Using Delicious(.com) to search for useful teaching resources.

Delicious is a social bookmarking site owned by Yahoo!  You can save, share and discover bookmarks with other people.  Because the opportunities to interact using this service are quite limited, it is often allowed in schools where other social sites are filtered out. Delicious is extremely useful for teachers and can be used in two main ways.

Saving and organising your bookmarks.

When planning lessons from home, if I find a resource that will be useful to me in future I save it to delicious (sometimes with a note of explanation).  This means I can access my list of bookmarks from home and school.  I now also have an online backup of my bookmarks in case my laptop dies.  When you save your bookmarks you can choose if you want them to be private or public.  Public bookmarks are very useful because you can share them with colleagues and even students.  All I have to do is give students the web address to my delicious page  (delicious.com/fiendishlyclever) and they can look through my bookmarks to find the site they want.  More tech savvy teachers can embed this list on the school VLE as a way of sharing links very simply with students.

Searching for new resources and information

People only bookmark sites that are worth revisiting.  Searching the collected bookmarks of users from across the world should return better and more useful sites than just searching Google.  Simply visit the delicious.com main page and use the search box at the top.  Search results (example below) also show how many people have bookmarked each site and key words (tags) added to the bookmark when it was saved.  The search will also return any sites that match the search query in your personal collection.  (There is a save button next to each bookmark so you can save it to your personal list if you find the site useful)

Whilst many teachers do use Delicious to save and share links, many forget that it has tremendous value as a search tool.

A while ago I blogged that I used Windows Live Mesh (beta) for syncing files between home and work.  I’d recently got fed up of the huge wait on boot up while live mesh indexed files on my hard drive and I decided to try some alternatives.  These are my thoughts on the software products I tried:

So which did I choose?  There was little difference in transfer speed and overall functionality between products.  Live Mesh took an age to start up (whether from boot or resuming from hibernation) but the other two pieces of software made little noticeable difference to start up times.

At the moment I’m using Jungledisk (I’m on an old plan and only pay the storage fees, not the monthly fee) and I feel safer knowing my documents are securely encrypted in the cloud.  The only catch is the lack of conflict resolution which has to be checked manually at regular intervals.

There are many cloud-based file sync products out there, and I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has tried one of the products above or one similar (e.g. sugarsync) for use by teachers.

I wondered if it would be possible to access this resource from anywhere on the internet (as the networked drive is always powered on).  The answer was yes, and this is how you do it over an encrypted ssh tunnel (it was quite simple once I had the right software).  It does rely on you having a device running openssh (you can add this to older versions of the Linkstation, or on a separate machine).  I haven’t exposed my network storage box directly to the internet because anyone could stream my music for free.

• Make sure you know the ip address of the Buffalo linkstation on the local network (e.g. 192.168.1.3) and that streaming works fine from iTunes on your local network.
• You need a copy of Putty (I won’t explain how to configure ssh and putty to work together).  There are some pointers on my blog post here.  Set up putty to forward port 3689 to your NAS box as shown below:

• Download Songbird and install.

• Download the daap plugin for Songbird (you will have to edit the install.rdf file to stop it saying that it can’t be run with the current version.  Simply rename the installation package to a zip file, open the file and edit max version to 1.5, then save and rename the plugin package back to an xpi file)

• Start up Putty and then Songbird.  From the File menu on Songbird add a new daap source at 127.0.0.1

• After downloading a list of songs available, your library should be ready for streaming over the internet

Please feel free to comment/contact me if you have any questions. Tutorials for setting up SSH to connect to your own network are available all over the internet – please don’t contact me about SSH if you haven’t read a tutorial first!

Firefox

I know Chrome is quicker but every time I use Chrome I end up moving back to Firefox.  I love the extensions/plugins available for Firefox and have a very similar set on both home and work computers.

Firefox extensions I have on both PCs.

Live Mesh

I tried Dropbox but first I became annoyed when it kept syncing MS Office temporary files (because I work straight out of my drop box).  Then I exceeded the amount of space they offered for free – but I only needed around 4-5Gb storage and I’m not paying for 50Gb that I’m not going to use.

