Today as I was researching on Wikipedia, I was preparing to click on the print menu on the side and create a pdf of the page to load on my kindle. When you click on the little arrow next to print you get a list of tools. You can create a book, download page as a pdf, or get a printable version. Wait a minute. Create a book? Why have I not noticed this before?
When you click create a book you will see this:
Add this page to your book
Adds the currently viewed article (page) to your book.
Show book
Opens a new page which will show a list of all articles (pages) that you added to your book. On that page, you can change the order of the articles in your book and structure them using chapters. Further, you can download the books as a PDF or ODF, or order a printed book.
Suggest pages
This tool analyzes the current set of pages in your book and suggests articles that might be also relevant to the overall topic of your book. This tool allows to create books quickly.
Disable
This will disable the Book creator and delete your book (unless you saved it first).
Adding pages without visiting them
A quick way to add pages is to simply hover on a linked article. If you wait about one second, a small box will pop up with the message “Add linked wiki page to your book”. Click on this link, and the linked article will be added to your book.
Hovering your mouse over links is a convenient way to add pages to your book
Adding whole categories
If you are viewing a category page, you can add all the pages in that category at once. The Add this page to your book link will have changed into Add this category to your book. Click on this new link, and all the articles in that category will be added to your book. Relevant categories may be found at the very bottom of Wikipedia articles. Categories can also be added by hovering category links.
Each successive page will now have this handy link at the top:
When you have completed adding pages to your book, you can download the entire thing as a pdf. Very nice for my Kindle
Click Show Book and the following page pops up. You can tweak your title, sort your pages, preview, order a printed copy if you like, or simply download your book. Then if you are me, you convert it for your Kindle and read at your convenience.
Caveat: I do not advocate the use of Wikipedia at school as teachers have very strong feelings about the website. I suppose the fact that even I can edit the site could be cause for concern but there are people constantly checking and fixing errors and misinformation. Try looking up Hurricane Katrina in the set of Funk and Wagnalls I bought when my son was born.
Because Wikipedia is a massive live collaboration, it differs from a paper-based reference source in important ways. In particular, older articles tend to be more comprehensive and balanced, while newer articles more frequently contain significant misinformation, unencyclopedic content, or vandalism. Users need to be aware of this to obtain valid information and avoid misinformation that has been recently added and not yet removed (see Researching with Wikipedia for more details). However, unlike a paper reference source, Wikipedia is continually updated, with the creation or updating of articles on historic events within hours, minutes, or even seconds, rather than months or years for printed encyclopedias.
You should always check more than one website when you are doing research, but Wikipedia is a great place to start.
I watched a demo on the Eno board which is what we are going to have at the high school next year. You can use them with your computer, with easy touch software, you can use dry erase markers. The presenter even wrote on it with a sharpie and the later traced the writing with a dry erase marker (said you can use anything alcohol based) and wiped the sharpie off.
The board is also magnetic and there is a magnetic icon strip you can affix to the board. You can use the pen that comes with it to access the functions and also draw or write on whatever you are projecting on the board.
They say they are not at all locked down, that the are just drivers and so the board is open to use with anything. I don’t completely understand that but according to their website:
The eno board application runs on an open platform that works with existing software/operating systems, meaning education and business systems that have previous investments in software can still utilize applications
Here is a video demonstration
Here is a link to software that can be used with it.
