VideoEgg Screencast

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In my last post, I mentioned iShowU, the Mac OS screen recording software. Below is a link to a quick little screencast I made about VideoEgg.

VideoEgg is a video sharing and creation tool. It has some very nice features including the ability to tap into webcams and if you have a recent Mac, your iSight camera. The audio level on the screencast needs a bit of work, but I was really impressed with how well iShowu worked.

video screen image

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del.icio.us: tagometer

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del.icio.us: tagometer:
del.icio.us released two new tools for display on web sites. The Tagometer Badge can be displayed in two ways. The tall badge is meant for sidebars and shows in a narrow multiline presentation the number of folks who have bookmarked your site on del.icio.us.

There is also a one line version that fits well in individual blog entry footers.

It's Snöwing on My MacBook

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Screenshot 02-35
Snö is the Swedish word for snow, and is a little freeware Mac application that makes snow fall over your desktop. It can be invoked as a screen saver or on top of your open applications. The preferences allow you so select types of flakes, wind speed and wind direction, flake speed and flake size.

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Flickr Upgrades Pro Accounts to Unlimited

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Flickr recently announced they have upped the previous limits on uploads to unlimited. Basically for $24.95 a year you can get the following:

  • Unlimited uploads
  • Unlimited storage
  • Unlimited bandwidth
  • Unlimited photosets
  • Permanent archiving of high-resolution original images
  • The ability to replace a photo
  • Ad-free browsing and sharing

They have also made changes to the Free Account:

  • 100 MB monthly upload limit
  • 3 photosets
  • Photostream views limited to the 200 most recent images
  • Only smaller (resized) images acessible (though the originals saved in case you upgrade later)

One feature I would like to see, and I thought was coming, was uploading of video clips to Flickr. I would like to have one place to store video along with my pictures. Maybe with the new PRO features they are getting ready for this?

Google's Picasa recently announced this, but it currently only works with their PC updater. The Mac and Linux tools do not yet have this functionality.

I've been playing around with uploading video using Google Video. The process works well, but if Flickr did this I wouldn't bother using two services. I've got quite a community formed with Flickr, so even though Picasa has recently added a lot of features found in Flickr, I'm not going anywhere, but I do wish they would add video uploads as a feature.

Speaking of Flickr, I just learned that by adding date-taken-calendar/ to the end of your photostream URL (http://flickr.com/photos/timlauer/date-taken-calendar/) you can view your images within a calendar grid. Kind a nice way to look back as 2006 comes to an end...

Screenshot 02-34

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Photo Booth + Flickr = Flickrbooth

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Screenshot 01-47Photo Booth is an application that comes with Intel based Macs that allows you to utilize the built-in iSight camera. Flickrbooth is a plugin for Photo Booth by Tristan O'Tierney which allows you to upload photos you take with Photo Booth to Flickr. Settings allow you to automatically upload after each shot or to manually select Photo Booth images for upload. I wish I would of known about this yesterday. It would of been nice to set up during our holiday party...

by way of lifehacker...

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Timeline software with AJAX

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Mike Winiski of Furman University points to an interesting AJAX application called Timeline. It is part of the SIMILE project at MIT and is basically:

a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information.

Timelines are something that my upper elementary teachers use and have their students create. It would be interesting to work with some of them to learn how to do this. I'd like to get some of our students using these types of tools to develop timelines based on specific assignments, not to mention it could come in handy when explaining timelines to parent groups for things like curriculum adoptions, and for viewing the school's yearlong calendar.

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Jon Udell

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Jon Udell recently announced he is leaving Infoworld and heading over to do work for Microsoft. Jon also has a new blog at jonudell.wordpress.com. On his new blog, Jon further explains his reasons for taking the new position. Jon Udell is one of the best reads on the web. He is interested in the many ways that people can use information for sharing and solving problems. His Library LookUp Project is a great example of this. It will be interesting to watch as he moves into this new role.

