The Biggest QR Code in the World and other Important Matters

From Facebook

World's Largest QR Code
The code . . . got the Kraays into the Guinness Book of World Records for "World's Largest QR Code," which was really what drove this whole project. At approximately 29,000 meters (1.1 square miles), that's quite a bit of carefully crafted [cornfield design]. . . . 
http://tinyurl.com/9ztkz8v

Google Drive Versus Evernote
Now iPhone and iPad users can edit Google Docs natively on their devices for the first time. With 5GB of free storage, integration with other Google services, and powerful text and image recognition when searching for files, Google Drive is now a formidable challenger to Evernote on iOS. How do they stack up?
http://tinyurl.com/9ztkz8v



Eight Great Gmail Tips
Over the years, Google has reinforced its unique approach and built bigger and better features into Gmail. The result, however, can be daunting. Which of this email program’s many option do you actually need? Here are eight tips for using the best.
http://tinyurl.com/bw3oz6r

Apple is Already Fighting Amazon in Ebook Price Wars
We’re already seeing that even if Apple would prefer agency pricing, price bands and MFNs for books, it’s willing to compete on price in the absence of those things. And it has a lot more money to do so than other ebook retailers like Barnes & Noble and Kobo.
http://tinyurl.com/8rkhqad

Will the Internet Replace Traditional Education
The future of education, both online and offline, will be won by those who understand that why, how and where people learn are not one­-size-­fits-­all questions.

Loving My Gmail

I am one of the Gmail "beta-users" at Mercy.  Our tech department has already assigned all students and staff Google accounts, but we do not all switch to Gmail until June.  However, I have several personal and administrative reasons to thrill at the switch:

*We each will have ten times the amount of mail storage as we do presently.

*Gmail is free.

*Gmail has terrific spam recognition software.

*It is "smart" in other ways too, like autofilling addresses

*No email has a better search function (After all, this is a Google app).

*As a "cloud" service it suits both desk top and mobile users.

*It will naturally integrate well with our other Google Apps.

*It is fast.

Like anything new, there will be adjustments.  But this is one area where I think the payoffs for changing will be realized very quickly.

A Baker's Half Dozen

I enjoy trying out the toys in Gmail Labs ("a testing ground for experimental features that aren't quite ready for prime time"). Just go to settings in Gmail and click the labs tab and a long list of options appears. One very useful gadget is the "undo feature", a setting which allows for up to 20 seconds of pause time after you hit the send button. I've clicked the "undo" more than a few times, and the way I see it, no email is likely to suffer from the delay of an extra few seconds.

Recently I was participated in a conference call involving dozens of educators. This was scheduled using Doodle. Check it out-- It is a splendidly simple piece of software that can be used for whipping up a poll. If you are setting up a meeting poll your members with Doodle and it will produce a matrix showing you the optimal meetings times. Pretty cool.

Have you been bewildered by Ning's announcement to eliminate its free social media sites, followed by a the mysterious statement that "A major educational company has offered to sponsor Ning Mini Networks for educators"? If your confidence has been shaken in Ning, perhaps you would like to try Spruz, which seems to offer similar functionality.

I've only been playing around with Voila for a few days, but I am already hooked. It is an inexpensive screen capture software made for Macs by Global Delight. Voila allows you to "capture and record anything on your screen." It also comes with an easy to use annotation tool kit. which I find very helpful for creating presentations and classroom resources.

Speaking of free accounts, some of the bloggers that I read have referred to Instapaper. If like me, you hopscotch all over the place when you read online, this might be a handy tool. It's simple to register for an account. Then drag a bookmarklet to your toolbar. This will create a "read me" button. When you are scanning an article and want to save it, click the "read me" button and Instapaper will save it for you.

My last recommendation is for pop music lovers. Downplayer offers ten free downloads a day, Monday through Friday. It's easy and fun to preview the songs. If you feel as though your playlist is stale, spend a few weeks sampling from this site and you will discover some new music. The free feature has hooked me into spending some cash on albums, just the way it's designed to do.

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"Six" Flickr Creative Commons Photo by duncan

Ten by Ten Top Techs

As the end of the school year approaches I've been tempted to make lists of this or that, so why not go all out and make a 10 x 10 list?

My Ten Best Blogs this Semester:

Wrap that Red Herring in Paper

At Long Last...ebook Joy!

A Vast Tinker Toy Playland

Hyperlink Heaven

Techno Topsy-Turvy

Sage Schuste Seduced by Cyberspace?

Tooting Your Horn

To Leap Forward or Hunker Down?

The Digital Natives Aren't that Restless

Teaching Literature Unbound

10 Lessons I've Learned at Age 55

Tweetdeck Top Ten: @bridgers, @cultofmac, @englishcomp, @jackiegerstein, @markwagner, @Milw_Mac_Guy, @ScottElias, @mcleoud, @potsie, @TweetingTigers

10 Necessities of Education Reform by Judy Willis

The 10 Commandments of Power Point. How can people possibly think that reading PowerPoint slides to an audience is an effective way to communicate? This post by David Pierce is a must read for those who use (abuse?) PowerPoint or teach it to others.