I moved to Live Mesh and it works flawlessly.  Files are synchronised between my work folders and home and school, and updates happen without any user intervention.   Add a net book to that mix and it becomes even more useful (also allowing you to remote control another PC on your ‘Mesh’).  You can also access your files from your Live Desktop should you find yourself working on a different PC.

Office 2007 and 2010

The new ribbon interface.  You either love it or you hate it.  I love it – and now I’m used to using it I couldn’t go back to the old version of Office.  I am the only member of staff at my school running Office 2007 (and I use the beta of Office 2010 at home) and I hope to convert my colleagues at some point in the future! 

GMail (Google Mail)

Feature rich, spam free and hosted in the cloud, Google Mail is useful because I can access my email from any computer (and also from my phone/iPod etc).  For those who don’t like web email it supports POP3, IMAP and SMTP so can be used with a desktop email client if you prefer.   Although I tag my emails, the search feature comes in useful for finding those emails where you only remember snippets of information.  I use Google Mail as a client for my work based Exchange mail, and prefer the interface to any of the desktop clients I have tried. (The to-do-list whilst basic is pretty handy too)

Google Reader

I started using Google Reader to keep track of blogs and news sites I like.  Google Reader pulls in RSS feeds and can then be accessed from anywhere.  Interesting articles can be emailed to friends, or shared with other users (and mine are even imported into Facebook!).   The addition of Google Buzz added a new layer of functionality to Reader and you now see articles/posts that your friends (who you follow) have shared.  Google Reader keeps me up to date with educational and news feeds.

Windows Live Writer

Part of the Live Suite available free of charge from Microsoft.  This is a useful piece of software for writing blog posts offline (and publishing them to your website).

Other software/sites

Google Calendar (I’ve tried lesson planning again this year using Google calendar. I kept it up for a over half a term but still ended up going back to a paper diary).  The SMS reminders are useful for reminding me of appointments when I’m not near my email.

Twitter.  I have a PLN (personal learning network) on Twitter but I’m still not convinced that this is a must-have tool.  A significant majority of people I follow are broadcasters rather than being interested in a two-way conversation, and most don’t reply to tweets directed straight at them.

What software do you use every day?  What software couldn’t you do without?

VLC

I managed to grab several clips using VLC following these steps.  First of all enable advanced options

Then play back your video/DVD.  Click on the red button to start and stop recording.  The recorded file is saved in your documents folder.  It is possible to change the output video format, however the defaults worked fine with movie maker. [Mac users – I believe you press Shift & Command & R instead]

Unfortunately I had problems with one of the DVDs so I had to use a different method.

Handbrake and K-Lite pack.

I installed the K-Lite pack to give me codecs I would need later on.  (Without the codecs from this pack windows movie maker was not able to use the audio on captured files in AAC format).

Handbrake is simple to use, but the files it generates will probably need some editing/trimming unless you need the whole DVD.

(You can also use handbrake to convert DVDs into a format suitable for an iPod/iPhone just by changing the preset at stage 2).

That’s all there is to it.  If you are grabbing clips from DVD make sure you own the copyright or else you could get into bother!

This is a collection of extracts from my logs over the last few months showing some of the more interesting visitors to my site (I’ve removed the IP addresses myself).  The bottom image shows visits from Microsoft and Google following an Outlook web access vs Google rant I had (#GoneGoogle).

I’d only recently noticed that the interface you get depends on the web browser you use.  If like me you use Firefox as your primary browser at work, a huge chunk of functionality is missing already (gee thanks Microsoft!).  The screen grabs below give an idea of the differences.

Straight away I’m using a clunky interface that looks like something from the Nineties to manage my email.  Compare that to Google mail which looks the same in IE, Firefox or Chrome (and I have all 3 browsers installed on all my laptops!).

I was going to write a comparison of the two platforms but it’s hard to find an aspect that OWA excels at.  Contact management is a joke, the PIM functions make me want to stab myself with a biro in frustration and anyone who has used Google mail knows the advantages of tagging mail versus folders.

