XRAY is a bookmarklet for Safari, Firefox, Camino or Mozilla. Use it to see the box model for any element. For a screencast demonstration, follow this link: XRAY Demo... By way of Simple Bits...
Jing is a tool that allows you to capture still and video images of your desktop. One way of looking at this tool is as a screencasting tool, but it also incorporates a feature that allows you to share your capture instantly via a link. This can be useful say in a chat session with a friend. Maybe you want to explain or demo a tool you are discussing. Using Jing you can quickly invoke the tool, capture some video along with your narration. When Jing is finished capturing and processing the video, it also places a URL to the video on your clipboard that you can paste into your chat client (or Twitter, or email...) and share with the person you are talking to.
The other day Steve Burt and I were on iChat and I used it to illustrate how it works. It was much easier just to show him. EXAMPLE Screencast... I can see using this quite a bit with my staff. Especially when one of the printers goes down and they need to select another one... :-) The ability to easily capture, post, and then send the URL is pretty slick.
The Jing web site explains it this way...
“Think of Jing as a supplement to all your chat discussions, email threads, forum posts and blog entries. It sits nicely on your desktop, ready to capture and share your stuff at a moment’s notice. Simply select an area of your screen, capture it as an image or record it as a video, and then click Share. Jing conveniently places a URL to your content on your clipboard ready for you to paste the URL into any of your conversations.”
By way of Tony Vincent via Twitter...
Google SketchUp For Dummies, by Aidan Chopra, is out and available for purchase. Chapter one is available as a free download, and in addition the author has posted on YouTube, video tutorials that accompany the book. Also interesting is that he has posted a listing of corrections. Basically things that are incorrect in the printed book with links to the corrected information. Related posts: Building a Community with Sketchup and Google Earth...
Recently we received the last of our equipment from a digital storytelling grant. The grant provided us with 15 MacBooks, and assorted video and still cameras. The last items we received are the Canon HV20 High Definition camcorder and a Canon Powershot TX1. The HV-20 is charging as I write this and I plan play with it soon.
The Canon Powershot TX-1 is a hybrid 7.1 mega-pixel still and HD video camera with a 10x zoom. It can shoot at 30 fps in 720p high definition widescreen (16:9 aspect) and is about the size of a deck a cards. I've been playing with it for a few days and am finding it to be quite impressive. Some of the reviews have mentioned that the layout of buttons and controls are a bit cumbersome, but I'm not finding any problems with it. It has a component jack so it can be plugged into a HDTV for playback, and comparing it to the HV20. For editing I just download the stills and video to iPhoto and then use iMovie to grab and edit the video. Now that things have slowed down a bit at school, maybe I'll throw together a short video.
SketchUp Buildings - This weblog highlights the newest buildings that have been uploaded to the Google 3D warehouse.
LeaderTalk: Looking at Data... With Google Earth: Latest post on Leadertalk.
The Geodata portal at King's College in London is a fantastic collection of geospatial applications that can be visualized and downloaded through a Google Earth or Google Maps interface. Region-based network links are used which allow you to zoom into areas of interest to visualise the data. Links are also provided for downloading the raw data in simple formats for use in GIS or remote sensing systems. This is a fantastic resource for the classroom. I spent some time this morning taking a closer look at four of the data sets provided:
NASA Blue Marble, is a natural color mosaic. These data sets show land surface and snow dynamics on the basis of monthly composites of imagery for 2004.
Terrascope, a Google Earth implementation of the LANDSAT MSS, TM and ETM+ ortho mosaics for the 1970s, circa 1990 and circa 2000. It is designed to allow rapid comparison of LANDSAT imagery between these periods for any view in Google Earth. This data sets also includes "a geowiki so that users can move or add information and comments to existing features as well as add new points to the database or comments on visible imagery overlays. All entries are immediately added to the database and visible to all users. Increased functionality (history, edit, delete and classify will be added to the geowiki in due course)"
Amazon-eye, a collection of easily browsable data and imagery on recent environmental change in the Amazon basin as a freely available information source for scientific and conservation users.
Sea level rise scenarios, looks at possible changes to coastlines based on the following sea level changes: Choose the radio buttons to also show modelled new coastlines at the following sea levels:
• -120m - sea levels during the last glacial maximum (approx, 18,000 years ago). • +0m • +1m • +4m
Blue Marble Data in Google Earth
By way of the Ogle Earth
JotForm JotForm is a web based WYSIWYG AJAXy form builder. Its drag and drop user interface makes form building easy. Using JotForm, you can create forms, integrate them to your site and collect submissions from your visitors. Examples include...
The word count feature in Google Docs displays not only word, character, paragraph, and sentence counts, but now also readability estimates.
Business Week has an article about Google Apps and reports that Google is preparing a Google Apps version of YouTube to create videos for training and employee communications. I hope this comes to the Apps version for education. We could post our student video projects and such without fear of being blocked by the district filter. by way of Mashable...