X Ray Goggles on the Web

Something unusual and powerful. (you need to know about this one)

It works like this …

1. Fire up Chrome (you have to use something other than Internet Explorer)
2. Show the bookmark bar (Spanner tool > Bookmarks>  Show bar)
3. Go to hackasaurus 
4. Grab the ‘XRay Goggles’ button and drag it to your bookmark bar
5. Now go to any webpage
6. Click the ‘Goggles’ bookmark. 
7. From now on each page element will highlight as you move over it.
8. To edit that element press R (to remix)
9. Press P to publish the edited page

The idea is to teach web page design without all the boring bits….

Pressing H gets help.  Pressing escape will quit ‘Goggles’

Bob Harding in the news

Real or Fake

Adobe has a nice site that showcases some ‘photoshoped’ images as well as original photographs. 

They have a little show of 5 images and you have to guess.  It strikes me that this would be a nice project to do that leads into validity – maybe a website or email real or fake?

Note bottom left there is the option to ‘play’ on previous games

Real or Fake

Microsoft Virtual Academy

This is something I’ve just stumbled over today – free courses for everyone!

(it makes me wonder where education is headed)

I think that MVA has been around for a while but the site has been recently revamped and is now really clear and easy to navigate.  There are units available in a wide range of topics including:

• Clustering
• Hyper-V
• IaaS
• Office 365
• PaaS
• Private Cloud
• Public Cloud
• SaaS
• Security
• SQL
• Azure
• System Center Virtual Machin…
• VDI
• Virtualization
• VMware
• Windows Azure

Within each of these there are topics like Office 365 (Word, Excel etc) and Exchange.

I could find nothing that I thought would be suitable for pupils or teachers but ICT support who are looking for a formal way to develop their knowledge might find this useful. 

MVA Website

QR Codes

Fantastic and really creative use of this technology.  No need to say more I think.

Flickr Image

Tools for Google Mobile

You know that if you go to google.com rather than google.co.uk then you can use ‘voice search’ I guess? (tip use ‘No country redirect’ if you cant do this – www.google.com/ncr).

This was a project developed for Google Mobile.  There are a few other nice features developed for mobile devices and slowly being released.  I did like traffic view in google maps – a very nice implementation but I didn’t know about “Search Along Route” that will find a specific service (eg petrol station) that is close to the route your taking.

Another nice one is voice guidance for walking.

Have a look at the other nice toys Google has to offer:

http://www.google.co.uk/mobile/navigation/

What do you love?

A really nice way to get some better search result from Google.

If you want to find out something about a topic but are not really sure what you want to know then try “What Do You Love” from Google.  The site use your search term to run through all of Google’s services and aggregates them onto one page.  This includes Books, videos, images as well as Google Earth, Web Trends, Maps, discussion groups, News and translation.

There are child protection issues with this site but there are loads of benefits for gathering background information on a topic as well.  Gotta give this a go at least.

Some describe it as the ultimate Mashup – may be a bit generous but if nothing else it’s a good example of what a ‘Mashup’ is. 

Website

PS

I haven’t found a way to embed the search tool yet (the image above is just an image).

Crowdsourcing Knowledge with Students

A neat application picked up by Nick Peachey in his excellent blog recently.

Tricider allows you to post a question and for others to respond – so far so good but this also allows voting on responses.  I’m wondering about using this tool for evaluation –

• Create your work (eg a poster)
• Create a Tricider question
• Crate a QR code to the website
• Wait for responses to flood in.

Seems really easy to set up and can be done easily in a lesson.  No login needed.

Original Article

South West ICT Conference

Getting Better at (Digital) Research

The British Library have a project entitled “ Growing Knowledge, The Evolution of Research".

• How have digital technologies changed research?
• What are the new challenges they pose?
• What role should a research library play in the 21st Century?

There are some really fascinating topics including:

• Map rectification (Realigning old maps to increase accuracy)
• London Lives (3.3Million records of the 18th Century)
• Galaxy Zoo – croudsourcing problems that are too massive for normal methods.
• Data.gov (a central point for all government held data)
• 3D Imaging (clever idea to make 2D images appear more 3D by moving the light source)
• Codex Sinaiticus (a very early bible, transcribed and encoded).

All of these projects are examples of what can be done digitally which would be almost impossible by other means.

Another tool worth of mention is Mendeley.  This tool will search for the data within documents and allows groups to work on research together (automatically building bibliographies etc).  I suspect that this will be for advanced users only but maybe worthy of

Thanks to Terry Freedman for the source article.

More on Web Design

I wonder how long it will take someone to come up with a really decent Web 2 page editor.  I use WordPress but it isn’t a WISIWIG editor and relies heavily on pre defined themes or heavy coding.

Mockingbird might be the first steps towards something worthwhile.  At the moment it only creates mock ups of websites but it is easy to use and intuitive.  There IS a free account tucked away just here , it’s limited to one project of no more than 10 pages but that’s probably enough for most.  It uses HTML 5 so might work on the iPad but doesn’t (yet) work in Internet Explorer so try Chrome or one of the others.

Mockingbird