Youtube is my GO TO site for videos over United Streaming or other video sites. There's such a wealth of information and you can pretty much find anything on there. Videos on youtube make it onto the actual news stations as Viral Videos and people talk about videos that they saw like they do with movies and tv shows. You know you've seen them.... the dancing baby, charlie bit my finger, the keyboard cat, Numa Numa, and the evolution of dance. The whole premise of Youtube is great (when used wisely). EVERYDAY people can upload videos of themselves doing whatever (illustrated by the hundreds if not thousands of coke and mentos rocket videos). You never know when an instant Youtube celebrity will be born.
I prefer Youtube over United Streaming for a couple of reasons. United Streaming is definitely more educational - many of the math videos that I find on there are instructional videos - a person with some kids, teaching some concept. Youtube will also pull up those kinds of videos, but I can also find music/songs/rap videos on the topic as well. The feedback and rating system as well as the number of views on Youtube also help me find good videos to use. UnitedStreaming's rating system still leaves something to be desired and it's not as popular as Youtube. However, I do like how UnitedStreaming breaks up their video and how they are able to pull out a specific 2 minute clip in a video that is 25 minutes long so I don't have to watch the entire video to find a specific clip.
Here's a hilarious math video titled Mathmaticious that's gained over 2 million views. It's catchy and appropriate to show to students. Very clever in the way he presents the different math topics in a popular song that the kids would enjoy.
This is one of my favorite Youtube videos - It's a guy playing Canon in D on his electric guitar. It is incredible! I love the traditional and classical version of Canon in D, but this version is awesome. A real talented musician. With over 70 million views, here it is!
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Monday, February 22, 2010
Thing 12
I could play with some of these sites ALLLL day. I tried to use Xtranormal to make a video, but the server kept timing out. Moving on..... The next one I tried was BeFunky that allows you to add effects to your photos. I liked the second one and the last picture made (the last one needs an upgraded subscription - hence the big fat logo in the middle of the picture). Not sure of the social aspect of this tool, but it is fun to see the different effects you can do for just one picture. Photofun anyone?
Another popular tool I've seen used already is Wordle. You type/paste in a bunch of text and it creates a picture of the commonly used words. The bigger the word, the higher the frequency that word appeared in your text. The Ning I joined was discussing the use of Wordle in a math class. It's a nice visual when you discuss the frequency of things occurring. You can discuss words that have similar frequencies, greater or less, and I wonder if the actual measurement of the word (a word being 6 cm and another 12 cm) - does the longer word in fact show up twice as much?
Now I don't speak Snowman but I think he's saying "RAARRR Saylor! I will avenge my snowman brother!"
The back story to this appeared in last week's edition of Snowman Chronicles:
Another popular tool I've seen used already is Wordle. You type/paste in a bunch of text and it creates a picture of the commonly used words. The bigger the word, the higher the frequency that word appeared in your text. The Ning I joined was discussing the use of Wordle in a math class. It's a nice visual when you discuss the frequency of things occurring. You can discuss words that have similar frequencies, greater or less, and I wonder if the actual measurement of the word (a word being 6 cm and another 12 cm) - does the longer word in fact show up twice as much?
Here is a project I made in Blabberize that makes your photos talk!
Now I don't speak Snowman but I think he's saying "RAARRR Saylor! I will avenge my snowman brother!"
The back story to this appeared in last week's edition of Snowman Chronicles:
Thing 11
Anti-Social Bookmarking! I've signed up for a Del.iciou.us account and have tagged a few of the math websites I found through searching. So far, I haven't shared with anyone since I'm still figuring out how the sharing aspect works (hence the anti-social aspect). The idea is good and I like the fact that I can access my bookmarks from ANY computer as opposed to them just being tied to just my home or school computer. BIG advantage here. The social aspect is what will be fun to play around with. Right now - besides keeping a running list for you, you could really just use Google to find the site for you again, but I'm interested to use the sharing aspect. Hmm... when you share, do you have to enter in the person's Delicious account name or can you enter in the email? EDIT: Okay, you can put either an email address or the person's Delicious account name to share sites.
I also like how the site will tell you how many others have tagged/saved the site - to me, the more popular the site is, the better resource it is (in theory). So that in itself should save me some time. However, I'm finding that I need to refine my searches. Searching for "algebra" comes back with many hits - and some of the popular tags are ones that I don't personally find useful as a teacher.
