OMG New Futurama!!!!

Thank you whatever mighty deity has granted us with new episodes of Furturama on Comedy Central starting June 2010!!!!!  I know that I lot of exclamation marks, but I really am that happy about it.

Futurama	Weeknights, 9p/8c
New Episodes on Comedy Central
www.comedycentral.com
Futurama New Episodes Joke of the Day Stand-Up Comedy

Update For picasa

So I know I've already turned the assignment in and thanks to the wonderful world of the internet the latest update (3/11/2010) for picasa will now allow for collaborations.  Which means the key feature that I was looking for applying to a classroom setting is now available freely through Picasa.  And another feature just added is what's called "geotaging" where you can put in the location you took the picture and then see where you have pictures from.  Which gave me another idea have students upload pictures of places they've been and keep a tally over the year and see where people have been and make lesson plans out of some of the historic places that they've inevitably been to.  Thank you Google.

Emergent Technology 2 - photo share

Yup, that's right it's homework time again. I currently use Picasa and pay for storage space, Picasa is free unlike most of the other photo sharing sites that only offer trials and comes with 1GB of online storage space free as well.  There are two parts to Picasa, there is the web storage, I invite you to look at my gallery http://picasaweb.google.com/weeezel and there is a free program that you can download that lets you edit the photographs or images.  I also found that with Blogger, you can add a photo slideshow to your blog, very easily, you can choose from a variety of picture hosts, and then pick the gallery you want to show off.  The modular nature of Blogger, allows you to put the slides at the top, bottom, or where ever.  I'm pretty proud of some of my photographs so I put my slide show at the top so anyone viewing my blog can see.  In addition to editing Picasa also has a face recognition system, in other words if you want to find the funny picture of your friend, instead of looking through the galleries you can browse by facial recognition.  The two thoughts I have on that are, a) that's cool and efficient and b) it's kind of scary to think that the computer can distinguish a human face in pictures, well maybe not scary, I probably just watched the Terminator too many times. 

I also looked at what other options, as it stands Picasa is free and has lots of features, but there is another site that I feel would be better for a classroom setting. The application I looked at is called Pictoma.  I think this one really demonstrates what the Web 2.0 is about.  Pictoma allows for multiple people to upload to the same place.  A classroom activity I could think of is to have the students do a project where they say, take a picture of your local court house, and then compare.  The idea being looking at different ways they took pictures, different angles, and then tie it into a say a Government class.  The downside is the cost,  while it is only $24 a year unless you're going to use it to have different people upload photos to the same location, like say a wedding, all the guests could post their pictures they took for you at no cost to them.  For Picasa, 20GB of storage space was only $5 and also ties in to other Google services such as email and document storage, for my current needs Google's the place.  

Homework time! RSS feeds ...

Wow... I've known about RSS feeds for some time but have never really tried to use them.  RSS feeds translated to normal speak; basically means instead of having to go look at 10 different websites you can check the content updated through your RSS Reader.  Clearly this seems like a good idea, instead of going to page after page, you have a central location to check all the updates. You can then browse through articles based  on where they came from or just look at all of them.  Again my old school internet bias has prevented me from trying out this technology, but I've been impressed so far.  I use Google Reader, most websites that provide RSS feeds support it, but there are a variety of different programs.  I started by adding the sites that I frequently check, I have a whole section of bookmarks that I check on a multiple times daily.  I used it through out most of the day, check it as each time I noticed a new Feed pop up.  After using it for about a week now I've come to several conclusions.  First, it can be a bit overwhelming, for example, on a regular morning my reader has about 300+ articles.  That's a lot to go through, but which the tools in Google reader, I can get around that by just checking the sites I'm really interested in, then marking the others as read.  Secondly, this is a great tool for keeping yourself updated on multiple things.  You are notified in your reader as soon as something new happens, meaning you can keep yourself updated on new changes.  I can see this a a benefit to the class room (i.e. create a "homework" blog and have all your student's parents subscribe, that way they could see what their child is supposed to be doing and if you make a change to the assignment, they're notified).  My advice is to not let yourself get overwhelmed, subscribing to news sites will keep you up-to-the minute updated, but can easily overwhelm you.  Use the tools the RSS Reader has to offer, check individual sites,  instead of trying to read your whole "new articles" section all at once.  Google Reader also makes it easy to share the article with your friends through Google Buzz if you use Google email, or email the article to someone.  It also gives you the ability to comment on the article when you share.