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Student Music Podcasts

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200612090818At Lewis we use the Brummitt-Taylor Music Listening Program as a way to expose our students to different classical composers. The program consists of short (2 -5 minute) musical pieces and a daily oral introduction that a teacher would read before playing the piece for the students. I have written before about how we are utilizing this program, and recently our music teacher, Tony Jamesbarry, has been having students record the introductions. Kind of an in house podcast.

In the picture you can see two students recording their introductions. Tony uses an M-Audio MicroTrack recorder to capture the student recordings and then edits them into the musical selection. Since the music from the program is licensed, the music is only available within our school network. Below is a short audio clip to give you a feeling for what it sounds likes with Tony's introduction, and with the student reading the set up...

Play Clip...

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Portland Metro Wi-Fi Starts Today

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They flipped the switch today on Portland's free municipal wi-fi network. When completed next year it will cover 95% of Portland with free wi-fi coverage (advertisement supported, ad free for $20 a month...) This is really interesting. I can see teachers and students on class field trips taking along one of the laptops to blog the trip and upload photographs for the students back at the school. The network isn't built out to my part of town yet, but I'm thinking I'll take a drive down to the initial coverage area today and take a look.

200612051321

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Parallels Beta Upgrade

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I have been using Parallels for a few months on my MacBook Pro. Mainly I wanted to be able to run Windows XP so that I could run the Groupwise email client. My district uses Groupwise as our email solution, and the native Mac client that Novell provides is pretty flaky. Otherwise I have to use the web interface to Groupwise which is really lacking in features. Parallels allows me to run not only Windows, but other Intel based operating systems including various flavors of Linux. I currently have Ubuntu also installed. And, if I really wanted to be faithful to my district's technology standards, I could also install Windows 2000. :-)

Anyway, Parallels allows me to run Windows, Linux and Mac OS X all on one machine and at the same time. The new beta upgrade brings a couple of new features including the ability to drag and drop files between environments, and something they call Coherency, which is basically the ability to run individual Windows applications just as I would seperate Mac OS X applications. I can move between them just as you would any other applications on OS X. This is really a great feature and makes the work environment more like I would expect.

In the screenshot below you can see I am running Photostory 3 and Internet Explorer in Windows XP, along with Firefox and iPhoto in OS X. Also note the Windows taskbar situated under my Apple menu bar... The ability to drag and drop files between environments is really great too. The images in Photostory 3 came from iPhoto. One thing they are still working on is 3D hardware acceleration so applications that rely on that will not run, but they indicate that is coming on the next upgrade which will be first quarter of '07.

Parallels Screen Shot

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A Request...

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Wreck
4th and 5th grade teachers and students at my school, Lewis Elementary, are working to raise funds to take part in an environmental education science camp next spring. The camp (sponsored by OMSI) provides our 4th and 5th grade students with a high quality off site overnight experience on the Oregon coast. They are working to raise funds in a number of ways, and with the help of a parent have created a page on myhometownhelper.com to highlight their project. Interested individuals are encouraged to visit the site, learn about the project, and leave comments regarding their request. If you have some time and would like to help, please visit the page and leave a comment.

http://www.myhometownhelper.com/ViewProject.aspx?tell=2&id=7799

Generating Circular Shapes in Google Earth...

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I've been looking for a way to generate circles in Google Earth. For example I've been looking for a way to easily share with students some common distances and represent them on the map. Today I found the KML Circle Generator. It is a web tool that allows you to enter latitude and longitude coordinates and designate a radius distance and create a KML file that you can download and display in Google Earth. In my example the two circles are centered on the school the yellow line represents a distance a half mile from the school and the orange circle represents a distance of a mile from the school. The yellow place-marks represent where students live. Displaying information in this way could lead to some interesting discussions and problem solving. For example, if all the students who lived within a half mile of the school walked or rode their bikes to school a certain number of days a week how much gas could be saved...

200611211804

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