can then be linked to scenes. In the location view you can make notes, add images and assign tags.

Other Features: There is a full screen mode available to help keep easily distracted writers like me on task. The Snapshots feature allows you to take a snapshot of your writing and then compare it to a newer version in order to keep better track of changes that you are making when you get around to editing your work. And a few more cool features are the word frequency checker, a progress meter and a Smart View mode.

StoryMill has many other useful tools for the writer who wants an organized approach to writing. A friend who tried StoryMill found it too organized for him, but for me, this program is making my writing life much easier and much more enjoyable. StoryMill is for Mac OS 10.6 and higher.

Back in September I wrote about the Khan Academy and how it can help bring students an individualized learning experience. I also specifically commented on how important it is for Indonesian teachers and administrators to translate these lessons into Bahasa Indonesia.

Just the other day, I wandered into the family room to see what my son was doing because he had a physics exam the next day. I discovered that he was online with a Khan Academy video in Bahasa Indonesia. If you are an Indonesian student or a teacher who wants to get involved with the Khan Academy, check out the Khan Academy- BahasaInd Channel over on YouTube. I love to see a good idea spread.

I’ve written before about online learning and how amazing it can be for those of us who want to continue our eduction online. I came across another website yesterday that is perfect for online learners. Utubersity is a site that organizes the educational videos hosted on YouTube. The idea behind Utubersity is that because it can be quite difficult finding educational videos on YouTube, Utubersity does it for you. They classify and tag educational videos so that it is easier to find what you are looking for. The website is a community-based project, and they welcome help from anyone who is interested. According to the Utubersity website, there are over 150 universities that offer more than 5,000 courses free of charge through the Open Courseware movement.

Videos are organized into three categories: Lectures, Documentaries and Conferences. Each category is subdivided according to discipline, such as anthropology, history, mathematics, etc. The home page offers visitors three additional categories: Newest Videos, Popular Videos and Featured Videos. If you’re interested in online education, it will be well worth your time to check out Utubersity. Who knows, you might want to learn about the Theories of Culture from Dr. Norris G. Lang at the University of Houston.

I was Stumbling along today and came across a cool website that is perfect for someone like me who loves to listen to radio online and would like to listen to new music but also would like to stick to a feeling that I’m in or want to be in. Usually, I listen to oldies stations from the States, but the playlists usually don’t vary much and even I get tired of 60s music all the time. So the site I’m mentioning today is called stereomood. This is a free internet radio station that is built around moods. That’s right, moods.

The site grew out of the work of some folks in Milan. They decided that they needed some international music to fit their moods and activities, so they came up with playlists attached to tags like relax, dreamy, good karma, Sunday Morning and many more. Pick the Sunday Morning tag and you get a playlist with 586 songs. You can just let the music play as it’s lined up, or you can pick what you want. You also have some choices of artists or subsets of Sunday Morning like happy, dreamy and calm.

stereomood pays license fees for the music that they stream, and they encourage site users to download legal music and support artists by purchasing their music after they hear it online.

I love this site. Check it out. If you’re a music lover, I think you love stereomood.

A former student of mine informed me of the Khan Academy after reading a post about another website where it’s possible to get great video lessons about math. The Khan Academy is even more extensive and is an organizational effort rather than just one great guy. KA was founded by Salman Khan in order to provide “high quality education to anyone, anywhere.” There are more than 2,400 videos available on a range of subjects that include math, science, test prep and some humanities. Some subjects are obviously better fitted for e-learning than others.

Salman Khan spoke at a TED conference about the Academy and how it can be used in education. In fact, it is being used in a few classrooms in the Los Altos School District in California. During Khan’s TED talk, he showed a knowledge map about math and how these small lessons build on each other until a student gains mastery over a particular area of a subject. A teacher has a dashboard that shows where each student is in their progress. Thus, he can see exactly where a student may be having problems with a concept or algorithm and work directly on that problem with the student on a one-to-one basis. Student can work individually at their own pace.

All of us who have taught know that the one size fits all model of traditional learning just doesn’t work for every student because students learn at different rates, some students don’t want to ask questions in class when they’re stuck because they don’t want to appear “dumb” or because they know that the teacher may never actually get around to their question in a classroom of 25 or 30 or 40 students.

As I write the international school reviews that are on the International Teacher blog, I regularly come across a requirement for prospective teachers that they be able to use a differentiated learning methodology. By using resources like the Khan Academy or Patrick JMT: Just Math Tutorials, teachers can individualize learning in such a way as to make lessons more enjoyable (and easier) for the students and more enjoyable (and easier) for them.

When I was teaching computer classes, I tried to get around this by typing out directions for different applications that I was working on, such as making web pages or PowerPoints or using Word. The idea was basically the same – let each student work at their own pace; I could tell where they were and how they were doing by monitoring which lesson they were on. I encouraged students that were breezing through lessons to help their classmates who were not having such an easy go at it. And this approach was somewhat successful, but several problems existed. Some students had difficulties in reading and following instructions, and some of my written instructions were not as clearly written as they could have been. The videos that the Khan Academy and Patrick JMT use allow students to see how to do something. And seeing for many students is just much easier to get than reading.

All of the lessons are in English which can be a problem for students in non-English speaking countries like Indonesia. Indonesian teachers could get around this by doing voice overs in Indonesian or by creating their own lessons. Another example for why Indonesian teachers might want to create their own lessons comes from when I was team teaching with an Indonesian math teacher, I noticed that she and I had different ways of solving math problems. I’ve noticed the same thing with some of the homework that my kids bring home. So, using the Khan or JMT lessons as a model, a great project for a team of enthusiastic and dedicated Indonesian teachers is to create a library of lessons in Indonesian and offer them for free to all schools in Indonesia.

