Top Shelf

Voicethread is one of the favorite tools that we introduce in our version of the 23 Things class. Joyce Valenza’s recent post in the Neverending Search blog describes Voicethread’s new relationships with New York Public Library and Flickr Creative Commons that give their users access to over 700,000 digitized images. Read the entire post for more details.

The tech world has been buzzing recently about the newest information tool on the block – Wolfram|Alpha.

Named after its creator, Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram|Alpha is not a search engine like Google that helps you locate information. It is a “computational knowledge engine” that “generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links.”

For more information on this amazing tool, read Joyce Valenza’s summary of Wolfram|Alpha’s features or watch Wolfram|Alpha’s creator do a demo.

Play around with Wolfram|Alpha. I think you will find a new tool to add to your information toolkit.

Since 2004, a group called The New Media Consortium has published an annual Horizon Report,

a research-oriented effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within higher education.

New this year is a Horizon Report, specifically geared to K-12 that follows the same format – a panel of experts from around the world identify and organize new technologies by their “adoption horizon” or how long they think it will take before those technologies are adopted in K-12 schools.

These are the technologies that are predicted to be seen in wide use within the year:

• collaborative environments – virtual workplaces where students and teachers can communicate, share information, and work together
• online communication tools – put students in touch with distant family members, practicing experts, and their peers, wherever they may be located

Within 2-3 years, we might expect to see:

• mobile devices – the new ability to run third-party applications represents a fundamental change in the way we regard mobiles and opens the door to myriad uses for education, entertainment, productivity, and social interaction.
• cloud computing – computing resources resulting from very large “data farms” — specialized data centers that host thousands of servers. Many of us use applications that run in the cloud daily without even being aware that they are cloud-based. Image editors, word processors, social networking tools, and others are examples of cloud-based applications.

In 4-5 years:

• smart objects – link the virtual world and the real: a smart object “knows” about itself and its environment, and can reveal what it is for, who owns it, where and how it was made, and what other objects in the world are like it. Libraries are an obvious place where smart objects come in handy, for purposes like collection tracking and checking materials in and out.
• personal web – a term coined to represent a collection of technologies that confer the ability to reorganize, configure and manage online content rather than just viewing it; but part of the personal web is the underlying idea that web content can be sorted, displayed, and even built upon according to an individual’s personal needs and interests.

The full report gives lots of examples of how these technologies could be used in K-12 and schools. Very interesting stuff and worth a look.

Playing with image generators is one of the most fun things we do in our 23 Things class. Here’s a new one I found via the Generator Blog:

Word Mosaic

This generator from Image Chef allows you to write a comment or a poem in the shape of a heart or other symbols.

I’m testing a live blogging tool called Cover It Live today with Kathy Schrock’s webinar on web 2.0 and professional development. If you are watching live, you can see the text come up as I type it, kind of like an instant message. If you come upon this post after the fact, click on the Replay button to see the updates from the webinar this afternoon.

What happens in three years when this little girl enters school and is told she has to leave her handheld at home?

Thanks to Cathy Nelson’s Professional Thoughts blog for the link.

Have you ever wondered why there isn’t a “go to” place for educator-created media that promotes books, reading and literacy? Well, some of the great thinkers in our profession have. Not only have they been thinking about it, someone (Joyce Valenza) has done something about it.

Bookvideoning.com is a new portal where teachers, librarians and students can share media (in any digital format) to promote books, reading, and literacy K-12.

In my travels around the web, I have seen lots of great video book trailers, Voicethreads, Animotos, and other digital storytelling efforts. What a fabulous idea to have them all collected in one online space.

I encourage you to participate and upload your creations. Here is my contribution.

Right before school started this year, I learned about Glogster from a post on the Neverending Search blog. I visited the site, created an account and in less than an hour had a cool new home page for our Library Policies and Procedures wiki. (It took longer to create the custom images than it did to make the “glog” itself.)

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According to the web site, Glogster is a way to “mix graphics, photos, videos, music and text” into a poster-style format called a “glog.” Glogs can include links to other web sites and be embedded into any site that allows users to paste in JavaScript code.

Now Glogster has introduced Glogster for Educators and I can see this tool being used for all kinds of student projects. Take a look at these examples of student-created glogs:

What a great web 2.0 way to re-invent the traditional poster project!

Google Earth has a cool new layer – Ancient Rome!

In the Ancient Rome 3D layer, you can:

• Fly into Rome as it looked in 320 A.D.
• Tour the interior of famous buildings.
• Visit the sites in 3D such as the Roman Forum, Colosseum and the Forum of Julius Caesar.
• Learn about how the Romans lived.

Here’s a demo:

In working with teachers and librarians, I have noticed that there seems to be an ever-growing divide between the so-called “techies” and the technology illiterate. As technology and the web become increasingly important in our day to day lives, I’m afraid that people who don’t have these skills will cease to be effective in their jobs.

In a recent blog post, Seth Godin listed several basic technology competencies. Take his little quiz. Here are a few of the questions:

• Can you capture something you see on your screen and paste it into Word or PowerPoint?
• Can you open a link you get in an email message?
• Do you have a signature in your outbound email?
• Do you fall for internet hoaxes and forward stuff to friends and then regret it?

These are really basic skills that we all need to have. If there is something on the quiz that you don’t know how to do, I encourage you to find someone to teach you. And if you know how to do these things, teach someone else who doesn’t.

Who knows? You may help someone (or yourself) remain employed!

Photo citation: Collage, uploaded on July 14, 2008 by Editor B.