Omnivorous Surfer

MakeUseOf.com comes through again. One of the top articles of the week this week was 5 Best Sites to Help Students Prepare for the SATs, and some of these sites would be good for students' general use as well.

I particularly like two of the math sites, both of which are FREE. PurpleMath is an algebra help site which also includes coverage of "preliminary topics" and has good textual explanations.

For video presentations of mathematics lessons, TV Math has directions similar to those which would be given by a teacher in the classroom and includes material from both general math and algebra. Each topic is available from multiple presenters, so students have some choice.

I also like the FREE vocabulary site, Vocab Test. Vocabulary for individual grade levels is included, and students can choose to "learn" before the take the "test" part of a particular word/prefix/suffix section. In addition, the site allows the user to create his/her own quiz.

Check the MakeUseOf article for information about and links to the other two sites it mentions.

This is sofware I will definitely use. We recently needed to convert some MP4 files to WMV, and one of our teachers told us about Format Factory, FREEWARE multipurpose file conversion software for Windows. I tried it out, and it's great. Its functions (copied from the website) are:

• All to MP4/3GP/MPG/AVI/WMV/FLV/SWF.
• All to MP3/WMA/AMR/OGG/AAC/WAV.
• All to JPG/BMP/PNG/TIF/ICO/GIF/TGA.
• Rip DVD to video file, Rip Music CD to audio file.
• MP4 files support iPod/iPhone/PSP/BlackBerry format.
• Supports RMVB,Watermark, AV Mux

Thanks, Marcus, for sharing this one. It's going to prove useful for several projects I have in mind.

One of my new favorite sites is MakeUseOf, because I have learned so many interesting things from their lists and guides. I have subscribed to and actually read their weekly best-articles-of-the-week newsletter. This week's find was a list of semantic search engines, which use context or other means of filtering search results to key in on what you're actually searching for. I'm not going to try to describe or add to...just here's the link to MakeUseOf's Top 7 Semantic Search Engines as an Alternative to Google. I am so looking forward to trying these out!

 While you're there, look around the MakeUseOf site. I'll bet you'll find something you can use.

I was creating a form in Excel for a friend this morning and wanted to have her take a look to see if she liked its appearance and suggest any changes. I won't be seeing her for a few days, and she is not very comfortable with computers, so sending her an attachment was not going to be the best option. In looking for a way to let her easily view a PDF version, I tried Zoho Viewer. While Zoho is a complete suite of productivity, collaboration, and business applications, I won't attempt to address those in this post. Instead the focus will be on Zoho Viewer.

It really couldn't be easier. All you have to do is browse to select your document, indicate how long you want it to be available from their server (1 day-"do not expire"), and click the view button. From the viewer you have option of saving the file, sharing it (put in an email address and a message, and off it goes), embedding it (code is generated for embedding the document itself or a link), and printing it. From the email or the link, someone who views the document has the same options.

For presentations, text documents, and spreadsheets, you have the additional option of exporting it to any of the supported formats appropriate for that type of file. For the spreadsheet, even the charts exported as editable charts.

File formats supported include MS Office, OpenDocument, and OpenOffice formats as well as pdf, rtf, html, txt, and csv. The Excel example on the site shows that it will display multiple sheets in a workbook. A PowerPoint presentation can be viewed as a slideshow (no animations or transitions) or exported to any of the above-mentioned presentation formats.

I was not successful in obtaining an acceptable view of a document with several images included, probably because of the layout specified for them within Word. This was my only failure. The solution in this case would have been to upload a pdf version of the document.

This is so quick, easy, and clean. To make it even better, there is no registration required! I think this is a great way to share a static document simply for viewing or for downloading, or to share a document via email without having to use an attachment. Nice!

 There have often been times when I needed some music to add to a video, Photo Story 3 creation, or PowerPoint slide. If I didn't have the right style or sound, or if I wanted a clip to fit a short span, I found one website which often fit the bill, but that was about it. The advent of the Creative Commons license, however, has brought about some new alternatives. In finding music for projects, you have to be careful about giving students too may options, especially if they're like me. The less structured the site, the more time I spend listening to find just the right music. The first two sites listed provide a method of narrowing down your options, which helps. If you have some time, though, browsing through these can be kind of fun.

Freeplay Music has been around for a long time, and still does very well what it sets out to do: provide short clips for video productions. It presents a large number of instrumental selections in wide variety of styles and moods. Each composition is available in 10-, 15-, 20-, 30-, and 60-second clips, very useful for video broadcast productions. You can search by style (e.g. ambient, baroque, drum & bass, funk) or feel (e.g. building/tension, cinematic, driving, hopeful), or you can browse through albums.

A newer player is in the royalty-free music game is Jamendo. This site is not designed for video production but could easily serve as a source for background music. Jamendo is a venue for artists to share their compositions and performances for others to use and enjoy. You can browse by artist or album, or you can select a "radio" for your choice of style (e.g. metal, jazz, lounge). If you scroll to the bottom of the home page, you will see an option to search using tags. This may be the easiest way to filter the content to find what you're looking for. Each piece has a brief description to help you see if it might be what you need or want. I've heard some nice music here.

Moby Gratis is a section of moby.com "for independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short." You simply browse the text list by title, play, and download. If you want to use any of the selections for commercial purposes, you can apply for a license; otherwise it's free. You do have to create an account for Moby Gratis, and it asks for a lot of information, including address; I suppose this is so they will have the information needed if you want to license a work. You have to guess the style of music by title, but, again, there is some nice music here, though this site has a much more limited selection than the previous 2. It is also entirely textual.

The last site for today is ccMixter , "a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want." To search for music you'll actually go to digg.ccMixter. I have not thoroughly browsed this site, but there seems to be a lot here. I really liked the first instrumental I listened to, and it was something I would use.

I know there are other sites, but this is more than enough for today! Happy listening...or searching.