AskDRlibrary Fights Back Against Cyberbullying

I’ve been working with Mrs. Evans’ marvelous green class for the past three weeks on my Teach 21/Media 21 Capstone as we learned about information literacy and deterring cyberbullying. If you want to see what we’ve been doing, here’s a link to our video page: http://askdrlibraryagainstcyberbullying.pbworks.com/w/page/39877388/Student-Videos. Browse around while you’re there and check out all our other information literacy and cyberbullying messages, including what you need to know about copyright and fair use, plagiarism, evaluating sources of information, social bookmarking, and using NoodleTools to cite your sources.

Weebles May Wobble, But Weebly Stands Strong

Quick! Where can you get a free website that you can easily create yourself with no HTMl or CSS experience that has no ads (and promises it never will)? And, oh, yeah, the site also includes free hosting, over 70 great designs, powerful blogging features, and the ability to publish to your own domain name if you already have one (or Weebly’s subdomain if you don’t). The answer: Weebly!

And did I mention that you can also add pictures, videos, music and audio, documents, maps, and photo galleries? Sell products, accept online bookings, create a contact form, or arrange your pages in multiple columns? Drag on slideshows, files, forums, games, RSS feeds, or any other HTML embed code — all by simply dragging and dropping. Everything.

I don’t know how they do it. I didn’t say I know everything. I just said they do it. And they do it so well they’ve earned impressive s from writers in Time, Newsweek, The BBC, TechCrunch, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, and GigaOm. Weebly is backed by some of the most
knowledgeable angel investors in Silicon Valley, including Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures, Ron Conway (original investor in Google), Mike Maples (Floodgate), Aydin Senkut (Felicis VC), Rajeev Motwani and Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail).

What’s not to love? There’s even a demo video to explain it all.  Edudemic also named them as one of the top 35 classroom tools. So what are you waiting for, people? Get out there and claim your free Weebly website before these people come to their senses!

Fur.ly Is Warm and Fuzzy!

So there are plenty of URL shortening websites out there, but not much new, right? Wrong! Fur.ly allows you to shorten multiple URLs in one fell swoop. I can see tons of uses for this in educational settings. All you do is open fur.ly, enter your first URL,  and then a second entry box opens, so you enter another URL, and so on and so on, until you’re finished. Then you click on Go, and Voila! you have a cute, furry little URL, you click on Try it, and then you just click through all of your websites, quick as a flash. You could use this URL to share favorite sites with friends, to create a pathfinder for students, or to share all your websites with colleagues. Students, you could share all your favorite sites with your friends via one single tiny address. Fur.ly is fast, easy, and fun! You can enter up to fifty URLs in one sitting. Only  problem is, if one fails, they all go down the drain. So be careful; be sure to copy and paste from current, active URLs.

My Latest Pick? Pixton!

So if you know me very well, you know I love alternatives to traditional presentation modes. Web 2.0 tools that allow students to animate or otherwise graphically present the products of their learning can engage not only the students presenting the information but their peers as well. So get ready to get engaged, kiddos, with Pixton!

Pixton makes it easy for students to learn how to create cartoons in a variety of sizes with easy-to-follow online videos.  When finished, students can post to Facebook, email their cartoons, or embed them in a blog or other online site, even WordPress, with a little help from VodPod.

Pixton is available “for fun, for free,” or additional features are available for educational  or business use at reasonable prices. Pixton’s creators have a very ethical code of conduct and they encourage users to report abuse of this code, so parents can feel confident allowing their students to use the site, unlike other graphic design sites that often feature content inappropriate for minors. Safety tips for students and parents are even included on the site.

With seven comic formats, all of which have individual sizes and shapes, plus a variety of characters and backgrounds, Pixton can keep students immersed in the learning process without requiring extensive training and artistic skills.

Become a Presentation King with Cartoonster

Cartoonster is an ultra cool site that features free tutorials  for all you future cartoon artists out there. Cartoonster’s tutorials show you how to get started, choose (and use) the right tools, create your first animation, animate simple shapes in 3D, and even how to make those 3D shapes jump. So you won’t get bored while you’re learning, you can change the background color, participate in an owl-naming contest, or click on entertaining quick videos between tutorials. This site  has been around for a long time, but I figure, like they say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” right? Try using ideas you learn from Cartoonster to create a presentation to share what you have learned on a recent research topic, and impress your classmates and teacher with your awesome skills.

