TuCows Better Than One

From ResourceShelf: Tucows, the popular download site, now offers web 2.0 tools.
It's full of the types of programs we like here -- free and useful!

Out of The Box But Not Lost in Cyberspace

These days, 90% of my writing takes place in web-based text boxes. You know, those small, cramped boxes on Blackboard, comment boxes on blogs, text-input fields on forms, the ones that students are loathe to type a character more than can fit in that 25-word field. (I'm not sure which is the chicken or the egg, but I notice my students have the same mindset when it comes to answering printed exam questions--the space I leave between the questions is the space to which they confine their answers.) These textboxes cramp my style and brain. Moreover, twice now I have lost my hard-typed words due to browser crashes or server "hiccups." (Not a bad record actually, given the amount of work I do online.) Nonetheless, infinite text horizons and virtual peace of mind have arrived with two new greasemonkey scripts-- Textarea Backup and Textarea Resize. Both scripts require Greasemonkey, of course, and work on all versions of Firefox.

What I Learned at School Today

I started this online workshop today, learning to incorporate web 2.0 and library 2.0 tools into your web sites. Today's lesson included building your own custom search engine, which is crazy easy with Google. Basically, you go here and you list the specific websites you want to search, paste in some code, and there you go! Tonight before dinner, I built this lesson plan search engine. Check it out, type in any subject, and you should receive some solid k-12 lesson plans. My logo image is broken, but pretty cool, I think.

MIStupid? Not with this handy tool!

Recently our department secretary needed some help with mail merge. Since we're on break I wasn't on campus to help her. So, I looked for an online tutorial that she could follow. I really wanted something that included screen shots. I found one that's easy to follow, even for the techno-phobic, and it includes some great short video tutorials.

The site is called MIStupid.com. The mail merge tutorial was just perfect! Check it out, there are tutorials for MS Office products, the Palm, and how to sell on eBay :)

This is cool, unless it achieves consciousness and kills us all

Freebase is a new open database designed to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Talk about a "Wow"! Think Wikipedia for computers. Rather than my trying to explain it, here's a link to Michael Arrington's description on TechCrunch.

GTD Heaven

What would we do these days without Microsoft Outlook or Palm Desktop to keep ourselves organized and on time? One of things I did was switch to using Google Calendar so that I could access my calendar and todo list from any computer with an internet connection. Still, I missed my Outlook--its snazzy interface that integrated my calendar, contacts, and todo list. Now I can have it all with gSyncit! This Outlook add-on will synchronize your Outlook calendar with one or more Google calendars, either manually or automatically at intervals you specify. Life just got one click faster and easier.

LibriVox

LibriVox is a fairly new organization (start-up in August, 2005) to harness the power of the multimedia web. As its name implies, the site provides access to public domain works that have been recorded as podcasts and audio files by community members, a kind of audio Project Gutenberg. In these days of rising print costs, I know my students appreciate being able to download public domain texts from various sites; now they can listen to and read many of those texts.

Geek Alert!

I've been contemplating starting a new Internet meme--"You Know You're A Geek When...", and this site definitely set my geek strings buzzing:  TaskList.org. The site is a fairly comprehensive list of all the processes you might see running on your computer at startup. For example, if you open up Windows Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Delete) and choose the "Processes" tab, you will see a list of running processes. Many of these processes are necessary for Windows to run; many others are the results of worms, trojans, or viruses. If you see one you're not sure about, you can look it up at TaskList to see what it is.

Barnaby the Scribbler

Try this fun whiteboard. According to Lifehacker, you can create an instant online whiteboard with Skrbl. You don't even have to register unless you want to upload files. You send your collaborators a url and you are in business!