open the door…

The amung.us project was created to bring you innovative web stats. We are not traditional. Page views are too easy to count. Instead, we tell you how many users are on your website or blog at once, where they are, how many of them there has been in the past and where they come from – live!

Check the widget in my sidebar

All blogs take a time to maintain and having two to work on is sometimes too much… but today I really appreciate having access to more than one blog – it means I can test stuff and make sure it works before I muck up the (semi) official work blog. It has taken a long time to get the approprite permissions to trial blogging at work so I am keen to make sure that all goes smoothly there. I am also pleased that edublogs has decided to allow embedding of javascripts – it will make including all sorts of multimedia possible. So here is my first attempt to embed the World Vision Flash file I want to feature on the CMIS Technology Focus blog.

© Copyright World Vision Australia ABN 28 004 779 081. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
http://www.worldvision.com.au/
To replay the animation refresh your browser page.

Note added 1/5/08: Having read Sue Waters instructions about embedding flash (Thanks Sue) I now know that I MUST embed the code and then immediately publish. This won’t be possible at work as I have to get all draft posts approved before publishing. A work around is to insert a one cell table and embed the code into the table cell. This stops the embed code breaking the blog layout when you save the draft post.

Note added 13/5/08: I have replaced the swf file with an image that links to the originating website. I am happier about this for copyright reasons… and also because it stops the autoplay function that I couldn’t get rid off

It’s so easy to pick up gems when you hang around with the right people on twitter. A passing mention by Anne Murcha in a conversation she was having with MrKp sent me off to look at Issuu. What a great little discovery. I have already registered and made this cool little guide to the website where I work. I will definitely be spending more time exploring this application – it has lots of potential. Thanks MrKp and the rest of the twitterverse.

Animoto is very cool – easy to use and FREE

I enjoyed this post from Michael Arrington at TechCrunch.

Britannica has made free access to the full content of Britannica Online through Britannica WebShare available to registered bloggers and web publishers via widgets.

from the Britannica WebShare site…

Britannica Widgets are here, and with them you can instantly post an entire cluster of related Encyclopaedia Britannica articles on your blog or Web site. Just follow the instructions and copy and paste the several lines of code associated with each widget as html into the appropriate place on your site. Any readers who click on a link will get the entire Britannica article on the subject, even if access to the article normally requires a subscription. Really. Try it.

I’m heading over to register and try it out (check back in a couple of days – every registration request is being processed individually)

Also available from Britannica Online are a number of embeddable widgets (example below) with a promise of more to come.

On twitter during the week and then on Ewan McIntosh’s and Paul Hamilton’s blog – Animoto now offer a free and fool-proof way to create presentations. It took only a few minutes to create this one – with images I already had online in my flickr account.

This is just one more example of the great tools available to teachers. Create a free account and have some fun

A recent tweet poll by new twitterer Linda asked users to name their top 3 Web 2.0 applications. Sue Waters has expanded Linda’s initial question into an informative Edublogger blog post: Using Your twitter network for help…

I am currently making use of a lot of the more well known Web 2.0 tools: iGoogle and the rest of the Google suite have simplified the way I work online; flickr, VoiceThread, SlideShare, del.icio.us etc all allow me to access and share resources with fellow educators; and twitter, ning and another nameless social site (beginning with a ‘d’ and ending with an ‘o’ – ask Sue about this) have given me an entry point to a community of like-minded colleagues.

Of course edublogs is one of my favourites too.

But this post is really about some of the lesser-known but really useful tools I have used in the classroom.

Search Crystal

I’ve blogged about Search Crystal previously (on our brand new CMIS Technology Focus blog) and am repeating it here because it’s great.Check out the tour Create an acount for free, explore and learn a new way of searching.

Kayuda Mind Maps

My Year 11 VET English class used this to create collaborative mind maps and collect information from the web for assignments.Here’s the Try it Now SandboxI don’t know how this one has been missed by so many people – it’s worth waiting for the hampster to be bootstrapped!

Kerpoof

Great fun for everyone. No explanations needed. Create an account and get started – your class will love it.

I’m stopping here so you can go and explore – like Sue I will be featuring more of my favourites. Please share some of yours.