My 10 RSS Feeds Knowing that I would just get depressed if I loaded more and more feeds into my Google Reader, I always limit myself to ten. Click here for my current feeds.

My 10 Largest Delicious Tag Bundles: finish, blog, tenthings, google, dadcalx, AP, mhs, 13, technology

10 Reasons to Tweet: The nine I wrote about in Why Twitter? plus this obvious one that I forgot: # 10 Twitter is perfectly suited for mobile communications.

10 Sites I Check Daily

10 apps or sites that I've enjoyed learning to use this year: GarageBand, iMovie, QuickTime Pro, Google Docs, Audacity, WikiSpaces, Google Sites, Twitter, Presentation.

10 Compelling Reasons to Teach with Technology

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"The 'Ten Truck' FDNY' Flickr Creative Commons Photo by stevejonesphoto

Drive-thru Weekend Take Out

Monitoring Gmail Labs
If you are a Gmail user, you would be doing yourself an enormous favor to check out the features at Gmail Labs. Among many other add-on features, Google now allows you to
* access your inbox offline.
*create a Google Document from an email.
*mark messages as read without reading them.
*undo "send" (five second delay).
*add a button that lets you send a reply and archive the conversation in a single action.
*insert images into an email.
....and much more.

The labs have been churning out new features like crazy. To stay abreast, I recommend that your subscribe to the Gmail Blog. It's the perfect blog, because the team only reports when it has something to say (Just like the Drive-thru?).

Using PowerSchool Comments Creatively
I’ve always disliked the programmed “comments” options that electronic grade books provide. Currently I use custom comments in PowerSchool, but often unconventionally. For example, I will use the comment section to log notes on participation or other classroom behavior. I may use the comments to indicate that a student didn’t bring notes for an open note quiz, or neglected to take advantage of an extra credit opportunity. Of course, I make plenty of positive comments to students, but recording some basic facts about shortcomings for my own records is very helpful at conferences with parents or counselors. They are less likely to float theories of how the teacher may be the cause of the student's under performance if the teacher has noted specific occasions where the student has been unprepared or distracted. I have found this documentation extremely helpful for "cutting to the chase."

Handy Storage at Box.net
At our school, teachers use Moodle to post files that students need for class. But when the students use Wikis or the teacher needs to host larger files than your Moodle administrator will allow, it’s nice to have another third party storage option. I’m a big fan of Box.net. They provide one gigabyte of file storage free (upgrades to larger storage options are reasonable). After an easy upload, the tools for embedding, sharing or downloading the files are highly intuitive. If you are a regular reader of the Drive-thru, you’ve come across more than a few hyperlinks to Box.net files.

P.S. The Drive-thru continues to publish on M,W,F for the rest of the school year.

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"Take Out" with generous permission of americanvirus

Three Sweet Shortcuts

Need a Quick Rubric? Talented ed tech consultant Andy Mann showed me Rubistar, which is quite useful for whipping up a quick evaluation rubric for student work. It is preloaded with dozens of templates and categories. It is also fully customizable. In an hour I created three very different and detailed rubrics for my wiki project. While using Rubistar is not exactly intuitive, I have found my way around without the tutorials. (Here is an example: Peer wiki eval). Get your rubric right the first time if you can. Later edits are somewhat convoluted and very slow.

Labels for Gmail Like so many other things in life, I am slow to move toward a trend, but when I jump in I go head over heels. Such has been the case with Gmail. Despite the fact that my daughter and wife have been swearing by it for months, I only recently made it my main account. But when I commited to it, I decided to go through the entire Atomic Learning tutorial so that I would become aware of all of its nuances. I then discovered that many users don't realize how easy it is to "tag" one's mail with a label. I find that these labels are particularly useful for short term purposes. For example, when I was developing my staff development proposal I contacted several academics about their research. Five of them replied at various times and we began different levels of correspondence. By tagging each response with a label, I could bring up all the mail with a click whenever I worked on my proposal. This was much more efficient than the typical folder system.

Cross Platform To Do List. This tip is the most idiosyncratic, but it has been a major change in how I go about my daily business. For years, I faithfully carried a Franklin Planner through the work day. I'm a compulsive list maker and my planner kept me quite happy making daily list after daily list. But now Google Docs serves that purpose. I have created a Google Doc titled "To Do". This document is published to a url and I have tagged it with my most commonly used Delicious bookmarks. The bookmark then appears on my Firefox toolbar at home and at work, on my Macs and my HP. It updates through the day. It makes me oddly happy.

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"Shortcut" Flickr Creative Commons photo by Wagman 30