Khan notes in the conclusion of his TED speech that the goal of the Khan Academy is to create a global one world classroom. That’s a great idea.

Other Considerations
A few years ago, I did a presentation for a group of teachers, principals and students in Mataram, Lombok, about how to use the internet for teaching. In the Q&A after my presentation, several questions focused on what to do if you don’t have internet connections at the school, or what to do if you don’t have computers at the school. The first part is easy enough to deal with. The videos are downloadable and free. So a teacher or student can download these and place them on the school server so that students can access them as they need to. The second issue, what happens if you don’t have computers, is harder to deal with. This problem requires money and efficient, honest administrators to develop a technology plan for a country, state, district and school.

Obviously this becomes a problem of resources. My kids are fortunate enough to go to schools where there is some technology in the schools, and where most parents have enough money that they can afford to buy their kids their own computer for use at home. However, I’m thinking about small village schools, or poor urban schools, where there are no computers at all and where parents don’t have the financial resources to buy their kids computers. Even with the new notebooks just now flooding the market in Singaraja that are selling at around 3 million rupiah, parents that may only be making a million rupiah a month will be hard pressed to purchase a computer. Ideally, the 1:1 laptop programs that many international schools are adopting is an excellent way to implement e-learning so that students can learn at school and at home. Solving this money side of this problem is not going to be so easy unfortunately.

Skype has been around since 2003. This simple-to-install and use application allows users to make a variety of internet-based connections for free. Yes, free. Of course, most internet-savvy people have heard of Skype, but for some folks (like me) who tried Skype in the past with a poor internet connection, it’s time to take another look at it, especially for those of us who live across the world from family and friends.

I used Skype a few times back a few years ago, but because of our slow internet connection, we had limited luck with using it for just a phone call, forget about anything else. So, Skype just sat there on the computer unused and semi-forgotten. Last week, my eldest son suggested that we try a Skype video call to catch up on things. I tried a test call with no luck. After several unsuccessful attempts, I realized that I was using a version that was long past its due date. So, I downloaded the newest version, and bingo, the test worked. An hour later, my son and I were engaged in a four-hour video call, which, with the exception of a few slowdowns, gave us a clear video and audio connection. I was more than impressed with the quality of the connection, and the opportunity to have a face-to-face connection with my son, daughter-in-law and granddaughters.

Skype lets you have voice and audio conversations, instant messaging, and even group videos from your computer all for free. You can also use Skype with mobiles to make free Skype-to-Skype calls and instant messaging. For users with Skype-enabled TVs, you can use view your Skype connection on widescreen TV. For a low cost subscription, users can upgrade and access landlines and mobile phones, as well as use over 500,00 WiFi hotspots.

So, if you haven’t used Skype in a while, or if you’ve never tried it. Download Skype today and see what it can do for the quality of your life.

As I’ve written before, I’m a great fan of open source software. It’s free and you have something that you can use legally. Better for the karma to use legal software. FileZilla is an FTP application. For those of you not familiar with what FTP means, it stands for file transfer protocol. And what does that mean?

FileZilla interface

FileZilla has both client and server software. It can be distributed for free under the terms of the GNU General Public License. FileZilla’s features include bookmarks, drag and drop use, remote file editing, directory comparison, cross-platform, able to transfer large files, fast and easy to use because of its intuitive graphical user interface. FTP has two modes of data transfer: text and binary. FileZilla automatically picks the correct data transfer mode for you.

Download a copy and try it. I think you’ll find it’s one of the best around.

Do you enjoy radio? Have you secretly always wanted to be a DJ? Well, podcasting is your chance to have your own little radio station right at home. Podcasting is a very popular form of media; you can find podcasts all over the internet, including at Apple’s iTunes.

What are podcasts?

Podcasts are just audio files that are encoded in mp3 format. You can listen to a podcast on any mp3 player or on your computer. You can find podcasts about just any subject that you can think of – I like travel and educational podcasts myself, and I’ve been using podcasts with students for the past five years.

So how do you make a podcast? Here are 8 easy steps to creating your first podcast.

1. Assemble your tools. You’ll need a microphone, a computer and sound editing software. I use an iMac so I can skip the microphone. Because I use a Mac, I use GarageBand for my sound editing software. If you have a PC, I suggest using Audacity which is free and easy to use.

2. Listen to some podcasts in a variety of formats, but pick a few that cover topics that you’ll want to cover. You want to listen for pacing, and the use of sound effects and music.

3. Write a script that you’ll stick to. If you try to create a podcast off the top of your head, you’ll spend a lot of time pausing and hmming and hawing. Write short snappy sentences.

4. Find some cool music and sound effects. There are a lot of free sound effects on the internet, as well as free music.

5. Now, open up your sound editing software and start to record. Stop after 30 seconds or so and go back and check your recording for sound levels and vocal miscues that you may have made. If everything sounds good. Keep on going, you’re doing fine.

6. Once you’ve finished recording your script, go back and add sound effects. I like to add a short musical lead-in. I use the same one to finish the podcast. You can take these and paste them on to your recording.

7. Play back your recording. Save it as a mp3.

8. Now you need to upload your podcast to a website. You can put podcasts in free WordPress or Blogspot blogs or you can host it yourself.
Congratulations you have your first podcast. Let your friends know about it and have them spread the word.