Serendipity35

Sipping from the fire hose that is the Web gets harder every day because of the amount of information that is available. You probably have your own methods of filtering or curating the Web for yourself. Perhaps, following this blog and others is one of those ways that you use other "trusted" sources to do some filtering for you.

I find that even on a site like twitter, where the messages are short or abbreviated, I follow about 400 people. If I leave my twitter page open and unobserved or a an hour, there will be about a hundred posts. That's more than I have time to sift through or read. One thing I do is create lists on twitter so that I can focus my attention on a topic. When I look at my public list for educational technology, I am seeing 90 people, and my list for environmental tweets only has 25. That makes it more manageable. If you trust my curation, you can follow my public lists. (I also use private lists for my family and friends.)

There are many sites where people intentionally curate the web around topics and save that information both for themselves and for others to use.  David Kapuler collected some sites (his blog is cyber-kap.blogspot.com) that I use, and others that are new to me.

Some of these sites could certainly be used by teachers to filter the web for their students and for certain assignments.

Pinterest - coming on strong, this site offers a way of curating the visual web by pinning images on a virtual bulletin board. My own experiment with Pinterest is to try using it just for the poetry side of my life http://pinterest.com/poetsonline/ Teachers can easily use Pinterest or other sites here to create a curated list for an author, topic etc.

Bag the Web has you put things into "bags" which you can embed into a site

MentorMob lets you create "playlists" that can contain different types of media such as video, articles, pictures, etc. Once these playlists are created, they can be rated and shared with others.

List.ly creates an interactive list that others can commenton and vote on.

Middlespot takes another approach where you can browse the web and stick sites onto a "dashboard," which can be edited and shared with others. (This site also has a paid account.)

Paper.li is a site I have used for awhile to publish an online "newspaper" from your own web content (twitter feed etc.). It's a kind of meta-curation since it further filters things like twitter which I have already filtered by lists. It automatically creates your newspaper and updates it on a scheduled basis. (It does not archive/save issues.) I have created one with my general interests http://paper.li/ronkowitz and another focused on poetry and writing http://paper.li/poetsonline The application also pushes a notice to twitter and Facebook when my daily issue is published.

Similar sites that I have not used are Searcheeze for text, video, images, articles turned into a digital magazine and Scoop.it which turns social media into a digital magazine.

Bundlr shares your curation as a grid or timeline

Storify promotes itself as a way to tell social stories by curating web content through video, photos, and text.

Flubaroo is a Google Apps for Education integrated tool that lets you easily grade assignments and do in-class assessments. Flubaroo is a free tool that helps you quickly grade multiple-choice or fill-in-blank assignments.

It works with Google Docs. It is more than just a grading tool. It also computes average assignment score, average score per question, and flags low-scoring questions. It shows you a grade distribution graph and gives you the option to email each student their grade, and an answer key.

Join us to learn about how this tool works, and what's in store for Flubaroo in the future. Also join to share your experiences using this tool, and your ideas to improve it. For those interested in writing their own similar tools, we'll also spend a little time discussing how to get started writing Google Apps Scripts.

Flubaroo is an edCode.org project.


This Google+ Hangout video archive was part of the Education On Air conference on May 2, 2012. Watch to learn about how this tool works, and what's in store for Flubaroo in the future.




https://sites.google.com/site/eduonair/conference-sessions/using-google-apps-to-enhance-instruction

Pinterest is an online pinboard where people organize and share things they love. It is also described as a vision board-styled social photo sharing website.  There are ways that teachers are using Pinterest.

I put in for an invite for the service at http://pinterest.com/ Users of Pinterest curate themed image boards, populating them with media found online using the "Pin It" button, or uploaded from their computer. Each such item of media is known as a "pin," and can be a pictures, a video, a discussion or a monetary gift. Pins can be grouped into "boards," which are sets of pins created on a given topic.

I have had three friends in the past two months contact me frantically because their computers crashed. It wasn't just the lost hard drive that had them frantic - it was the "lost" documents or photos. None of them had full backups of their files. I'm pretty tech-savvy but I'm no expert. Luckily, I was able to retrieve all the files from one hard drive. I retrieved some files that weren't corrupted from another. Unfortunately, I could do nothing at all with the third hard drive.All was lost.

As tech people say, it's not a question of IF your hard drive will crash, it's just a question of WHEN it will crash. Of course, I highly recommend that you use some kind of regular backup. You can buy a backup drive or use flashdrives - but they can crash too and, more critically, you have to remember to actually do the backups.

So, the preferred method these days is to store your work "in the cloud" - online on a computer server that will do regular backing up for you.

There are several well known services like this but I am recommending Dropbox because they offer a FREE 2 Gigabyte account (that's a lot of documents!) of basic backup protection.

You sign up, install a small program on your computer and it creates a folder (your DRopbox) on your computer to put files in. You use the folder just like any other folder - but it will be automatically backed up online.

If you have other computers, you can add Dropbox there too and then those files will appear on both computers. No more emailing files back and forth or carrying them on a flashdrive. And you can access your files by signing in at Dropbox.com from any computer.

You can also share folders in your Dropbox with other Dropbox users. That would be great for collaborative projects. If I make changes to a file in our shared folder, you would see the changes the next time you open it.

The 2GB storage is free and you can add additional storage space both by paying for it (50GB costs $99 a year) and for every friend who joins and installs Dropbox, they will give you both 250 MB of bonus space (up to a limit of 8 GB).

Okay, I pointed you to a solution. Don't contact me when your computer crashes and you lose those files!