Achieve Your Personal Zen With Zendo

Zendo | passionate learners via kwout

Zen.do is a cool Web2.0 tool on a mission to help students become more efficient learners. The creators of  Zen.do are students themselves–students who want to spend less time studying while still enabling themselves to know their material better. They know that good students want to commit the most essential information to long-term memory.

The Zen.do creators are anxious to receive comments and suggestions from users. They have a quick two and a half minute video tutorial that easily explains how to use Zen.do. All you do is type your notes in outline form, and Zen.do converts them to flash cards. Once you sign up, you simply open a folder, name your new directory, then name your file, and start typing. Zen.do prompts you on the next step as you create your cards.

Once you finish a set of cards, you can go through your cards and test yourself, and Zen.do gives you a grade based on your success. You can also edit and update your cards if needed.

The website includes a helpful forum that allows you to post suggestions and view the questions and feature suggestions of others. Unfortunately, the FAQ section is not yet operational. If you are a dedicated student looking for a new way to organize yourself, Zen.do could be for you!

A smidgen of all you need to know about those funny codes you’ve been seeing around lately

So, have you been seeing QR codes around everywhere lately and wondering what they’re all about? You may have heard them called matrix barcodes or 2-D codes. They are gaining popularity because they can contain more information than old-fashioned barcodes that can only include numeric information. QR codes can include hyperlinks to URLs, words, email or text messages, logos, artwork…the possibilities are endless! You use QR code readers on your smart phone to scan the codes and instantly read them. Have you looked at the current DRMS media center home page? Did you freak out and wonder what it meant? Wonder if it was some kind of message from space aliens? Well, it’s top secret. Be the first person to tell me what it says and win a prize. Many thanks to The Daring Librarian, aka Gwynneth Ann Bronwynne Jones, teacher librarian at Murray Hill Middle School in Laurel, Maryland for creating and sharing the ultra cool graphic used in this blog post. She is a genius.

Create Cooler Word Clouds with Tagxedo

So of course you’re familiar with Wordle‘s beautiful word clouds, but have you tried Tagxedo? Tagxedo is an alternative word cloud creator that offers additional options for your word clouds such as shapes and words. It’s kind of like Wordle meets ImageChef. You can acquire your text from a text file, website, or copy and paste it into Tagxedo. To upload from a document, you must first save as a plain text file, not as a regular Word document, and even then I was not successful with this option. Don’t you just love beta? Maybe Tagxedo was just having a bad upload day. Acquiring text from websites and copying and pasting worked beautifully, however.

Once your text is inserted, there are various options for handling your text, such as removing punctuation, common words, and numbers. You can even save the same word multiple times, such as a school name or important concept, adjust the word options so that identical words are not combined, adjust the layout options so that all fonts are utilized, ask Tagxedo to kindly normalize frequency, and voila, you have a lovely word cloud of the single word.

Tagxedo works like Wordle to combine words using the tilde (~) symbol to keep related words together in the word cloud. I created clouds with the word “read” and my school initials. No problem. Students studying Africa, for example, could upload a shape of Africa or the word “Africa,” and then create a word cloud of important concepts. This even provides the opportunity about discussing copyright, because we don’t want our students borrowing those shapes inappropriately now, do we?

One feature I especially liked was the “history” feature that allowed me to review all of my previous options and select the best of all possible views. There are also numerous options for saving the word cloud in various sizes and file formats. Sadly, the embed codes only work in some formats–see Tagxedo‘s forum comments for details. Wikispaces isn’t one of them, and that’s the only place I tried it so far. Embeds would (presumably) allow some of the cool features of the word cloud that you can’t see in the saved .jpg image, such as word spins (if the word is not horizontal) and zooms when you hover over words in the cloud.

Tagxedo‘s creator Hardy Leung has a very impressive resume, and he has a new Web 2.0 tool coming up soon called Coloroke. He has also created a helpful blog, idea gallery, and FAQ to accompany Tagxedo.

Check out our new NetVibes pages, Gale GREENR Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill 2010 Widget

Check out our new NetVibes pages, which include a special page with info about the oil spill in the Gulf. We have temporary free access to the Gale GREENR database with a special Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill 2010 widget. We’ll be updating our NetVibes pages with information on current topics, so stay tuned!

