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This is a cool site where you can spell things with copyright-free letters from flickr: Spell with Flickr. Type a word in the box at the top of the page. When the letters appear you can click on each one to get different pictures. When you are satisfied with the letters in your word, copy the code in the box below the letters and paste it into your blog. Note that you can choose to square-off the letters so that the images are all the same size. Have fun!
The prelude of posts to come . . . .
I had been trying to figure out how to make my blog become the main place I “store” all of the information I acquire as I am “Finding My Way” in the information world, library world, and world in general. One major source of information I wanted to make available to myself (and others, if interested) was my classwork. I’ve done a lot of work for these MLIS classes that are making me a librarian, and much of it could be useful to me in the future. But computers come and go, so I didn’t want to save everything on my hard drive. Zip drives and other storage units are great, but they are prone to loss and destruction. Plus, I didn’t know of an easy way to make these formats available on my blog without copy/pasting the content into a post.
Lo and behold, along comes Zoho Viewer. As its tagline says, “Get rid of attachments. Just upload your document, grab the URL, and share it with your friends or post it in blogs / forums. No sign up required.” So, in a way it is like Google Documents, because you can allow others to edit your documents — yet another Web 2.0 tool encouraging and allowing easy collaboration. OR you can just let others view your document, which is what I’m doing on my blog.
Since I already use it, I tried Google docs, too, after I realized Zoho is similar. But I like Zoho better for this purpose because it has a “Bulk” upload option which is easier — less clicking. Plus I like the final view better in Zoho. Also, Zoho might be a good option for collaborating with people online who do not (for whatever reason) want to set up a Google Account.
Animoto is a “cool tool” I’ve been fooling around with . . . it’s been fun. Basically you upload some photos from your hard drive or a photo-sharing site (I use Picasa), and then you can choose music from their collection or yours, and then it creates a video which you can keep or remix. It only takes a couple of minutes! When you are on the page with your photos, note the options for deleting or highlighting selected photos. Keep in mind that you have to have between 10-15 pics . . . For example, I made a separate ‘album’ of my Eiffel pics rather than uploading all our Europe photos which would have taken forever. Then you can email the finished product or upload it to your blog — the “Help” section walks you through any questions you might have. Best of all, these 30-second videos are free! They seem to have uploaded kind of funny . . . . they are a little too big for their frame and fuzzy. Maybe I’ll figure that out in the future but for now — Enjoy!
Hutch (the dog) Video
Eiffel Tower Video
The VW Van Video
I decided to use Google Reader for my aggregator. (I like to say “aggregator” because it sounds like agitator and alligator.) Bloglines looks cool, but it wasn’t as intuitive for me as GR; plus, I use Google, GDocs, Gmail, etc. and I want to use Picasa and more.
I’ve added a bunch of feeds . . . I think I’ll have to remove some after I see which I really like. I put a link to GR on my blog so that I can get to it that way, too.
While doing this, I discovered a cool tool called Pagekeeper.org. It is a bookmarking site for teachers and students. It is not RSS, just a “favorites” site that you can organize in a way you can’t organize your desktop or browser favorites. It is easy to use, you can access it from any computer (instead of saying “Erg, I can’t remember the site, but it is saved on my Favorite’s), and others can view your page if they know your username (no password required for anyone who is not going to edit the page). So, take a look at it — my username is simply “Karen” . . . you can look at other people’s pages by searching for a particular subject or grade level. I really love it!
