I am reaching out, here. I got the NECC Presenter Atomic Learning offer.

Is this something I should take advantage of? Or is this just them trying to sell me something…

They are offering NECC presenters six months free. Will I like it? Is it worth it?

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I’ve blogged about my concerns about blogger transparency before. This time it may have taken its toll.

1. Read this post.

2. Read this comment.

3. Then read this comment by the post’s author.

Now you tell me, when your “head” (substitute “principal” or whatever) approaches you about a post like that, does it forebode bad things?

What do you think? Did Doug go too far? In a perfect world he (or any of us) could say what we want without fear of reprimand. I am sure most of us would appreciate that level of transparency. But with Doug headed for an Ed.D and a higher-level job, does his blogging affect his job chances?

Would your blog affect yours?

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I’ve been using Google Docs since it was Writely. I liked it then and I still do. I get frustrated by the extensive formatting and weirdness when pasting, and boy would I like the page setup to be just like Word, but I won’t go there.

Anyway, I’ve been using the tag feature for a while, and have a tendency to use Google Docs as a backup. For example, I just finished an assignment for a new grad class and I did it locally in Word on my Mac. Just for kicks, and to have it available, I uploaded it to Google Docs.

What I then did was tag it with my course number (EDAT783 for example). Well I messed up. All my other tags were one way and I typed this one wrong.

How do I delete it? I looked and looked and finally found the answer in this google discussion thread.

Turns out once there are no documents tagged with a particular tag, it goes away. So I selected all the documents with the wrong tag (by Browsing using the green button) and then tagged them correctly and then removed the bad tag.

Poof. Gone. Sweet.

Maybe this tip will help someone else!

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I’ve been using Picasa Web Albums primarily because of the sweet integration into Picasa, which I have used for some time for all my photo management. I simply prefer it over iPhoto (sorry Apple) and this makes me turn on my PC every once in a while.

I don’t use Flickr much because of the sweet integration I mentioned only moments ago.

I might change that, now.

Check this out, it’s a Picasa plugin that adds a button for you to upload pics directly to Flickr. It isn’t terribly pretty, but it sure does work. It’s Java and CGI based. I was able to authorize and upload a picture of ready-to-cook rabbit inside of one minute.

It sure does work, although it lacks aesthetically. Future versions may prove prettier.

picasa2flickr (sourceforge) (via lifehacker)

Technorati Tags: picasa2flickr, christophercraft

1 Comment »

On-the-fly, browser-based, java-running screen capturing?

Oh heck yeah.

Here is a quick little playful piece I did, and I did it on my iMac!

http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cihw2HjS

And since it’s Java-based, it is cross platform. I have to be honest, the entire process was super easy. I think this is a tool I will use a lot!

Screencast-O-Matic (via Lifehacker via Download Squad)

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Let me begin with a disclaimer, I do not watch television. My wife and I do own one, and it is connected to a DVD player for occassional movies, but even that is not too terribly often.

That said, I was reading this morning that Google added a meme-like function to Google Trends, called Google Hot Trends.

I took this screenshot and quickly edited it in Snipshot.

What does it say about our world that the top trends are all about nonsense. I had to look up the first one to see that Andy Baldwin proposedto Tessa Someone. I am scared to find out who number 10 is.

I will save you the social commentary, and merely point you to tvturnoff.org.  I imagine my readers (all 12 of you) are not searching for this stuff, but chances are your students are. Let’s help them turn away from this and into a good book!

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Great tip from Doug Belshaw about the advanced WYSIWYG editor in Wordpress 2.1. I wasn’t aware of this until reading it on Doug’s always great blog. Here’s Doug:

A quick tip for those who use the excellent Wordpress to power their blogs: pressing a combination of buttons can make your WYSIWYG editor display another row of icons, giving greater ease-of-use and functionality. If you’re using Firefox on Windows, it’s Alt+Shift+V; for Internet Explorer on Windows it’s Alt+V; for Firefox on the Mac it’s Ctrl-V; unfortunately it doesn’t work on Safari…

via Doug Belshaw via justsome…

1 Comment »

This is interesting. Below is the slide presentation that won Slideshare’s contest. Is it any marvel that it’s a remix of Karl Fisch’s Did You Know?

Truth is, I am a bit speechless. Tell me what you think…

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I’ve been wondering about this…

I am looking at Project Honeypot, which attempts to catch spammers and harvesters (bots) by the IP address as they visit your site and prevent them before they see any content. It looks tempting to utilize as a web geek, since I get loads of comment spam and even contact form spam.

Perusing the Wordpress plugins database, I found the http:BL Wordpress plugin to make it easy to implement Project Honeypot.

I signed up really quickly, FireFTP’d the plugin (nice and small) to both my Wordpress install I use with my kids and this blog.

What I am wondering about is that this means if you visit my site, your IP address will be checked against a database. I did not enable logging, so I am not going to see everyone’s IP. It only checks them against the database that renews every 14 days.

Is this a privacy thing? Or is this type of protection permissable given the amazingly rough Spam attacks I’ve been getting?

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I think I downloaded and burned this in record time.

Quoting Steve Dembo…

Dan Meyer, a high school math teacher in Santa Cruz, has modestly shared a brilliant avenue for introducing graphing to high school students.

I went out and taped ten events. They were simple. I walked down two flights of stairs. I ran up a hill. I drove my car. Each event was exactly fifteen seconds long.

I put a handout on every student’s desk with a graph ready for each event.

I played each event and then paused the video. I asked questions like, “When the clock started, was I up high or down low?”

You get the idea. Not only does he share how he did the lesson, but he shares the videos themselves, along with handouts and instructions. Want to take it offline? He also shares an ISO that you can burn to a DVD. So if you teach graphing at all, you can grab this resource and be using it on Monday.

Dan Meyer is a heck of a guy. Go look at these stories for yourself!

dy/dan » Blog Archive » Graphing Stories

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