gimp
beth phinny
big spring high school
leslie ferris
lubbock cooper high school
GNU image manipulation program
up to version 2.6
www.gimp.org
alien project
picture of person
select what part (face)
click on rectangular select
draw square around upper body
crop to selection
that gets rid of excess
distort Iwarp
opens a window
grow option
deform radius – choose between 25-35 kind of play with it
click on forehead and kind of click out to pull it out bigger
if you don’t like it you can click reset
when ready – click okay
filter distort iwarp again
grow the eyes – little horizontal lines slowly
shrink chin same process only shrink instead of grow
to colorize
click on color, colorize choose numbers to get hue and saturation
selective colorization
6 steps
layer
duplicate layer
click on background copy
make it b and w – desaturate sure whatever
turn off eyeball on background copy
click on erasure get size you can work with – brackets change size
erase the black and white part you want to end up in color
warp
new image
choose size
click ok
foreground and background color
fill
click on paintbrush tool
click on top, hold down shift, drag it down and click on bottom and it will create a straight line
make ten of these across the image (vertical lines)
use filter – distort, polar coordinates
make sure that checkmark is on 2 polar
gaussian blur
Creating Video Tutorials with Jing
fort sam houston school district
Dr. Rios
what is jing
upgrades
image capture
video capture
screencast.com
other freebies
free techsmith program
storage for videos is free
presi.com used to make their presentation – free web based
http://todaysmeet.com/UsingJing online chat during presentation
up to five minutes swf video
save to screencast.com (free account)
for mac and windows
www.jingproject.com
snag pic of screen
record vid of onscreen action
share instantly on web
free 2 gb storage
2 gb monthly bandwidth
click and drag
or select a window
capture image
manip preview
add text
add arrows
boxes, and highlighting
save or copy to clipboard or send to screencast
records audio too
3 sec countdown
record up to five minutes
(follow fshisd on twitter)
pro upgrade lets you go to youtube and itunes own camera and 14.95 a year
screencast pro account 25 gb storage
snagit and camtasia
200 gb or bandwidth – $10 per month or 100 a year
jing sun icon resides on your desktop
options features capture hotkey settings
free format is swf but pro does mpeg4
establish free screencast account
you can use other video there besides jing
sun icon can be hidden and reside in your programs toolbar
click capture button on sun
highlight what you want to capture or video
options on left toolbar -arrows, text, draw box around things, highlight sections,
keeps history on hard drive in jing
video tutorial how to
3 sec countdown then mic turns on
talk and do whatever then click stop
video is created
once on screencast you can grab the html code and embed it on blog or webpage
jing does not resize so set size to smallest
camtasia will resize and fit the window
vid tuts hints
anything where teachers will see desktop – make sure your desktop is clean
www.fshisd.net/blogs/irrios
screencast page (They have a bunch of comic life tuts)
embedded on blog – hits count on your bandwidth
jing pro or camtasia lets you use with a webcam
you can also save to hard drive as flash video
free jing is only five minutes
break information into chunks
online lectures camtasia relay
voice recording will pick up internal mic or you can use headset
tell jing which mic you are going to use
celtx.com screenwriting
livestream procaster
format factory
dimdim web meetings
edmodo free private social networks for teachers
xtranormal.com – if you can type you can create 3d movies
freeplaymusic.com
presi.com
TCEA session 1
Karen Ferrel
Language Arts Activities using Microsoft Office
Word
1. sentence elaboration
copy and paste
e.g.
The dog ran.
to elaborate – see wherer they started and where they ended up for complete concrete visual of improvement
copy and paste sentence – add an adjective
The spotted dog ran.
How did the dog run?
Swiftly
The spotted dog ran swiftly.
more descriptive what breed?
The spotted dalmation ran swiftly.
The spotted dalmation swiftly trotted.
some language arts skills
teach open word, copy and paste,
Passive Verbs
Find and replace
given a prepared sentence or paragraph
use find and replace to find passive verbs like is
and replace with is but click more
format – replace unhighlighted is with highlighted is
replace is replace all
student can quickly see that they have a lot of is in there
or
vary sentence structure
find The (capital The space) check match case
this highlights all the sentences that start with The
you can change the colors of highlight
Parts of Speech
formatting and or highlighting
prepared paragraph
or their own writing
have them go through and highlight or bold all the verbs or different font
or underline
can use format painter
find all the nouns?
select noun, highlight
double click format painter
it will now stay active
now click off painter and click maybe the verbs
change format and click on format painter
Excel
sentence generator
tools addins box tool pack – click first tow little check boxes
has spread sheet of words click f9 and it generates a new sentence
uses a combination of an if statement
function =if randbetween
www.karenferrell.net
can highlight the list and format font to white so kids don’t see the words
file available online
Access
Madlib
design the sentences
create table
ID student name adjective noun 1 noun 2 adverb past tense verb
add data for each field
she used label wizard type in what sentence might look like
student name
the space adjective space noun space verb to the noun.
it will put them in there for you
detailed instructions online
Powerpoint
drawn objects with text
triggers
click on the ? could be noun? whatever you want them to click on
create text box, type in sentence, enlarge font
create buttons to tell student if they clicked right or wrong
can create prompts 1n wordart
e.g. try again, you are right, maybe a star that says correct!
if they click anywhere on the sentence besides the noun we want it to say try again
custom animation
add effect to try again
enter, dissolve?
