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Get back Muzzle Lab in Gmail — Muzzle was the lab which let you hide the status of your friends in the contact pannel of Gmail. It has been removed from the Lab list on the sad 25th day of February 2010 — Tested on FF3.6 and Chrome 4
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Mute on Lock is a tiny resident utility that sits in the system tray and monitors your session: when you are locking your Windows workstation, it mutes the sound of your speakers. With the help of this program you can quickly mute or unmute the system sound by double-clicking the tray icon or using an optional hot key.
links for 2010-02-26
Your tweets on Student Blogging
In advance of my PLP session a few days ago I tweeted out the question:
For a blog post: What do you think about blogging with students? Good? Bad? Mixed bag? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Here are the responses I got on Twitter. Note, this only shows responses that came as direct replies to the original tweet.
No replies found for status 9535286517.Student Blogging for PLP Year 2 Participants
I offered to present to the PLP Year 2 participants and was accepted to present on student blogging. This is a topic that has interested me in both a tools perspective as well as a pedagogical one. I have seen student blogging done very well and I have seen it done not so well. My aim here is to identify both potential tool-based issues and considerations as well as to consider the pedagogical implications.
The first question to ask is what the purpose is when blogging. I posit that there are a variety of purposes for blogging.
1. Teacher-centered blog for communcation with students and families
2. Teacher-centered blog for communcation with other educators
3. Student-centered blog for communication with teacher and/or classmates
4. Student-centered blog for communcation with wider audience
I suppose that is not an exhaustive list but will serve us for the purposes of this discussion.
So once you decide what sort of blog you want to begin, you can begin looking at tools. We will focus on student blogging here, as it has a different set of implications requiring a more specific tool.
Here are the specific tools that I think are suited for student blogging, with each having certain benefits and drawbacks.
1. Blogger.com
3. WordPress.com – see features here.
4. 21classes.com – see features here.
5. Edublogs.org
6. WordPress Multi-User (must be installed on a server)
7. Kidblog.org – a heavily customized WPMU install. Hands down my pick.
What do you think about these tools?
Update: Here is the archived recording of the presentation. Also be sure to see the first comment for a great comment by Cathy Nelson.
PleaseRobMe and Geo-Location Tweets
I’ve been thinking about PleaseRobMe. It’s a clever idea, and a clever name. But all it does it search.
So I went to their site, and figured out how it works. And I set up a search for my local area. Now I can easily see who in my local area is not home. It certainly brings the robbing me issue closer to home.
Now the question is, what do I do about it? I’m not sure I need to do anything. My thinking goes like this..
1. Most of the time I check in, I am out of town at a conference. This is obvious by my earlier tweets, anyway. Am I putting my wife and daughters at greater risk?
2. Is anyone really reading that stuff anyway?
3. Shouldn’t I just protect my updates and not worry so much?
How do you all handle it that travel a lot? I confess I like to see folks check-in. It gives me a personal flavor to their tweets. And for me, Twitter is inherently personal.
Presentation to Jornadas Tic
Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure to present to a group of educators in Mexico via Elluminate. They were attending the Jornadas Tic conference. The room was full of folks who clearly wanted to learn about technology in education. They had to want to, since they were there at 5:15pm on a Friday evening!
Here is the recording of the session, should you want to hear it. It’s in Spanish, so if you want to brush up on your Spanish or just hear if I’m any good, hit up the link.
Twitter Replies in a blog post
I’ve been playing with some alpha code that grabs replies to certain tweets and makes them publishable.
Theoretically, as new replies come in, this will be updated. So this is another test post.
No replies found for status 9018179206.links for 2010-02-06
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The app is called Movist, is hosted (again) on Google Code and it’s media player for Mac OS X based on Quicktime and FFMpeg.
Testing out how to easily post Twitter replies
If this works, I’ll explain how I did it. If it didn’t, disregard this post.
Thanks..
No replies found for status 8677044427.Update 2: Trying it out again. It works!
Twitter Images
