Catch of the Day - LiveBinders - 19 Aug 09

Livebinders, the knowledge-sharing site, is the catch of the day.

LiveBinders is dedicated to helping you empower your students with the information you worked hard to collect.

LiveBinders was created so that you could do with digital information what you do with the papers on your desk - organize them into nice containers - like three-ring binders on your shelf. Teachers place Livebinders on desktops so kids don’t have to type URL addresses or get lost searching on the web. And they don't have to add a bookmark to every computer everytime they have a new link to share - they can just update the Livebinder.


LiveBinders lets you use not just one binder, but as many binders as you need to help organize the stuff you collect and share over the internet. You can create as many LiveBinders as you want for free.

View links like pages in a book instead of URLs on a page. Combine PDFs and Word documents with the links you collect. Organize your links and documents into tabs and subtabs.



Build a library of Livebinders and allow others to view your public and private binders. You can embed Livebinders on blogs, web pages and desktops.

Add the LiveBinder It bookmarklet to your browser toolbar. Then start browsing the web. Find a link you want to save then click on the LiveBinder It bookmarklet to automatically add the link to a new Livebinder.

Catch of the Day - Nota - 18 Aug 09

Today's catch is Nota, a dynamic whiteboard wiki.

Nota lets you mash your ideas and media together with others in a dynamic whiteboard wiki. Using photos, videos, and other web content you can quickly create multimedia presentations on your own or with more than 50 colleagues.

Nota has been used for educational purpose as an online collaboration tool that allows students and teachers to quickly create and share virtually any kind of document such as presentations, notebooks, reports , artwork, anything. Using Nota’s toolset, users can integrate text, video, maps, clip art, photos from web albums or on a local computer, or images from Flickr, and other sources. Users can then embed their work in webpages, wikis, or blogs, and can share and collaborate with other people. There's no limit to what students can express using Nota.

It’s free of charge, no software to purchase or install, and because Nota’s online, collaborative and real-time, student reactions, responses, and ideas can be integrated live into the document.

Unique Features

• Users can create visual presentations or notebooks in literally minutes using any web browser.
• Design and user interface are simple, intuitive, and can be mastered in minutes.
• Instantly combine virtually any kind of material, from any source.
• Materials can be shared and edited simultaneously with group members.
• Work is auto-saved and immediately published.
• Ideal for group projects and hands-on instruction – incorporate student responses into material as you develop it.

Creativity

Use the text tool to add titles, messages, and comments to your creations. Insert photos, videos or flash from your own files or Flickr, YouTube, Google Maps, Wikipedia articles, and more. Use the drawing tools to work on any object in the workspace. Upload PDFs, document files, and audio for sharing.

Collaboration

Create private or public notebooks and invite one, two, or dozens, of people to collaborate on a Nota project. Add as many pages as you want to a notebook.



To use Nota, you'll need to register. See the Nota Quick Start Guide.

Catch of the Day - kids DO science - 17 Aug 09

kids DO science is our fresh catch of this day.

kids DO science is the result of a hands-on "research-to-classroom" science program for elementary students initiated in 2002 by The Environmental Outreach Program of the University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory. Fouth and fifth grade students from South Carolina participated in five 2-hour hands-on science workshops where they worked in teams, formulated hypotheses, and collected, recorded, and analyzed data.

The hands-on workshops and materials developed for the program are available on the kids DO science web site where you are invited to try them with your students. The workshops cover a variety of topics and are appropriate for grades 3-6. All the activities were developed to get students involved in science and to stress the scientific method and science inquiry skills.

kids DO science offers sections for the methods of science, hands-on science activities, science fun and games, and other science resources.

In the Science Fun and Games area you'll find activities related to ...

• The Scientific Method
• Biodiversity
• Wetlands and Water Quality
• Chemistry
• Genetics
• Ecotoxicology and Pollution
• and more

kids DO Science is supported by the American Honda Foundation.

Say 'Hello" to My Little Friends

My little friends are small Mac and Windows freeware apps without whom my life would be much less efficient. Most of these apps have been long-time buddies in good standing, having been culled from numerous trial relationships with a large number of wannabee friends.