Most teachers work as much from home as they do from work, if not more.  I know I do.  I like to have access to my emails from home and when I visit other schools.  All of my email that is, not the last two or three in my inbox.  I never take my laptop home – who’d want to use that piece of junk in preference to my own modern machine – which means I need access to email in the cloud.   Look at the generous mail allocation I get from work versus Google Apps email – I can search through archived emails and contacts with ease using the Google interface, without having to fire up a desktop mail client to achieve the same result.  It might help if EMBC gave you a reasonable amount of space – 100Mb is nothing, I’ve sent more email than that in a day!

(Compare that to the standard space allocation provided with Gmail and you see a world of difference.)

Fortunately Google Mail will retrieve emails from my work address, and send replies that look as though they have come from my work address, so I don’t have to soil my hands with Outlook Web Access (or a desktop client).

Until Microsoft comes up with a better interface that works well with Firefox, and EMBC can give us sufficient storage, I’ll continue to use the Google mail interface as my primary mail client.  What’s your email client of choice and why?

Google Custom Search is extremely useful because you can set it to search over a list of pre-selected sites, knowing that learners will be getting the results you want them to see.  It’s also a good tool to use with an interactive whiteboard so no unexpected results come up on screen (even the most innocent of keywords can bring up some dubious results!).

To use Google Custom Search you need a webpage that you can embed the HTML code in – I use Google Sites which is free and simple to configure.  Follow the steps below and create your own custom search engines.  You can even add a logo to your results (and remove adverts if you are a school or non-profit) but I haven’t shown these steps in my guide.

Set up your search engine and enter a list of sites to search 

Once your search engine is set up, follow these steps from the ‘Control panel’

Pick a style and get the code to put on your website

Copy and paste the code and then go to your site to embed it.  These pictures are from Google sites

Use these options to change where the search engine appears on the page, and the size of the search engine box.

Save your page and the custom search engine is ready for use.

I installed the latest firmware on my Nokia 5800 (v 40.0.0005)  hoping for an iPhone style upgrade!  The improvements are worthwhile but how satisfied you are with it will depend on what you want from the phone.  In my opinion the update makes the 5800 a better phone, but does very little to address the limitations of the device when compared to the iPhone.

For those who wondered what improvements the new firmware makes I’ve listed the ones I’ve noticed below:

• New home screen as shown.  Contacts and application shortcuts can be added to the home screen (and you can scroll sideways through these contacts).
• The audio widget is much improved and you can pause and play the current track/podcast from the home screen.
• The dialler is renamed Telephone and pushed down to the bottom of the screen with Contacts, to make room for the extra information on the screen.
• New incoming call screen when the phone is locked
• When you are typing in text and rotate the phone sideways, the keyboard automatically changes to the qwerty arrangement (even if you were using an alphanumeric keyboard before).
• Kinetic scrolling makes it easier to flip through long lists of pictures or music.
• The phone feels slightly snappier than before (in the same way Windows 7 feels snappier than Windows Vista)
• One or two new menu entries in the various settings menus.

The phone still lags behind the iPhone/iPod touch when it comes to applications.  Whilst the selection of apps available is growing, the pricing of many apps is totally unrealistic and so large scale adoption of Ovi store apps is unlikely to improve until this (together with the interface) changes.  The Apple Apps store is excellent and I’ve already purchased many games and utilities for my iPod, the likes of which either aren’t available or don’t represent value for money on the Ovi store.  Unfortunately I think Nokia have conceded defeat on this one, and their move away from the Symbian operating system suggests that this is likely to remain a stumbling block for some time.

I’m waiting to see how Apple improves their next model before I change to an iPhone.  I’m hoping to see better text entry and multi-tasking, as these are the two obstacles at the moment that stand between me and an iPhone.  However no manufacturer can fit a full size screen and keyboard into a pocket device so I’m likely to continue using my laptop as my primary computing device.

• Disable sharing outside of the domain unless you know need this functionality.
• Make sure pupils are aware of the sharing status of their own site.
  
• Have all pupils tag their Google site with a class or even site-wide tag so make monitoring easy
  

Google – you need to add an easy way of checking if any of your employees are leaking company information by mistake!