What one bit of technology could you not do without?

In the course of a day, the most useful piece of technology, from my perspective, is the Smartphone. Not a mobile phone, a Smartphone. The Smartphone lets one connect with the world through 3G (or 4G if one is lucky enough to live in the USA), enables one access to his/her photo collection, list of contacts, twitter stream, Facebook updates and posts, photo and video opportunities, the chance to learn through TED.com or ed.TED.com or even Youtube, listen to one's playlist, the chance to keep down one's email inbox, txt the family and even, make a phone call to anyone in the world (free through Skype..thank you very much).

Without the Smartphone (pre 2010), one relied on a camera for photos, a chunkier digital video camcorder for videos, an iPad for apps and a netbooks/laptop for access to the internet, a newspaper to read the daily news and a landline to take phone calls. Now, all is possible with a Smartphone which, as it names implies, is smart and getting smarter. Geotagging, image stabilsation, better graphics... the list could go on.

Think what you will but without a Smartphone could you rely on yourself to function in daily life...just think how you feel when you leave your Smartphone at home....oh, that's right...peace!

What piece of technology could you not live a day without? Hmmmm.....

Left the best to last - Research

I remember training staff in the use of Google (what's a google I would get asked a google times...it's a million zeros after one although can't find that in many online dictionaries these days!). In those days in the last century the search engine of choice was Dogpile (for meta searches) or Ask Jeeves. They were both great, in particular Ask Jeeves.  Very good results even early on in the life of the Internet. I still will check both out if I have time as sometimes they can pick up some great hits.  I used to keep up with search engine news via Searchenginewatch (gee how that has changed to encompass everything about technology!).Anyway, enough reminiscing....

Checked out Kngine and it looks interesting but pretty basic and more of a local search type app. Also checked out Twurdy as I like it when you can refine your search to level of difficulty. I did think twice though when I saw that it is powered by Bing (don't love Bing) but I did a few searches and its simple interface  meant I will keep it in my list of potentials.

These days I am pretty hooked on Wolfram Alpha and Trove (isn't what the NLA do amazing?) I think Wolfram Alpha has a big future, in particular with mathematics (with Mathematica) and the education side of things. I think this mix of algorithm with human input is the future.

Most of the other searching I do is specific to a subject or academic and so, I use online databases for such searching, usually via NLA or SLNSW. Indeed, if I reflect on my searching practices I will go to Google for a quick search but if I know what area I am looking in I will use a tried and trusted specific website and use its internal search engine. For example, when looking for travel info I will go to Flyertalk or Milepoint and when I am looking for authors and books I will use Fantastic Fiction and Goodreads or for age recommendations I will use the WA DET catalogue.

Anyway, this is my last blog for the course. I am off to do a Power Searching course with Google at http://www.google.com/insidesearch/landing/powersearching.html - it starts July 10th and looks pretty interesting.

Week 10 - eContent and The End

I love eBooks and eContent. I love that I can carry all that stuff around in my handbag. But I hate all the platforms. I hate that I can't use them seamlessly. I live in a mixed up world of Macs, Android including the Kindle Fire (don't ask) and Windows...one word...frustration.

eContent -  I recently discovered Librivox and listened to Pride and Prejudice. Some chapters were better than others as there were different narrators for different sets of chapters (hey it's free). And we all know that with audio books, the narrator is the most important part. Even a wonderful book can sound clumsy if the intonations, pauses and speed of the speech are incorrect. In this vein I also tried free audiobooks on YouTube by Librivox. Some of the books have powerpoint style videos to go with the audio -somewhat irritating for me but I showed the YouTube channel to some students and they really loved it....sort of let them do 2 things at once.

Scribd - I do use Scribd to access document and presentations for the web when I find them online but for work I use Slideshare to upload. It is great for sharing resources online with students (yeh! no more paper print outs). It also allows students and other interested people to have access to these resources - I am all for sharing these resources and making them social (isn't that phrase great... not sure where I heard that one first).

