Awesome Highlighter is a web site for a free online highlighting tool. This web site lets you highlight text, pictures or video from a web page and then it gives you a link to your highlighted page. You can email the page to yourself or share it via Twitter, Facebook, Delicious or Wordpress. You can add notes to the highlighted pages as well. A record of your highlighted pages is kept for later reference. This is a great research tool. Try it today!
Free Online Highlighting Tool
How you can use Google Calendar for collaboration
Google calendar can be a great tool for learning. I have been using it professionaly for a couple of years now to keep track of meetings and events. A new feature of Google calendar is the ability to attach a Google Doc to a calendar event. This makes using Google Calendar for lesson planning a powerful tool. After you create a lesson or unit, you can share your calendar and relevant documents with other educators in your building, district or beyond and therefore have the opportunity to collaborate with others. This will generate new ideas for your own lesson plan, plus provide you with more resources and support. What a great way to display 21st Century skills! All you have to do is enable this feature within Google Calendar by clicking on the Settings tab and then Labs tab. Scroll down and Enable the Attach Google Docs option and Save. Voila!
Just a reminder: If you share a calendar that has attached documents, you must give those people permission to view/edit your shared documents. Sharing the calendar does NOT automatically give them permission to view/edit the attached documents.
Check out the video below that I just found (2/1/10) on how to use this feature:
Wiffiti – Great site for all your tweets!
I attended the Virginia Society for Technology in Education (VSTE) conference the past 3 days. One new cool tool I learned about was Wiffiti. Wiffiti is a site that allows you to use the hash tags from Twitter to “aggregate” them in one place. It takes the hash tags (up to 5) and creates an interactive screen. As the tweets are tweeted, the most recent pops up and then it rotates all tweets around. It also provides you the option to list them in a timeline format. I created one from the VSTE conference but after some time it may change if others use the “vste” hash tag in their tweets, so beware! 
Xtranormal – Make Free Movies
Xtranormal is a website where anyone can create free movies very easily. “If you can type, you can make movies.” Just text or type and voila! A movie is made! It is really that easy. Try it and see for yourself. You’ll be glad you did!
The Complete Guide to Google Wave
Have you caught the Google Wave yet? Well, if you haven’t, you owe it to yourself to check it out. I love using Google Docs and the new Google Wave has been designed to help groups of people collaborate on documents on the web. To me, Google Wave is your email on steriods with all the cool Google collaboration tools built in. I truly loathe sending emails back and forth, back and forth, till their size gets so large and the true reason for the email is lost in all the many emails in my inbox! Then, when trying to figure out exactly what everyone is trying to say, that gets lost in the shuffle too. Google Wave takes care of all that as long as you understand it is like using your email but without all the tons of emails you have to sort through to get your job done. I have to work smarter and not harder and this cool tool will help me do just that. Try it and share how it works for you! Here is a great guide to help you in catching the Google Wave! Checkout this video that helps to explain Google Wave better. Enjoy!
Comic Strip About Google
This comic strip was shared with me at the Virginia Educational Technology Conference this week. Its kinda cute and about Google, of which I have been ‘google-eyed’ for a long time. Enjoy!
The “Tech Commandments” – A Guide to Proper Integration
The “Tech Commandments” are all an educator, leader, administrator or even a Tech Director needs to help us make the right choices in our tech decisions and not just “buy” stuff just because you can! How will you support it? Who gets what training? This presentation really makes you think!
Drop.io – A cool way to share anything, anywhere
Drop.io is a cool tool used for simple real-time sharing, collaboration, and presentation. Teachers can use it for any content area at any grade level. Drop.io allows you to share text, video, and audio media. Users can share their “files and collaborate in real time by web, email, phone, mobile, and more. Create each drop in two clicks and share what you want, how you want, with whom you want.”
You can also use Drop.io as a bookmarking service. Drop.io’s free voicemail service allows you to make mp3 recordings without the need for any software. Drop.io can also be used to conduct online, real-time, presentations. Best of all, Drop.io is free.
Google Docs Equation Editor
Google Docs has now added an Equation Editor as part of their Back-to-School features for students. The equation editor allows you to easily complete problem sets online or write papers that include equations. You can even take notes in your math class or answer questions using Google Docs. Also added is superscripts and subscripts that can be used for expressing chemical compounds or algebraic expressions. Check it out on the Google Docs Blog which also has a list of links to other sites of interest at the bottom of the page.
ISTEVision News – NECC – Washington, DC – 6/28/09
The International Society for Technology in Education’s (ISTE) National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) is one of the greatest conferences I have ever had the pleasure to attend. This year makes my 4th NECC and I look forward to next summer when it becomes ISTE2010 in Denver! Below is a short video about the conference and some cool tech tools. Fast forward to 5.22 and you will see yours truly being asked about what cool tools I learned about. Of course, it was Twitter Fountain that day. Just don’t understand the eye thingy though, do you? 
