Omnivorous Surfer

What a cool idea to use the connective power of the Internet to help raise funds for a charity! Learned of this site today through a Tweet by Will Richardson, offering readers the opportunity to help raise money for clean water for Africa in honor of his birthday.

Because mycharity.ie is located in Ireland, most, though not all, of the charities listed on the site have an Irish connection. There is a link on the site for charities to register to be included on the site, and individuals can submit details of a charity they would like to support. Individuals can create a fundraising page like the one Will used.

 One person CAN make a difference, and this site provides one way to do that!

I always like science and thought it would be cool to be a chemistry or physics teacher so we could do neat experiments in class. I still like to experiment and am still fascinated by experiments. When I ran across the Scientific Tuesdays ferrofluids and magnets video on YouTube, I figured I'd found a goldmine to fuel my curiosity.

I'll let you look for yourself while I go to the kitchen to try out the "Awesome milk trick!" Oops...it alway pays to look around (at least I can't keep myself from doing so). I found a Steve Spangelr Science "Color Changing Milk" video that has a little different take that I'll have to try while I'm at it.

Hope you can find some fun things to try for yourself or with children (or other adults) or perhaps for a science fair project simply by exploring YouTube!

I take lots of photos, and I especially enjoy recording scenery so we can enjoy it later. I sometimes take a series of photos as I pan the camera around my location, trying to see that they overlap so there's an area of commonality between consecutive images for matching. I just found a FREE demo of AutoStitch which does an amazing job of stitching photos together to make a panorama image. In the past, I have kept the camera on a fairly level horizontal plane, but AutoStitch does not require this, as it can take images from a variety of angles, match them up, and smooth them out; this is illustrated on the AutoStitch website.

I have encountered and learned from the Interesting Ways series so many times and yet never thought about sharing it here. Then today I found this page by creator Tom Barrett where he includes links to all of them. This puts all the information he has put together at your fingertips

He has used Google presentations to create slides with uses and tips for using technology in the classroom, inviting others to add to the content. The result has been a rich resource of tested-in-the-classroom ideas for a wide range of topics. Examples of topics include using audio, the Wii, Twitter, Prezi, or Google Docs in the classroom; and  supporting spelling or writing in the classroom. This morning I was looking at Twelve Interesting Ways to Use an iPod Touch in the classroom,; I found things I had never considered and a piece of technology I did not know about, a way to share audio from a single iPod Touch with 5 students.

Note that since content may be added as teachers share their ideas, the number in the title may change. For example, the link I found and used to the iPod Touch presentation specified "Eleven," while the current count is up to twelve. By the time you look, it may be at thirteen!

If I weren't already so invested in Blogger, I would switch to Posterous. In fact, I might even think about doing that anyway. Blogging just doesn't get any easier, especially if you want the ability to use or embed almost any kind of media in your posts.

What makes it so easy? First, there's no registration, no login requried. Second there's no post creation interface: you simply send an email to Posterous. Third, there's no uploading: you simply attach any photos, videos, audio, etc. to the post email. Fourth, if you include a link to, say, a YouTube video, the video will automatically be embedded into the post. Begin to see what I mean?

If you want to get fancy, you can use Posterous to distribute audio podcasts via iTunes. If you want to autopost to Twitter or Facebook, or your photos to Flickr, you can set that up pretty easily, too.

Your site can be private if you wish; you can simply password-protect it and send the password to anyone you want to share it with. Or, if you want a group of people to be able to post (and posting is so easy anyone who can email can do it), you just add their addresses to your site; they don't have to register or do anything extra.

A quick read of the FAQs will give you a better overview of Posterous' features. If you're not already blogging, this would be such an easy way to start! What are you waiting for?

TechRepublic is a wonderful source for nearly all things technology for me, and this tip really will be useful. In a nutshell, it will do a quick look up for you in a matrix of data. For example, I have a huge...well, really large...spreadsheet of codes and other information for several hundred individuals. When I need to look up  specific data for one individual, I do a find for the name and then look across to find the data, which may be a few columns over. Using the tip in this TechRepublic article, I can prepare the spreadsheet in advance so that I can use drop-down lists for the particular individual and column I want, and the data I need, located at the intersection of that row and column, will "magically" appear at the top of the spreadsheet.

While this is not a beginner operation, it is something even a beginner can do; the directions are very specific and accurate. I had trouble grasping what it would do from reading the text, so I created an identical spreadsheet and followed the steps. It works like a dream. (See results, with my notes of what it does, at left.) If this is something you could use, give it a try. It could be a real timesaver.

I've been looking for a different online bookmark manager, and today I stumbled across one by accident that I think will serve my purposes. I wanted something other than a social bookmarking site that would let me 1) organize the bookmark list in some easy fashion and 2) share it with either selected individuals or everyone. Symbaloo does that, and with a flair!