Note: If you mispell Jon Stewart’s name, a bot on Twitter will contact your Twitter account, telling you messed up.  Classic.

Lynda.com. I had the opportunity to try out Lynda.com recently due to a promotion through Adobe for a 30 day free trial.  Lynda has tutorials in all software applications and technologies (CSS, programming languages).  With any large selection, there is a mix of quality in the tutorials.  I wasn’t disappointed by the quality of the tutorials, but each trainer had a different approach, and it requires finding your preference of training.  The monthly subscription to view all content is $25.  The cost is clearly worth the price if you are determined to learn the content.

Adobe TV devotes its training to Adobe products, but it’s free and very good.  I have been going through the Flex in a Week series.  The training is high quality, though the videos don’t seem to be organized correctly–the next video is often not the one mentioned at the end of the previous video.  Also, it seems the trainers in Adobe videos, when accessing external data, always connect to a ColdFusion server, which always annoys me.  I have no idea how to use ColdFusion and would benefit from a server solution like PHP/MySQL.  I did locate some additional tutorials on using PHP and Flex.

**I initially viewed these tutorials in Adobe Media Player, but though the Media Player has potential.  It’s clunky and not the best UI for viewing a series of videos.  I became so frustrated with the Media Player, I searched for Adobe videos and found Adobe TV.

I finally had time to dig into an online tool called Prezi (www.prezi.com) and found it a refreshing and compelling approach to the presentation software idea. The user interface is easy to learn and it took me about 30 minutes to figure out the majority of the tools to create a presentation.

The main control tool that allows you to write, format, create frames and paths, and view the show is shown below.  It appears in the top left hand corner.

Understanding the workflow:

1. Imagine a large piece of white butcher paper.  You can type and add pictures all over it.  Think of a brainstorming session where you put all your ideas down in any order.  You don’t have to know the overall picture from the start, just get down ideas and visuals.

Here’s a sample below:

2.  Click on the white butcher paper and add text, images, grouping main ideas and topics.

3.  Click on an item and you can move, enlarge, or rotate the object to your requirements (using tool below)

4.  Add frames around blocks of content (text, images).

5. Finally, create a path from first item to next and so on.  This creates the “slide order” or the path which the presentation will take.

Key concepts you will need to understand: frames and paths.  Frames group content together into one location.  Paths are used to connect pieces of content or frames of content.

Here’s my first Prezi presentation for an in-service I conducted.

Literacy: Adolescent Literacy, literacy resources for parents, teachers, and students.  Including classroom strategies list and research articles.

College/Career: Interactive 3D and maps-based college search site at Egiate.com

College/Career: Google offers scholarships for minority and special needs students.

Science: University of Utah has developed an interactive website for learning and teaching genetics with animations and simulations.

Science: The journey of Darwin online.

Social Studies: Interactive website on the Lincoln Memorial.

Social Studies: You can now find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts at Google Scholar.  Link

Teaching: Outline your classroom floorplan with Classroom Architect.  For those who don’t use Easy Grade Pro.

Teaching: Good video created by the Art Institute of Chicago preparing students for a museum visit.  Link (YouTube)

Research: 100 Google Tricks that will save you time in School

Research: Search images and see their interrelatedness to each with Google Swirl.

Learning: WatchKnow — Videos for Kids to Learn from – Scouring the web for the best of YouTube and other video sites

Learning: Word Ahead — Vocabulary Videos.  Another way to learn vocabulary.

Learning: A list of 20 virtual field trips for students.

Technology: Why is the My Computer Running so slow?  This question comes up all the time from computer users.  Here’s a list of popular software to help clean up your computer and get it running smoothly again.

Technology: Google OS – the next big thing from Google.  Good video for beginners to understand operating systems, browsers, and the future of computing.

Technology: The three easiest ways to blog.  Posterous.com, Tumblr.com and now TypePad Micro. And a review of all three.

Creativity: Guide to Tapping into the World of Comics

Reference: World Clock – a clock that tells what’s happening over the passage of time.

Art: Artnatomy: Anatonical basis of facial expression learning tool.

For Fun: Autocompleteme.com shows the bizarre searches of Google users.

Also, take a look at Collecta.com.  It’s a real time search of what people are talking about on the Internet.  You can search for keywords, and it streams from blogs and Twitter and other sites.  It’s a nice way to follow along during an event.

