Timetoast is a new web application for the creation and sharing of timelines. Timetoast lets you create multiple timelines using your own images. Your timelines can be embedded in any blog, wiki, or web page. Adding events to your timeline is point-and-click easy. You have the option to include more detail about each event that is displayed when the event title is clicked. You can also include an image with each event. The interface is very clean and attractive. And, best of all, it's totally free.
This AP article by Felicia Fonseca describes how a small New Mexico high school equipped all of its students with Microsoft Zunes and began to use podcasting.
The students were encouraged to be linked to their devices during class hours, on bus rides home and on school trips. Teachers got a $400 bonus for coming up with lessons to identify 20 downloadable digital lectures that supported their lessons and to develop five of their own.
Washington Post writer Linton Weeks explores the effect the Internet is thought to be having on the writing skills of young Americans.
This assault on the lowly -- and mighty -- sentence, he (Librarian of CongressJames Billington) says, is symptomatic of a disease potentially fatal to civilization. If the sentence croaks, so will critical thought. The chronicling of history. Storytelling itself.
For the last several days I've been checking out a new social micro-blogging site, Plurk.com. Actually, I'm way past "checking it out," I'm nearing "consumed by" status. I had tried Twitter twice in the past and it just didn't work for me. But Plurk has grabbed me by the *****!
The community is still small but vibrant and enthusiastic, and growing. I think that they, like myself, are excited about being in at the start of something with potentially a great future. Plurkers appear to be a more mature, more sophisticated group. As yet, not a lot of kids appear to be plurkers. I have met a lot of really interesting, wonderful plurkers so far and had a blast!
The quirk of Plurk is the horizontal timeline.Newest items appear at the left and by dragging or using the scroll wheel you can go back in time. It has a bit of a learning curve, but as I got more familiar with it, navigation became relatively simple.
I really like the conversational threads that develop from individual posts and appear in a drop-down window. Sometimes these convos go on for hours with various plurkers jumping in and out as they can.
You can also preface your plurk with a choice of verbs and choose from an assortment of emoticons.
There's a system of karma points with certain plateaus that open new features. For example, when you reach 25 karma points, you're emoticon set increases.
You can group friends into cliques and send private plurks among the members of that group.
Pictures on other image hosting services such as Photobucket, Flickr, and Picasa Web can be linked to as can YouTube videos.
Plurk is not feature-rich. There is no search capability as yet. There isn't a way to ignore a conversation or save one, but it's early days yet.
I'm hooked, as are most of my pleeps. They are the best thing about Plurk ☺.
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Washington Post writer Linton Weeks explores the effect the Internet is thought to be having on the writing skills of young Americans.
Newest items appear at the left and by dragging or using the scroll wheel you can go back in time. It has a bit of a learning curve, but as I got more familiar with it, navigation became relatively simple.
I really like the conversational threads that develop from individual posts and appear in a drop-down window. Sometimes these convos go on for hours with various plurkers jumping in and out as they can.
