Edunology

WolframAlpha is the next generation in search engines. I have found this site to be one of the most useful tools available on the Internet.  It  is a computational search engine.

What this means is that this search engine can compute just about anything. The program is so sophisticated that it can query almost any computation using natural language. You can “just ask a question”. You will not only get your answer, but you will see the steps to solve it as well as all other pertinent or relevant information related to your question.

Does this sound confusing. The best way to learn about the power of this website is to watch this demo video made by its creator.   Sit back and enjoy this clip. I am confident you will be amazed!

Wolfram Alpha can be used quite extensively in Education. Math and Science students can use the engine to help solve math problems, learn the step to solve a problem, and gather data for research.

This search engine separates itself from GOOGLE in that it delivers the answers and data you are looking for. It does not just list a page of search results that you  sift through to find what you are looking for. As I mentioned, it is a computational search engine. That means it has access to endless amounts of data to pair with its algorithms. At the bottom of all of  your search results you will find a link to sources. These are the sources that are used to complete the computations. Whether it is historical weather data or us census numbers, the sources of data are right at your fingertips.

There is so much that I could write about Wolfram Alpha. Stay tuned for more postings.  In the meantime, take a look at the video and start exploring.

Enjoy!

I recently bought the Droid from Verizon. I have been waiting for Verizon to finally release a good smart phone. I must say that I am really impressed with it. The OS is very fast. The screen is great. It is has a very sharp picture.

You have to drink the Google Kool-Aide if you buy this phone. It is fully integrated with all of the Google Apps. In my opinion, that is what makes the phone so great. I have never been much of a ‘cell phone’ guy. This phone has changed the way I look at them.

Having access the the internet, email, messaging, twitter, google reader, google maps, navigation, every major newspaper, sports scores, you tube videos, and traffic and weather right at your finger tips has changed my life! It is such a great asset.

The keyboard is not designed well and the phone is a bit heavy. Other then that I have no other complaints as of now. The Google Voice Search by GPS location is really neat.

I highly recommend this phone. I will keep you posted if this changes!

I have been starting to plan a strategy for online document management for my staff and students. We are implementing a new Wifi network in my district. I plan on creating a guest SSID just as i did in my previous district. I wrote about that in a previous post.

My plan is to allow faculty and students to be able to bring in their own mobile devices. In order for this to be successful I want them to have access to their documents while on and off the network. Setting up the guest SSId for internet only is the easy part. I need to find a solution for accessing documents over the web. This will ensure they will not have to be added to our domain to get to their files.

There are of course a number of options these days. Google Apps for Education, Zoho and other open source document management platforms are available. In the case of Google Apps it is a major change.  My biggest obstacle is that Google Apps uses email as its primary communication and collaboration tool. There are many concerns with providing email accounts to our students. While the details of this are another post it is a noteworthy concern.

Microsoft has recently introduced Office Web Apps. You can access the beta called Microsoft Office Live currently. It provides the ability to access word, powerpoint and excel documents online. You can even share and collaborate on them. I have heard that office 2010 will offer the ability to host this online cloud on your own servers. I am hoping that if hosted authentication can be handled with LDAP.  This might be a solution for us. It is of course a very expensive solution in comparison to Google Apps. The good news is we are already paying for it with our MS volume license.

Here is a quick blurb about MS Office Live.

Office Web Apps, the online companion to Word, Excel®, PowerPoint® and OneNote® applications, allow you to access documents from anywhere. You can even simultaneously share and work on documents with others online. View documents across PCs, mobile phones, and the Web without compromising document fidelity. Create new documents and do basic editing using the familiar Office interface. By offering more ways to access files from almost anywhere, Office Web Apps enable you to get things done according to your schedule.

I will continue to look into an open source solution that we can load onto our servers. If anyone has a recommendation I would love to hear it!

>Would you like to be able to access your word, powerpoint, excel or pdf files from any computer? Have you ever created a document at home and forgot to bring it with you to work? Would you like to be able to work collaboratively on a document? Would you like your students to collaborate on a powerpoint presentation? Would you like to share a word document or powerpoint presentation with another faculty member and not have to email it or post it in a common shared folder where it could be manipulated?

