Astronomy.net helps you identify all celestial bodies in your pictures of the night sky.  Their promise: “Input an image and we’ll give you back astrometric calibration meta-data, plus lists of known objects falling inside the field of view.”  Also, a nice selection of photographs of space on the Flicker group.

Lexipedia.com is a free visual thesaurus, providing definitions, synonyms and antonyms in a visual way.  I used to use the Visual Thesaurus until they started to charge for the tool.  This one’s free, so check it out!

Tinychat.com allows you to create a chat room on the fly.  Just log in and it creates a web address for you.  Then send it to everyone you want to join and then you can chat.  I’ve never seem many real educational applications for chatrooms, but if you want to get a group together quickly, this is a great solution.

Gmail finally allows you to customize the colors anyway you wish.  This is a real nice addition to the web interface.  Now, to see the colors apply themselves as well to Reader, Calendar and Docs someday.  I’d like to see the tools feel like more of a single application than 4 distinct tools.

Here’s a good blog post for students prior to going online.  “Behaving Well Online” Sometimes we rush them online and could do a better job preparing them with important guidelines.

I’ve been messing around with embedding different objects into our school website.  One useful tool is the ability to embed a RSS feed easily using WidgetBox.   Here’s my sample with Interesting Thing of the Day.  Any teacher can embed this by simple copying the embed code into Plain Text (or HTML code) of a page.

Also, Embedr allows you to embed video playlists (haven’t tried this one yet.)

Tech Enthusiasts:

Interested in building a computer from scratch, check out this overview of the process.

Need to create a favorite icon for your website?  Here’s a website worth trying out: FavIcon Generator. The Fav Icon is the small graphic that appears to the left of a web address in your browser. Some sites do not have one.

A two-part article and interview defining the term “cloud computing.”  I tend to refer to cloud computing as simply: doing what you do on your computer without an Internet connection only on the Internet.

In the News:

Pennsylvania has a bill to ban all electronic devices in schools.  Good luck on this.  Personally, it’s each teacher’s job to set the standards for their classes.  Why must we enforce general standards on everyone?

If you are a Netflix user, Queued allows you to manage your Netflix cue from your desktop.  It appears useful, but like many AIR application, they feel clunky to use.  I like the idea, but what was so wrong with the web interface to demand this effort.  You still need Internet access and I see like improvement on the Netflix interface.

For Fun:

50 of the Most Insane Things Never Seen on Google Maps

Google Proves Humanity is Sick and Sad, and Absolutely Hilarious