When I send people links to sites, it's mostly a solitary news article, not really an entire site. For this purpose, I don't really see an advantage of doing this through Delicious. When I see an article about a baby stroller recall - I can immediately send it to my sister and brother in law and I don't necessarily want to bookmark/archive this site or tag it. The list of tag words also can be overwhelming too - as I was adding sites, when I had 3 bookmarked I had a list of 13 tag words. Imagine if I had 100 sites with 3 tag words (minimum) - that's a list of at least 300 tags! Yikes... Also when I save a site, I wish the tags the tag words other people used to tag the site would come up automatically!
Another disadvantage is that I really don't know many people that use Delicious yet! And I have to search for them by the name they used to sign up... not by email. That might make it hard to look for the right people. My Delicious name is "J"... yes I know.. so creative and specific!
I don't even know what I was searching for on the site, but I found a REALLY fun site to play around with called Build Your Wild Self where you can create an avatar of yourself made up of different animal parts.
I also like how the site will tell you how many others have tagged/saved the site - to me, the more popular the site is, the better resource it is (in theory). So that in itself should save me some time. However, I'm finding that I need to refine my searches. Searching for "algebra" comes back with many hits - and some of the popular tags are ones that I don't personally find useful as a teacher.
When I send people links to sites, it's mostly a solitary news article, not really an entire site. For this purpose, I don't really see an advantage of doing this through Delicious. When I see an article about a baby stroller recall - I can immediately send it to my sister and brother in law and I don't necessarily want to bookmark/archive this site or tag it. The list of tag words also can be overwhelming too - as I was adding sites, when I had 3 bookmarked I had a list of 13 tag words. Imagine if I had 100 sites with 3 tag words (minimum) - that's a list of at least 300 tags! Yikes... Also when I save a site, I wish the tags the tag words other people used to tag the site would come up automatically!
Another disadvantage is that I really don't know many people that use Delicious yet! And I have to search for them by the name they used to sign up... not by email. That might make it hard to look for the right people. My Delicious name is "J"... yes I know.. so creative and specific!
I don't even know what I was searching for on the site, but I found a REALLY fun site to play around with called Build Your Wild Self where you can create an avatar of yourself made up of different animal parts.
Here is me as "normal"
Here is me as my wild self!
NO Comments on how this second picture is my normal one please!
Create your wild self! Would love to see it.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Thing 10
I've originally heard this term used in music where someone has mashed together songs by different artists. The first music mashup I heard was made by someone who goes by Norwegian Recycling. Click on the name to see a Youtube video of one of my favorite mashups done by him called 8 become 1 (mixed 8 songs into 1 song). The one posted on our site with the Mashup of the top 25 billboard hits is ridiculous! I love it!
I enjoy the Flickr color picker. It's just so aesthetically soothing to look at similar hues in different pictures. I could use this to get some artwork up on my bare walls and easily match it to various colors of the room! Here's a collage made using Flickr color picker!
One other web maship that I read about is called Twittervision. It mashes together Twitter and Google Maps. You basically get to see a flat world map and then Tweets will pop up from the map in real time. Even cooler is Twittervision in 3D which is the same concept but in 3D using a spinning globe! This is more for entertainment though, but it is fascinating to get a glimpse of what other people are saying all over the world. Especially when the Olympics are going on, it's neat to see what people in other countries say about the results! Here's an example of what Twittervision in 3D looks like. It's mesmerizing if you leave it on and just watch it spin. While watching the tweets pop up, I found out that it's officially fish face week on Facebook! So if your friends start changing their pictures - now you know why!
Monday, February 15, 2010
Thing 9
I've been a Picasa fan, but am enjoying Flickr so far. I generally enjoy uploading my pictures to the internet as a safety net in case something happens to my computer. When my last laptop gave me the blue screen of death and I wasn't sure if it would recover, I was kicking myself for not backing up my photos. Well, my computer did recover and the first thing I did was upload my photos to a photo storage site and backed it up with an external hard drive. However, the external hard drives have a shelf life too... so it seems the safest place is online! Without the rolls of films to develop, my digital photos hardly get developed or shared as much as the hard copies did. With sites like Picasa and Flickr, it's easy to share albums with others - I'm interested to see and explore the sharing aspect of Flickr.