Clipped from Slideshare.com

Anyway, not sure why I chose Slideshare over Scridb but in reflecting on my choice now and comparing the two, it seems you can download documents etc off Scribd and convert from text to speech. That sounds like a great feature and one I shall look into soon...maybe, it is best to use both?

Digital Storytelling - the iLearn link to the 31 of the best digital storytelling sites caught my attention (who said there isn't enough time to explore them all!!!!!). At school, students have used ToonDoos and also a great resource from ACMI (Australian Centre for Moving Images) - storyboard generator. Both great fun.......

As was this whole program. There is still much more I want to explore (hopefully we still will have access to the modules?) and refresh some of the tools I am already using.

Week 9 - You Call It Condensing...I Call It Content Curation or Just Plain Organising Stuff

If you want to manage your time then ignore Web 2.0...it is all engrossing, all amazing and seemingly never ending. Once again, my colleague and I today discussed why some web apps, web tools (call them what you will) rise to the top of the pile. Why Pinterest and not some other similar tool? Why Instagram and not Picnik? Anyway, we were just musing and that sort of fits in with this weeks blog about saving time and managing yourself on the web....:)

I like the idea of catching and condensing and I think that is what I already try and do every day so as not to miss out on interesting new tools, bits of information that may come in useful when talking to the boss or a teacher or deciding on a computer platform for the whole school! I lamented a few weeks back that Google notebook had disappeared and I had used this as a catching and condensing/read later tool and as a collaboration tool. I discovered just last week that all those notebooks are now Google docs

Clipped from Google Docs

Yeh! So much fab information and insights into still relevant ideas that I can now use again.

So, I've seemingly signed up for Strawberryj.am but am still waiting for contact so have moved on to paper.li. A few of my favourite tweeters use it. So I set up my account and then updated my lists (an attempt to streamline my reading of tweets!) in Twitter so that my streams into paper.li were more condensed and made sense. Shall see how it goes at The Skiing Librarian Weekly.

Still waiting for strawberryj.am email!!!! Not in the junk mail but am I suppose to do something else but try and sign up?

Checked out Topicmarks as this looks like a very handy tool as I read a lot of online articles as well as online journals (but these usually have an abtract to read). Added the url of an article about teenage brains that I want to read but I think I could have read it faster than topicmarks can summarise it (still waiting!)..hmmm...tried again....now giving up and tried Freesummarizer which worked in an instant (an no email signup..good). Article was great though and of much interest as I am quite intrigued by this area of research after reading an article in NG last year.

Well another module down (and no email from strawberryj.am nor has topicmarks summarised my article)...still great fun and I organised my twitter followers into lists so a productive module as well.

Week 7 - The Image Culture

Images are where my organised life falls into an abyss of embarrassment. I have photos and videos everywhere and when I do try and start to organise, like I tried with Picasa, Google goes and changes it with Google+. This was the page that greeted me when I wanted to learn more about Picasa and Google+ integration (saving this for later reading):

Clipped from support.google.com/picasa

Saying that, when I finally worked out how to use my screen capture app, I saved the captured webpage into Picasa and added it to this blog from there! Seamless integration, once I worked it out.

I read other blogger comments about Picasa Web Albums and Google+ and learnt how to turn off the Picasa Photo automatic notification check box from Bearman Cartoons. That was a great tip as it is so annoying to be notifying people you had shared an album with and then added more photos to.

Photo Banks - I usually recommend students use Flickr CC for finding and using online images in their assessment/homework tasks. I really like Flick CC as it searches creative commons images and the photo bank is impressive. Now I also like morgueFile after investigating it this week. I really like that is creative commons and I also really like the morgueFile classroom for learning how to take and edit images.

After discussions with my colleague, who is also completing this fab course, I am off to integrate my new photo editing knowledge and image bank knowledge with our school's Diigo presence. And I also need to check out Zoom.it..it is very useful (especially for the image above).