Jan
24
2010
Technology is, of course, incredibly useful to most of us. You can do all sorts of wonderful creative things with tech tools. You can also bore people to death with both your work and your explanation of your work. One of those tools that gets used far too much and is the favorite of creatively-challenged, or just lazy, computer teachers is PowerPoint. I don’t know how many computer classes I’ve seen where the students are either making PowerPoint presentations or learning how to play with fonts in Word. PowerPoint has its uses, but does it need to be taught as a separate part of the curriculum year after year?
And while I’m on my PowerPoint rant, administrators really need to learn more about technology, or at least take some well-meaning advice on how to use PowerPoint presentations. I came across a great video about PowerPoint that beautifully satirizes the approach that I’ll be many of us have run across in staff meetings. Take a look at this, and use it with your students – it’s a great way to show what not to do with PowerPoint. Oh, and while you’re at it – show it to your administrators. It may help save you from Life After Death by PowerPoint.
Jan
21
2010
Today’s post isn’t about technology per se, but rather about a website that comes to you via the wonders of the WWW. Arts and Letters Daily is one of the places that I go to every few days. ALD is a virtual goldmine for academics, scholars and rogue intellectuals. It’s published by the Chronicle of Higher Education. The site is updated six days a week. There are three columns on the website: Articles of Note, New Books, and Essays and Opinion. The way that the site works is that there are short descriptions of an article with a link to the original source. The descriptions are well-written, and I’ve almost never been disappointed when I followed a link to an article that sounded interesting to me.
The site draws from a wide variety of newspapers, news sources, book reviews, nota bene, columnists, weblogs, radio news/music, diversions, classics, etc. The sources, while international, are weighted towards the United States and the UK. If you are a reader who wants to know about the ideas behind the news, ALD is a great place to look. And all this is free. I usually have more to read than I can deal with, and as the links move down each day, you can come back for weeks and re-read an article that you need for your work or pleasure.
So, if you’re a discerning reader who wants to know what some of the most prolific and insightful writers have to say about the issues of the day, you should take a look at Arts and Letters Daily.
Jan
12
2010
You can tell how much technology has insinuated itself into our lives by the number of tech terms that have become verbs: two of the best known examples are the use of the words “photoshop” and “google”, as in the sentences, “You can just photoshop yourself if you want to lose three inches in the waist,” and “I googled my name and found out that I don’t exist.” What does this have to do with GIMP? Well, GIMP is the poor person’s photoshop.
What is GIMP then? It’s an image manipulation program that is absolutely free. And, if you follow this blog at all, you know that I love free software. With GIMP you can work on photos, you can paint, you can create designs for blogs and websites, and it’s all free.
I tried GIMP a few years ago and found it difficult to use, but when I downloaded the latest version last week, I found it to be very similar to Photoshop. Is it better? I don’t know is my honest answer. I’m not a professional photographer or designer. In fact, my friends and students tell me that my design sense is somewhat lacking, but GIMP does serve my limited needs quite well. There are forums that you can check to read all the arguments for both programs, but for me, the Photoshop/GIMP and Word/OpenOffice debates are somewhat pointless. If there is free software that can take care of beginner and intermediate level user needs, then that’s what I use. Why pay hundreds of dollars for a programs that give you more bang than you need?
And for schools, GIMP is a great tool because it’s free and easy to teach. I wish that I had come across GIMP while I was still teaching, because I would opt for that rather than spend money on Photoshop.
So what are a few things that GIMP does?
- GIMP is customizable so you can use set it up to suit your needs.
- You can enhance your photos with the great set of tools that come with GIMP.
- You can do advanced retouching. I used GIMP to restore some old ruined photos of my wife’s family.
- You can save your work in a variety of formats like JPEG, GIF, PNG and TIFF.
- GIMP comes with a set of plugins to give you more options in your manipulations and retouches.
- You can load and save files from remote locations using FTP, HTTP and SFTP/SSH.
- You can compress files to save space using ZIP, GZ or BZ2.
- GIMP works on most operating systems including Windows, Mac, Linux, Sun OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD.
There are many tutorials out on the Web. A few are:
- Creating a Fancy Website Layout
- GIMP Tutorials
- GIMP Tutorials/ Design Links
- 30 Exceptional GIMP Tutorials
- Recoloring Eyes for GIMP
So if you are looking for an alternative to Photoshop, you should check GIMP out. If you are a technology coordinator with less money than you would like, you might want to try GIMP and save yourself some money. I’ll be adding GIMP to my growing collection of free software. How about you?
Jan
3
2010
I just found this new search engine that is very cool. What can I say? Well, I do have a few things to say about Search-Cube. I spend a lot of time on the internet researching various writing topics, as well as just surfing around for interesting things. As someone who does a lot of searches, I’m always looking for alternatives to Google, and I love visual things.
So search-cube is a visual search engine that gives you the results of your search in the form of a cube that can be manipulated to see all six sides with up to 16 results on each side. The results of your search can be websites, blogs, videos or images.
To use search cube, you need to have Javascript and Flash Player 9 or higher.
You can use the mouse, the keyboard or a combination to manipulate the cube. It’s all quite easy to work.
Is this the best search engine available? No, but it’s really cool, and sometimes cool things are just what you want to brighten up a day.
Dec
27
2009
Netvibes is another online service that you can use either privately or publically. It functions as a web portal: you can use a variety of modules that let you receive podcasts and play them, view weather and sports reports, receive RSS feeds, check web based email, and lots more. I’m still working out all the things that I can do with Netvibes. Netvibes is similar to MyYahoo or iGoogle, but in my opinion it has more options for the user.
Netvibes also functions in a social network so you can connect to Facebook and Twitter. If you like sharing your internet presence with others, you can get Followers who can keep track of what you do publically by subscribing to your page and then reading it on their page. Your Followers can become your Friends. It’s all very social, and frankly it’s not why I started using Netvibes, but I am checking out the possibilities of Netvibes social aspects.
What I like about Netvibes is that it is easy to customize and set up tabs for a variety of your interests. You can determine where your content goes, and then just click on a tab to see what new feeds have come in for your favorite topics. I spend a lot of time on the internet, and I have so many bookmarks that it’s often difficult to keep up with them. Netvibes let me organize my work more efficiently, and it lets me share some of my interesting new finds with friends.
Check Netvibes out and see what you think about it.