You can now embed Google Documents into your webpages.  A Scribd-like feature, but with Google Docs.  A great new addition.

Check out this cool Wordle of Obama’s student address!  Most common words used: school, education, responsibility and know.

Where I get my news:

Podcasts:

• Twit: This Week in Tech, MacBreak Weekly and Windows Weekly. Leo loves to talk tech and it’s contagious.  Some of his guests can become quite obnoxious when they talk about how much money they spend on Apple products.
• Buzz Outloud: Daily Tech News — Consistent news update with thoughtful analysis on the most part
• Tekzilla: Short tips and tricks on technology – Useful one minute podcast about tips and tricks on your computer

Blogs:

• Lifehacker – My all-time favorite for tips, tricks and software.
• ReadWriteWeb -- Great details about the future of the Internet.  Best for those up for exploring the next new thing.
• Free Technology for Teachers — Great information about Web 2.0 tools and services.
• Cool Cat Teacher – I find the daily updates and links posted through Diigo the most useful.
• Ars Technica — This website has some nice updates on tech, though sometimes I feel like they post articles on topics that are not fully researched or based on one poorly sampled study.

Web Tools:

• Google Reader — I have found Google Reader the best tool for streamlining all my news reading.  It is a simple interface and it archives all the news in a simple format.  I’m not like many people who fall behind on their unread stories.  I read it every day and keep the count under 500 on the most part.  I usually unsubscribe from any feed that overupdates.  I don’t think that any one site should post more than 10 articles a day.
• Twitter -- I confess that I follow people who post good resources on the web and I actually find Twitter useful for keeping up to date on Web 2.0 services.

Too lazy to link these .. but you can search for any of them in Google.

Prefer to use discretion when adding Firefox extension due to the loading time of Firefox.  Here’s a list of the top 10 extensions.  Can’t say these would be on my list.

Dictionary.com now defines and pronounces words on IPhone OS.  This is a nice feature.  There are words I still mispronounce like “queue” and “distribute.”  Link.

Also, I’m real excited about the possibilities of Read It Later adding content to the IPhone OS, allowing you to archive interesting articles and then sync them for reading offline.  Since I have a Touch, I sometimes want to read when I’m not near a wifi connection.  Great solution if it works.  I might also try out Evernote for this as well.  Link

Finding music for students to use in their videos is always a challenge with the strict licensing laws.  Our film teacher has the students write to the recording industry for permission to use popular songs in their movies, and they get rejected or receive no reply.  The new Free Music Archive might offer an alternative for finding music to use.

I’m also planning to try using annotated pages using Diigo.  Check out a sample page here annotated.  Annotated article about Ask the Dust, a great book.  Will also have to try out Glogster.

Two quick tips for the IPhone/IPod Touch I learned on accident: Hold down top button and click home button and it will take a snapshot of what’s on the screen and saves them into your Photo folder.  If you double click the home button, it pulls up the last played song, video or podcast.  Funny how I stumble upon these things (sure wasn’t in the instruction manual, or if it was, I didn’t read it.)

For Viewing:

Film School for Video Podcasters.  Link.

For Discussion:

Should colleges host email for their students?  Read

There is nothing simpler and more desirable than good wallpapers to use to brighten your day.  It’s amazing how much everyone enjoys changing your wallpaper from time to time.  Again, another example of how humans are amused by the most inane things, colors and choices mean so much to us.

This doesn’t surprise me at all.  Google Documents is a very limited online word processor and spreadsheet program.  It doesn’t make sense in most capacities because most of the time people want to quickly create a Word or Excel spreadsheet and print.  Sharing is not common at this time, and most people have little clue that it is available.

I encourage students and teachers at our school for two reasons:
1. Students can access their documents on any computer, at home and school.  It eliminates the need for using one particular computer or carrying a flash drive or floppy disk.  Files are stored in the cloud for easy access.
2. Teachers can access student documents and make comments into their documents.  (This is not happening at the level I would like to see, but it is an awesome academic application for Google Documents.) 

However, I clearly see the reason why Google Documents doesn’t catch up more, and once the Office Suite hits the cloud.  Google Docs will become yesterday’s news.  I’m enjoying it is the best offering in this space at this time.