Hello Dropbox; Goodbye Lost Flash Drives and Inaccessible Emails

Dropbox is my new best friend. OK, so I’m fickle. But Dropbox can save you time and money, so now Dropbox can be your new best friend, too. You can get 2GB of online storage free from Dropbox, or for a small monthly fee you can have 100GB free.  As you can see from the screenshot above, there’s a video to show you how easy it is to use Dropbox, so I won’t even share the steps.

Recruit your friends to save their files (also for free) on Dropbox, and you get even more free storage space–250 MB per friend up to a limit of 8GB. Click on this link for a referral: https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTkzOTMxOTk5

Say goodbye to all that downloading your files to flash drives and then leaving them at school or home. Or emailing files to school and not being able to open them due to firewalls. Plus Dropbox automatically syncs whenever new files or changes to your files are detected.  Any size or types of files are allowed, and Dropbox will work with Windows, Mac, and Linux computers.

Suppose your network connection drops? Dropbox transfers will resume correctly wherever they left off once your connection is restored. You can also share your files with your friends when you need to collaborate on a project and see their changes instantly. Dropbox automatically backs your files up and allows you to undelete your files for 30 days; unlimited undo is a paid option.

Don’t want to share your files? They are stored securely over an encrypted SSL channel so they are always safe and password secure. Even Dropbox employees cannot view your files, no matter how much they beg and plead! Only the people with whom you share a link can view them.

You can even have mobile device access for your iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, and Android so you can access your Dropbox on the go.  And sync your downloaded files or take photos and save them to your Dropbox.

Here’s the list of official Dropbox features:

File Sync

Dropbox allows you to sync your files online and across your computers automatically.

• 2GB of online storage for free, with up to 100GB available to paying customers.
• Sync files of any size or type.
• Sync Windows, Mac and Linux computers.
• Automatically syncs when new files or changes are detected.
• Work on files in your Dropbox even if you’re offline. Your changes sync once your computer has an Internet connection again.
• Dropbox transfers will correctly resume where they left off if the connection drops.
• Efficient sync – only the pieces of a file that changed (not the whole file) are synced. This saves you time.
• Doesn’t hog your Internet connection. You can manually set bandwidth limits.

File Sharing

Sharing files is simple and can be done with only a few clicks.

• Shared folders allow several people to collaborate on a set of files.
• You can see other people’s changes instantly.
• A “Public” folder that lets you link directly to files in your Dropbox.
• Control who is able to access shared folders (including ability to kick people out and remove the shared files from their computers).
• Automatically create shareable online photo galleries from folders of photos in your Dropbox.

Online Backup

Dropbox backs up your files online without you having to think about it.

• Automatic backup of your files.
• Undelete files and folders.
• Restore previous versions of your files.
• 30 days of undo history, with unlimited undo available as a paid option.

Web Access

A copy of your files are stored on Dropbox’s secure servers. This lets you access them from any computer or mobile device.

• Manipulate files as you would on your desktop – add, edit, delete, rename etc.
• Search your entire Dropbox for files.
• A “Recent Events” feed that shows you a summary of activity in your Dropbox.
• Create shared folders and invite people to them.
• Recover previous versions of any file or undelete deleted files.
• View photo galleries created automatically from photos in your Dropbox.

Security & Privacy

Dropbox takes the security and privacy of your files very seriously.

• Shared folders are viewable only by people you invite.
• All transmission of file data and metadata occurs over an encrypted channel (SSL).
• All files stored on Dropbox servers are encrypted (AES-256) and are inaccessible without your account password.
• Dropbox website and client software have been hardened against attacks from hackers.
• Dropbox employees are not able to view any user’s files.
• Online access to your files requires your username and password.
• Public files are only viewable by people who have a link to the file(s). Public folders are not browsable or searchable.

Mobile Device Access

The free Dropbox application for iPhone, iPad, and Android lets you:

• Access your Dropbox on the go.
• View files from within the application.
• Download files for offline viewing.
• Take photos and videos and sync them to your Dropbox.
• Share links to files in your Dropbox.
• Export your files to other applications.
• Sync downloaded files so they’re up-to-date.