Thing 8
I see what's going on here.... the startup pages are like the SuperWalmarts trying to take over the world - turning into one stop places for your internet needs. Whatever happened to "Surfing the Web"? Is that out like school on a snow day? It's not like we have to drive around or expend energy to go from one site to another. Sometimes the journey from one site to another allows you to find other treasured troves on the net. If you only go to one customized place all the time, you'll miss out on the other things that are out there!
Oh Sam-I-Am, why don't you go and see
What's waiting for you and me
Not on NetVibes or a one stop site
Surf around from noon 'til night!
Don't give in to Pageflakes either
Take a seat, take a breather
The whole world you have access to
But your start page will limit you!
(Inspired by Dr. Suess's Green Eggs and Ham)
Alright - I know what you're thinking. I could be the Sam-I-Am by not taking advantage of the Web 2.0 way of doing things. So I chose to do a Netvibe page instead of Pageflakes. Pageflakes reminds me too much of snowflakes and the bitter cold! I loaded it with the following widgets: Web Note (things to do list/post it feature), Word of the Day (Math teachers use words too Thing 2!, CNN news, New York Times, local news from the Freep, a cool Widget called Bordelize that just has thumbnails of cool pictures that were recently posted up such as this one and this one, the local weather, a game called 3 foot Ninja that doesn't seem to work, and finally an education blog called Weblogg-ed.
Sam-I-Am, it's alright, it's okay
Where widgets and content come to play
In one place, saving energy and time
Your carpal tunnel syndrome will be benign
From less surfing and typing in
Let the chapter of start up pages begin.
Oh Sam-I-Am, why don't you go and see
What's waiting for you and me
Not on NetVibes or a one stop site
Surf around from noon 'til night!
Don't give in to Pageflakes either
Take a seat, take a breather
The whole world you have access to
But your start page will limit you!
(Inspired by Dr. Suess's Green Eggs and Ham)
Alright - I know what you're thinking. I could be the Sam-I-Am by not taking advantage of the Web 2.0 way of doing things. So I chose to do a Netvibe page instead of Pageflakes. Pageflakes reminds me too much of snowflakes and the bitter cold! I loaded it with the following widgets: Web Note (things to do list/post it feature), Word of the Day (Math teachers use words too Thing 2!, CNN news, New York Times, local news from the Freep, a cool Widget called Bordelize that just has thumbnails of cool pictures that were recently posted up such as this one and this one, the local weather, a game called 3 foot Ninja that doesn't seem to work, and finally an education blog called Weblogg-ed.
Sam-I-Am, it's alright, it's okay
Where widgets and content come to play
In one place, saving energy and time
Your carpal tunnel syndrome will be benign
From less surfing and typing in
Let the chapter of start up pages begin.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Thing 7
RSS is appropriately named as Real Simple Syndication and it's true! It does make web surfing Real Simple. I set up my Google Reader and started subscribing to the sites that I usually visit when I go online. It's a bit overwhelming at first because I usually go to sites such as cnn and yahoo to read the news and since they constantly have updates, those appear first in my reader before the blog posts. Since I'm reading updated news stories, there are usually many of them as well.
The reader does provide a way for me to just see stories from each subscription site but I have to admit, I miss the friendly layout and links to related stories on each of the independent news sites.
However, using Google Reader makes it easy to see updates on everyone's blog since you don't have to keep rechecking each blog separately to see if someone has updated it, but I may undo my subscriptions to the news sites since these sites are constantly updated and the chances of me going to the site with nothing new posted is very rare.
I agree with Carolyn's post about not really having many sites to follow or read right now. Since I am following mostly blogs on here, I find the blogger dashboard being able to do the same job as google reader.
Time to find some of those orange symbols on pages to make Google Reader more worthwhile!
The reader does provide a way for me to just see stories from each subscription site but I have to admit, I miss the friendly layout and links to related stories on each of the independent news sites.
However, using Google Reader makes it easy to see updates on everyone's blog since you don't have to keep rechecking each blog separately to see if someone has updated it, but I may undo my subscriptions to the news sites since these sites are constantly updated and the chances of me going to the site with nothing new posted is very rare.
I agree with Carolyn's post about not really having many sites to follow or read right now. Since I am following mostly blogs on here, I find the blogger dashboard being able to do the same job as google reader.
Time to find some of those orange symbols on pages to make Google Reader more worthwhile!
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