attach animation to (right click timing box comes up click triggers
first everything will be try again
create boxes over nouns for exceptions
make fill transparent so word will show (and no outline)
add animation effect for correct and again right click timing trigger and choose rectangle number (whatever is correct)
Error eraser
use this for finding an error in a sentence (taks)
(this one is in book – gamewise for Language arts
matching game
booth 935 and 2479
conference price for book 27.00
If your company decides to use Microsoft Exchange 2003 for email you will have to stop using Firefox and begin using internet explorer or you will not have all the options that should be available like making rules and folders for emails and seeing the calendar in umm, monthly view?? I should also add that it acts ugly with Safari, Google Chrome and Opera as well.
If you begin to use internet explorer you will not be able to open attachments or links included in emails unless you turn off the pop up blocker in internet explorer. If you turn off the pop up blocker in internet explorer and have either the Yahoo or Google toolbar, you will need to turn off the pop up blockers on them as well. If you still have problems with attachments and links you can go to options and download some mime security thing. If you still have issues, go to tools and add on management and try to figure out which add ons you can turn off and still have your internet function. If that doesn’t work, open Quicktime and if you get a message saying that files are no longer associated with Quicktime and do you want to restore the defaults and update Quicktime, click yes.
If you still can’t open an attachment or a link, try opening your email in Firefox.
Now wasn’t that simple? Better living through technology! I’m just saying….
I am working on part 4 of my Stealing Time story and it’s coming slooowly this time.
In the meantime I have been making some changes in the way I read blogs. I have been using igoogle homepages for a couple of years because I liked the visuals but beginning last week I started having problems with it. Suddenly, my pages wouldn’t load. It wasn’t my computer or my bandwidth because I tried from several computers and several locations. It just wouldn’t load. I am assuming at this point that google has made some changes.
I began migrating my feeds to google reader. It’s something I should have done to begin with. I seem to enjoy making things difficult for myself by using things for purposes other than what they were intended for. The process has been slow and I am still not finished but it has also been a good time to clean out. There were a lot of feeds I didn’t bother reading anymore and as I migrate I have forced myself to pare it down to the things I read consistantly. I have organized as I moved and marked everything read so that I can start fresh.
I am alternating on working on my story and googling so be patient.
Writing this story has been kind of like having a baby. Repeatedly. Doesn’t sound like fun does it? I remember thinking in my ninth month that this was going on far too long and couldn’t this baby just GET HERE ALREADY? Then I would go into labor and things would happen so fast that the pain seemed secondary just do the work breath through the pain oh here it comes don’t ask me anything, there – it’s a boy/girl/story. I was blessed with short labors for those of you that are reading this and going “what??”. Writing the story seems like that for me. Wait, wait, wait – boom!
I’m no good at the waiting part. Never have been. Never will be.
I admit that I am NOT in love with Twitter. I have seen how it is handy to let a group sof interested people know something in real time all at once. It just hasn’t been something I use very often. I follow a couple of folks but that’s about it. Then I read this article about a Dad in Bonham who was donating a kidney to his three year old son. Updates were twittered from the operating room so everyone was able to keep up with the progress!
As someone who has waited through an entire transplant hearing very little until it was all over with I can tell you that it is pure agony and time seems to creep by one millisecond at a time. What a blessing Twitter was for all the anxious friends and family!
You can see the “Twitter transcript” here and read the article here.
SHERMAN, TX -You may have heard of the website Twitter. You might even use it yourself, but on Monday, Children’s Hospital in Dallas did something that’s never been done before. They posted real-time updates of a major operation. A Bonham father and Sherman firefighter donated a kidney to his young son. Rita Kotey has the one-of-a-kind, 21st century story.
Students frequently ask me how to insert a sound and make it play for more than one slide. Here is how to do it in ten steps. This assumes that you have already found a sound and saved it somewhere on your computer. This is in Office 2003
