Global Education Conference

As you get back into school and start planning professional development for the upcoming year, be sure to check out the Global Education Conference.

The conference (online and free) will be held November 15 - 19, 2010, at multiple times and in multiple languages. This innovative conference sounds very exciting. The two co-chairs, Steve Hargadon and Lucy Gray, are nationally recognized educators. As you will see, there are numerous opportunities to be involved –as a presenter, on an advisory board, an attendee, etc… and the site is still under development with more information being added regularly.

There's an App for that! Mobile devices for research

Check out this SlideShare Presentation from Yale University Science Librarian, Joe Murphy. Will students increasingly use smartphones to access databases? Our Gale databases can currently be accessed on the iphone! It will be interesting to interview students re: apps when school starts.

Mobile devices for research

View more documents from Joe Murphy.

Tools for the 21st Century Teacher

Just in time for the start a school: handbook of web tools for students & teachers:

Open publication - Free publishing - More 21st century

Diigo - social bookmarking for serious web surfers

Diigo is definitely my bookmarking tool of choice. If you haven't yet tried it, take a look at the video to explore all the possibilities.

Diigo V5: Collect and Highlight, Then Remember! from diigobuzz on Vimeo.

Open Mic for Open Minds

We have been talking about the possibility of an open mike event at our library for a while. Here's a relatively short video of a recent program at Harold Washington Library in Chicago:

StudentSpeak Webisode 9 from Spotlight on Vimeo.

The students talk about their use of social media including FaceBook and Twitter to increase attendance. This event was profiled recently by Spotlight magazine which highlights projects and people funded by the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative and covers the intersections of technology and learning.

Snap Shots (similar to Apture)

Just a heads up that I have added the Snap Shots feature to this blog.


Introducing Snap Shots from Snap.com

I just installed a tool on this site called Snap Shots that enhances links with visual previews of the destination site, interactive excerpts of Wikipedia articles, MySpace profiles, IMDb profiles and Amazon.com, displays online videos, RSS, MP3s, photos, etc which is similar to Apture.com It is supposed to save you time, both as the blogger and the blog reader. See Quick Start guide.

With Snap Shots, users can mouse-over links to get the most appropriate shot of content for that link. Snap Shots features: (from their website)

* Link to an online video and we'll create an inline player for it.
* For photostreams, we'll provide an inline photo album.
* Investment sites can get online stock charts.
* Like Google maps? We even put them in shots.

Snap Shots brings you the information without your having to leave the site, while other times it lets you "look ahead," before deciding if you want to follow a link or not.

So, you download an add-on to Firefox first. Use the latest version.

If you don't like this feature, just click the Options icon in the upper right corner of the Snap Shot and opt-out. Scroll down this page, for a further explanation.

Move your cursor over the following link to try it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/picasso

or try this photoshot from flickr: Move your cursor over the following link to try it. http://flickr.com/photos/.../345009210/

I am really experimenting here and hope that this does not get too annoying. Send feedback if you use it.

What do you do when you have 30 tabs open? Yikes! Look at Tab Candy

Tab Candy is a tasty new Firefox treat in development right now! My work style is completely insane to most and I end up very distracted by all the hyperlinks available. Maybe there is hope for me with this tool that promises to be incredibly useful.

Take a look at the video below, and let me know if you can't wait to try Tab Candy.

An Introduction to Firefox's Tab Candy from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.