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.

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.

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!

I didn’t think it was possible, but Animoto has added even more fun stuff. Now available are Christmas songs and a way to use it to make a holiday greeting! Try it!

Photos from Christmas – a set on Flickr by Matti Matilla and used under a Creative Commons license

Dewey poster created with Wordle inspired by the Neverending Search blog.

School librarians everywhere deal with students (and others) who use reams of paper when printing information from the web. Many web sites don’t have a printer-friendly option and a lot of those printouts are taken up by ads, graphics and formatting that the student doesn’t need.

Enter PrintWhatYouLike, a “free web page editor that gives you control over how web pages look when printed” and has the following features:

• Edit any public page in your browser – no installation required!
• Change page font size and type, remove the background, and remove images
• Edit any part of the page by clicking a page element or selecting text
• Any selection can be removed, isolated or widened
• All changes are undoable
• Combine multiple web pages together – edit and print them as one document!

Looks like a really handy tool for those who want to save money paper, ink, and the environment.
Hat tip to Joyce Valenza for the link.

Last week I started seeing blog postings about the new templates on Google Docs, but I didn’t have a chance to look at them until today. As a person who likes to create good looking documents, spreadsheets and presentations, but has little artistic ability, I love templates! As a busy person with lots to do, I also like the idea of not having to start something from scratch. Templates are a life-saver when you want to create something professional looking and don’t have a lot of time.

In the Google Docs collection, there are templates for business of course, but there are also templates for students and teachers: academic calendar, science fair project outline, research paper, lesson plan, grade book, book report, class schedule, you name it – right there waiting for your own customization!

On the personal side, there are templates for wedding planning, sign-up sheets, packing lists and lots more.

I’m always using the templates in Microsoft Office – it’s nice to know that Google Docs has that option now too. Browse through the whole list here.