1. Navigate to the slide where you want your sound to begin playing.
2. Go to Insert>Movies and sounds>Sound from file
3. Navigate to your sound file
4. Click OK
5. Click Automatically
6. Go to Slide Show>Custom Animation (your sound file should be listed)
7. In the drop down list next to your sound click the effect options. Play sound, Effect tab
8. Click the radio button beside stop playing after (Here there is a drop down box where you can choose the number) slides
9. In Timing tab – to play automatically you can set to start after previous with a 0 second delay
10. Go to sound settings and adjust the volume
They are playing ZORK! On Big Bang Theory! ZORK was the first real video game I ever played. Dale was working on the pipeline and we were living in a 25 foot trailer in Blythe. One of the guys had an old TRS 80 – the kind that was all one piece, monitor, keyboard, and all. He let me use it and I filled a legal pad with notes as I worked my way through the text based adventure. I LOVED it! You typed in north, south, east, or west and went that direction. It would sya something like “You are standing before a wooden door” and you would type in open the door. There were objects to find and many of them were needed to get to othe parts of the underground empire. You can only carry so many items at a time so you have to figure out what to carry and what to drop. There are some “bad guys” and some dead ends so it helps to draw a map as you go along. In this very first version of ZORK, ZORK I there are no pictures – only text. Your imagination provides the pictures!
This is my favorite show EVER!
P.S. If you are curious there is a java version of the game that you can play online ZORK
There is an interesting take on tutorials from Guy Kawaski (and a recipe and demonstration for making his world famous Teriyaki sauce) It is worth the visit just for that! Show how to do something in about two minutes!
His cooking demonstration is an episode at StartCooking.com There are plenty of videos as well as recipes in text form. I don’t know about you but there are plenty of times I have read a recipe and felt a little nervous about parts of it. A demonstration would have been great! Now you can have one and you can even subscribe in your feed reader or through iTunes and for those of you that do not like rss, you can subscribe to the email updates.
There are other resources as well, including reference charts for safe cooking temperatures, conversion and measurement charts, explanations on equipment and how to use it, and general how-tos for anything and everything around the kitchen. I’ll be sending the link for this to number one son!
(also referred to as the “Human Web”) refers to the idea that, if a person is one step away from each person they know and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is on average six steps away from each person on Earth. It was popularised by a play written by John Guare.
A few days ago I joined a group on FaceBook started by people who went to my high school in Michigan. Today I got a friend request from Lori who is the sister of someone I went to school with. She lives in Jacksonville Florida (which happens to be where one of my brothers lives) and has a bar there.
I found a name (Patrick) on her friends list that turned out to be the son of someone I hung out with when we were barely past being toddlers. Both our parents and grandparents lived on the same dead end street and we made our little trek over the course of the day stopping at each house for cookies. By the time we got back to the first place quite a bit of time had passed so we would get cookies again. It worked well for us so we kept it up until the silly grownups talked and figured our little plan out!
Patrick’s older brother is Lori’s nephew. I haven’t talked to my brother yet (I have to actually call him since he isn’t on the internet as much as I am) but it wouldn’t surprise me to find he has been to Lori’s bar or at least knows of it.
I haven’t been back to Michigan in nearly thirty years and don’t know when and if I will ever get back so these were connections that would never have happened if I hadn’t been on FaceBook.
It used to be that if you wanted to get together with friends you had to physically get in your car and all drive somewhere. Now I see my kids texting on their phone while chatting online and checking email all at the same time. The connections are different than face to face. I still miss the nuances of tone of voice and facial expression which are the things that give us emotional cues and smiley faces while helpful do not really replace those things. The upside is that there is time to think about what you are going to say and you can always back up and delete and edit before you hit the send button. In real life I tend to say too many words and not say enough about what I’m really thinking.
Will relationships in the future change because of this way that we communicate now? In the last few months many of my friends have appeared on FaceBook. This used to be the almost exclusive venue of the younger crowd but there are a lot of us more “mature” folks showing up. There are groups for everything you can think of and places like FaceBook give us a place to “play” without clogging up our inboxes. It also becomes a tool for communicating with groups and I can already see several of my groups overlapping with others.
The world becomes smaller in some ways but if we can connect so easily on the net, will face to face connections happen less? When I was growing up my mother communicated with her family through letters on a regular basis and the rare phone call. We alternated years visiting. Gas prices and phone bills dictated how often and in what way you connected. With the present economy concerns, will sites like FaceBook and Twitter become the new letter? Instead of traveling to visit, will we meet as a group online? We already have the capability to video chat and most computers now come with webcams. We can easily create online presentations with pics of the kids and create an audio file to go along with it so grandparents can see and hear the grandkids.
Interesting things to think about. Do you think we are more or less connected to people because of the internet? Do you have a special way you connect using the internet? Has FaceBook ever surprised you?