If you answered yes to any of these questions then you must check out Google Docs. Google Docs is a web based version of MS office. You can create and host word, excel, powerpoint and PDF documents. They are accessible from any computer with an internet connection. You can upload all of your existing office documents. This includes office 2007 docs as of this week!

Google docs also allows you to share your documents with others. It allows multiple users to collaborate on a single document. With its forms features you can create a form that will collect answers/data from individuals.

The best feature is that it is totally free!!! All you need is a google account to get started.

Stay tuned for more details and workshops on Google Docs.

I have been a member of Delicious for a long time now. I have used it primarily to bookmark all of the great websites I find online. I am a big fan of social bookmarking. However, it has only been within the last year that I really started taking advantage of the “social” aspect of  social bookmarking.

For those of you who are not on the social bookmarking wagon yet, here is a short summary. Traditional bookmarking of sites consisted of adding them to your favorites. You can add the site and place it in a folder. While this is helpful it has limitations. The major limitation is that you can only access these favorites from the computer you saved them on. You are also limited in the how you can organize them for retrieval.

Social bookmarking is web based. You can access your boomarked sites from any computer with an internet connection. These services also allow you to add ‘tags” to your  bookmarks. Tags are keywords that you assign to a bookmark. You use these tags to organize and search your bookmarks. You can bundle your tags to be better organized. This is the equivalent of putting them in folders.  By downloading some toolbar buttons you can add and access sites in your delicious account right from your Internet explorer or firefox toolbar.

The most power feature of social bookmarking is the “social” aspect.  Delicous and other social boomarking services are a network. You not only have access to sites that you bookmark, but you also have access to sites that other delicious users bookmarked. The service allows you to add members to your network to make it easy to view their bookmarks. You may be interested in this if you know of other users that share the same interests or profession. You do not have to have someone as part of your network to search their bookmarks.

This is the feature that i have only started to really use in the past year. It has replaced about 40% of my Google searches. You can search by tags on the site. The results that are returned will be seperated by 1. sites you bookmarked, 2.S ites your network bookmarked, 3 Sites that users on delicious bookmarked.

A simple search on “smartboard Math” returned hundreds of websites that other delicous users had bookmarked. What a time saver. Instead of sifting through thousands of google results i have  list of a couple hundred pre-approved sites. Other users thought these sites were good enough to bookmark. If one of these people are in my network then the validity and relevancy of the result is even stronger.

Planning a trip? A tag search of ”rome” and possibly “restaurants” should provide a variety of bookmarked sites.  What about “social studies” “lesson plans”?

Every  post has a number at the end of it. This is the number of people who also bookmarked this site. By clicking on the number you get to see the usernames of the people. This is a great way to add users to your network that share a common interest.

Delicious has become one of the web2.0 tools that i use everyday. As it grows and my network grows it is becoming even more valuable. I encourage you to check out this resource.  I have put together a social bookmarking tutorial page on my wiki. There are printable instructions for using delicious as well as screencast tutorials.

Enjoy

>Google has introduced some new experimental search features. See results on a timeline, map, or in context of other information types. With these views, Google’s technology extracts key dates, locations, measurements, and more from select search results so you can view the information in a different dimension.

Timeline and map views work best for searches related to people, companies, events and places. Info view shows all the data found for each result, to help you select the best choice.

You can access these features by visiting the experimental search page in Google Labs and turning on the feature.

You also can add the following terms to your searches to utilize the features.

Timeline:
In the search bar type: Thomas Jefferson view:timeline
The results will display in timeline view.

Info View:
In the search bar type: space exploration view:info
You will have the opportunity to switch the search results by: Dates, Measurements, Locations and Images.

Map View:
In the search bar type: olympics view:map
The results will appear in map view.

Google has also released a news timeliner: http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/. It allows users to view news and other data sources on a browsable, graphical timeline. Available data sources include recent and historical news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores and information about various types of media (i.e. music albums and movies).

To dive into the Google News Timeline experience, simply enter your topic of choice, pick out the relevant source and specify the date. The result is an interactive news timeline based on your personal interests. By the way, you can set the time scale to days, weeks, months, years, or even decades!