Cliotech: March 2009

This demo -- from Pattie Maes' lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry -- was the buzz of TED. It's a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine "Minority Report" and then some.

At the MIT Media Lab's new Fluid Interfaces Group, Pattie Maes researches the tools we use to work with information and connect with one another.

Pranav Mistry is the genius behind Sixth Sense, a wearable device that enables new interactions between the real world and the world of data.

11 March 2009

Websites I Found Interesting - Diigo 03/10/2009

How to Present While People are Twittering - Annotated
tags: twitter, presentations, backchannel, presentation, twittering, presenting, education

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

04 March 2009

Websites I Found Interesting - Diigo 03/03/2009

Creative Commons: What every Educator needs to know
SlideShare presentation
tags: creativecommons, slideshare, educator, copyright, cc, education, creative_commons
VisualBlooms » home
tags: Blooms, visualblooms, taxonomy, web2.0, bloomstaxonomy, education, technology

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

03 March 2009

Websites I Found Interesting - Diigo 03/02/2009

Best Online Interactive Museum Exhibits for Students | Making Teachers Nerdy
tags: education, technology, museums, virtual_field_trips, learning

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

01 March 2009

Going Googley with Google Tools - Week 9

Image by Rev Dan Catt via Flickr

I know, I JUST posted week 8, but this is actually week 9 of my Going Googley with Google Tools series.

My topic for this post is Google Maps.

Did you know that you can create a customized maps with placemarks, shapes, and personalized content in much the same way you create a Google Earth tour?

Click here to access the Google MyMaps users guide.

When adding placemarks in My Maps, you can include photos (if hosted online), videos (if embeddable), customized text, and hyperlinks. You can also export your My Maps files as a KML file for viewing and editing in Google Earth. Likewise, you can import either a KML or GeoRSS file in My Maps. You can also take advantage of the content overlays already published and searchable on Google Maps.

This is a tremendously valuable application for the classroom. Students can collaborate on a map and aggregate their research content. They can publish, link to, and embed their maps. Teachers could have student groups collaborate on a My Map, download the data as a KML file, then import that KML file into Google Earth where they can use the data to create their individual tours. Plus, schools who do not have access to Google Earth can do many of the same things in My Maps. If your school subscribes to Discovery Education streaming, you can have your students use the rich image and text content to create placemarks that can be used to teach other students. Take a look at a sample. Click on the placemarks to view the multimedia content.

View Larger Map

Click here for more classroom integration ideas.

Here are a few video tutorials to get you started. You can also visit the Google Maps page of my Google Tools for Schools site.

Creating personalized, annotated, customized maps with Google My Maps.

Adding personalized content to Google Maps

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Going Googley with Google Tools - Week 8

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

As some of my regular readers know, I recently changed jobs. Working as a certified trainer for Discovery Education I am on the road often. I just returned home from a 13 training trip and am leaving tomorrow for another 10 day trip. Consequently, my blogging has dropped off, well, entirely. I annoyed with myself for missing my 8th installment of my Going Googley with Google Tools.

So, I'm making up for it with two posts this weekend. In this installment, I'm going to explore one of my favorite applications for researching with students, Google Custom Search.

What is Google Custom Search?

A Custom Search Engine is a tailored search experience, built using Google's core search technology, that prioritizes or restricts search results based on websites and pages you specify. Your Custom Search Engine can be tailored to reflect your point of view or area of expertise. With a Custom Search Engine, you can:

Apply your website's look and feel to the search results page.
Provide search refinements within results pages to make it easier for searchers to find the information they're looking for.
Add sites to your search engine's index as you surf the web.
Invite friends and trusted users to co-edit and contribute to your search engine.
Make money from your Custom Search Engine by participating in Google's AdSense program.

Once you've defined your search engine index, Google will give you a simple piece of code for a search box to place on your site or blog. You'll then have the option to choose various customization options to make the look and feel and functionality of your search engine your own.

When adding web pages, sites, and domains here are some tips:

Individual pages: Specifying www.mysite.com/mypage.html will just include the mypage.html page on www.mysite.com.
Entire sites: Specifying www.mysite.com/* will include all the pages on www.mysite.com.
Parts of sites: You can use wildcard patterns to include just certain parts of a site. For example, www.mysite.com/*about* will include only files on www.mysite.com that have about in their name.
Entire domains: You can also specify an entire domain using *.mydomain.com. If you specify mydomain.com, we will automatically convert this to *.mydomain.com/*. If this is not what you want, you can change it back in the control panel.

How can this be a benefit to students? It should come as no shock that when students are tasked with a researching activity they will go to Google first. Thus, creating a custom Google search engine with pre-defined sites and domains to search will feel familiar to them while limiting their search results to reliable web sites. Plus, educational institutions can elect to eliminate all advertising on the search results page for their custom search engine. A terrific benefit to teachers is that they can collaborate on creating their own custom search engine. So, teachers who all engage students in a common grade-level assessment can collaborate on adding sites to custom search.

Playing devil's advocate, if a teacher limits the sites that students can search to reliable site, how will students learn to practice their source credibility analysis skills? Well, for younger students, limiting their search results is an excellent way to model good reliable sites so that they will know what to look for when researching on their own. For older students, teachers can select the preference: Search the entire web but emphasize included sites. That will push results from included sites to the top of the search page. It doesn't eliminate results from elsewhere on the web. I think that is a fairly good compromise.

Here is an example of a custom search engine that just searches my blog, wiki, and Google site.

Here is another example. This custom image search only searches hosting sites that allow for Creative Commons licensing. Thus, it would be a great way for students to search for images that they can use in media mashups.

Visit the Google Search page of Google Tools for Schools site to learn more about creating your own custom search.

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