Tim Lauer: IL-TCE 2006

DownloadClick above for a link to a short video clip of the Reader Board at Lewis Elementary. The readerboard software is TickerShock which take RSS feeds and creates a “news” crawl along the bottom of the screen.

Greasemonkey - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Greasemonkey is a Mozilla Firefox extension that allows users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to specific web pages… As the Greasemonkey scripts are persistent, the changes made to the web pages are executed every time the page is opened, making them effectively permanent for the user running the script.

In my workshop session on Wednesday I demonstrated an example of a script that utilizes Greasemonkey. The Amazon PDX Linky script allows you to visit a book page on Amazon and as the results are returned, the script also searches for that book at Powells Bookstore (a popular Portland, Oregon bookstore), and also at the local Portland Library. The script inserts links to those searches right in the page that was returned from Amazon…

More about this can be found here…

Technorati Tags: greasemonkey, PDX Linky

After our session was over on Wednesday, some of us were working with Flickr. I shared a Greasemonkey script for Flickr called GMif.
GMif is a Firefox script that allows you to embed Google Maps into the Flickr interface. Note: the Firefox extension, Greasemonkey is required…

With GMiF, you can…

• add geo-tags to your photos,
• add geo-tags to others photos,
• locate others geotagged photos,
• or look up other photos taken nearby….

All within the Flickr web page.
Once installed, a Gmap button is added to the right most button above any Flickr image. If an image is already geotagged, Clicking the button redraws the page adding a map below the image with the image plotted on the map. If the image is not yet geotagged, a map appears which you can navigate to find the photo location, and once you have the image location, you can add geotags to the image… This works on your own images, and on other user pages that have allowed tags to be added to their images…

A slide show mode is also available which automatically pans your map to show additional geotagged images in the Flickr photo stream you are viewing…
This is a very impressive piece of work. The more I explore the interface the more I find and am impressed with. This is by far the easiest way to add geotags to Flickr images and the interface is very responsive and well conceived…

[by way of ... The Map Room]

Technorati Tags: flickr, GMiF, google maps, RSS, Yuan CC

Technorati Tags: flickr, GMiF, greasemonkey

Batchgeocode.com is free service that will bulk geocode tabular data directly in your web browser. Latitude and longitude information is returned for each address. You also have the option of creating a Google Earth KML file that will allow you to plot your addresses in Google Earth. At Lewis Elementary we are working with our city traffic department to add some crosswalks and pedestrian improvements in our neighborhood. I can now share with them specific information about our students and show them the need for these improvements based on where our students live. I plan to play with this a bit more. Am thinking I could do things like plot achievement data based on geography, not to mention helping plan bike and walking school bus routes.
Via… Google Maps Mania…

Technorati Tags: Batchgeocode, Google Earth

I wanted to thank everyone for a very enjoyable day. I enjoyed working with all of you and hope to run into you again. If I can be of any help, please feel free to contact me.

Tim Lauer

RSS is a technology that brings web content to you. The BBC has a new site called The Feed Factory . It is an introduction to the RSS feeds that are available from bbc.co.uk. It also includes a very good introduction to RSS for those new to the technology.

Visit the BBC site linked below and read through their tutorial about RSS. After doing the tutorial, write a response in the comments area about what you learned. Think of the application of RSS technology to education, to your specific school, to student and school data? How might you envision using this technology?

BBC Feed Factory Tutorial

This is a test. This is only a test.

Google

edublogs.org is a web site that allows educators to create free weblogs. It uses a tool called Wordpress. Travel to the edublogs.org web site and create a weblog. Once you have created your weblog, please come back to this posting and post in the comments section the web address (URL) for your page…

This site will serve as the workshop space for the workshop. Wikis and Weblogs as School Communication Tools.

Not much here yet, but there should be by Wednesday…