My Little Mac Friends. (I'm a Mac user by choice.)

Skitch is a free screen capture and markup tool. You can capture the full screen, a selected region, or an iSight camera shot then use Skitch's markup tools to annotate the image. You can drag the capture onto the desktop or upload the capture to skitch.com or other image host.

RapidoWrite makes it easy to type full sentences or paragraphs using abbreviations. This is great for signing your emails with a signature, inserting your address into a form, or typing a long, easy-to-misspell word. Simply type the abbreviation you chose and RapidoWrite expands into the full text.

ClipMenu can manage clipboard history. You can record 8 clipboard types, from plain text to image. To paste a recorded item, you just pop up the menu by invoking the shortcut key or toolbar icon, and select an item from the menu. You can also register texts you frequently use, like e-mail addresses, user IDs and so on, as snippets which you can then paste from the menu, too.
Jumpcut ia another clipboard manager that works almost identically to ClipMenu without the Snippet feature.

Google QuickSearch Box can be used to find the following: programs and files on your computer, search results on Google, bookmarks and websites, calculations, site-specific results, weather and definitions, and contacts. You can even post to Twitter.

My Little Windows Friends. (I'm a Windows user by necessity. Some of these apps are tools to supplement the functionality which is native on a Mac but missing from XP.)

Easy Capture is a powerful and easy-to-use free screen capture software. It allows you to capture screen shots, including windows captures, scrolling windows, and selected-regions. It also allows you to edit and markup the screen captures.

Texter saves you countless keystrokes by replacing abbreviations with commonly used phrases you define.

xNeat Clipboard Manager is handy and very simple to use. It captures clipboard items as they are copied to the Windows Clipboard, and you can simply bring up a menu containing all the previously copied items and select the item you want to paste. For regularly used text you can make it permanent in xNeat Clipboard Manager's menu by right clicking on it, then select Make Sticky.

EditPad Lite is a general-purpose text editor, designed to be small and compact, yet offer all the functionality you expect from a basic text editor. EditPad Lite's features include opening multiple documents in tabs, unlimited undo/redo, reopen recent files, highly configurable, and much more.

ScreenMarker is an application used for drawing on the current screen using a variety of tools. It gives you the functionality to draw on the screen to highlight existing or provide further information to all those viewing. Screen Marker provides some of the features of an interactive whiteboard without having one.

QuickMonth Calendar adds a tiny calendar pop-up to the clock icon in your Windows XP tray. Just hover your mouse over the clock and up it pops, ready to serve. That's it. Nothing more dramatic. But definitely a bit useful.

Launchy is a free windows utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager. Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!

SumatraPDF is a slim, free, open-source PDF viewer for Windows. Portable out of the box. Sumatra has a minimalistic design. Simplicity has a higher priority than a lot of features. It's small and starts up very fast.
FoxIt Reader is a free PDF document viewer, with incredible small size, breezing-fast launch speed and rich feature set. Foxit Reader currently has over 50 million users all around the world.

PrimoPDF is a completely free PDF creator. Create PDF files from 300+ file types. Make 100% industry-standard PDF from virtually any files that print. Create PDF files optimized for print, screen, ebook, or prepress.

Saturday Project: A Central Charging Station

Friday night, I finally had had enough of having things charging in every room of the house (except the bathroom). I decided to do something about it and paid a visit to the local Home Depot Saturday afternoon. This convenient kitchen charging station is the result.

The shelf has room enough for both my 13" MacBook, my 10" Toshiba netbook, and a couple of smaller devices such as my iPod Touch and my phone. The two hanging baskets below the shelf, which are the key feature to me, accommodate the AC adapters for both laptops, the iPod charger, the phone's AC adapter, a camera battery charger, and a charger for AA/AAA batteries with space to spare. If necessary, a couple more baskets could easily be added. A couple mini hair clips help with cord management.

The shelf unit is Closet Maid item 8279, $15.76, all hardware included. The two baskets are Closet Maid item 3937 at $3.67 each. The hair clips were locally appropriated at no cost to me. Total (with tax of course) was $24.48. Labor, about a half hour. Degree of difficulty, a caveman could do it.