September 2006

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Making e-friends

September 28, 2006 in Technology | No comments

This recent Close to Home comic was featured Sept. 26:

This comic makes an interesting statement about forming relationships in online communities, and it made me think of a conversation I had recently with another DEN member while at a Wisconsin/Illinois DEN event. This DEN member told me that he didn’t doesn’t encourage/allow his kids to use any technology that removes face-to-face contact, because it removes them from real, interactive encounters.

I thought about that for a moment, but instantly disagreed. Since I’ve been posting to the DEN blog, I’ve met many people online before I met them in person. In fact, we had established a relationship before we ever met face-to-face! This has been the case with Keith Schroeder (WI DEN), Steve Dembo (National DEN Blog), and Chris Craft (SC DEN). When used effectively, online communities can be a great way to form lasting friendships through collaboration.

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Review of Audacity

September 22, 2006 in Technology | No comments

Tech Learning (a great resource) has provided a quick overview of Audacity (free audio recording software). If you are new to digital storytelling or podcasting (Dale and I use this program to record our WSST podcast: Periodicity), this is a great starting point to learn how to capture audio.


“You Can Use Audacity to Record live audio, Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs, Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and WAV sound files, Cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together, or Change the speed or pitch of a recording.” [Link]

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Neat Comm Arts Resources

September 20, 2006 in Education, Technology | No comments

 

With Daily Lit, you can select from a number of public domain books (search by author or title), and have short segments sent to your e-mail inbox every day.

 

The Shakespeare Searched engine (via Clusty) queries the works of Shakespeare by keyword. For instance, search by character (like all the times Romeo says “yonder”) or by work (here’s blood in MacBeth.)

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Timeline with Excel

September 20, 2006 in Education, Technology | No comments

Looking for a low-budget alternative to Tom Snyder’s Timeliner?  Create one within Microsoft Excel!  Microsoft Education has a good tutorial on how to create a timeline with Excel:

With Microsoft Excel, you can create a timeline “by utilizing fill colors to fill in
groups of cells. Text can even be entered sideways to mark the events being
represented. [You can also] enter text inside a drawing such as a rectangle or
add pictures to jazz up the timeline.”

[Link] From LifeHacker

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Protect your e-mail

September 12, 2006 in Technology | No comments

Have you ever needed to submit your e-mail address to sign-up for something online, but were wary of giving out your address? Now you can create temporary e-mail addresses just for such an occassion with spambox.

From spambox.us:
With this service you can create a temporary e-mail address that will forward all
    incoming mail to your usual e-mail address. Simply enter your e-mail address
    and the life time of your spambox and we will generate you a
    temporary@spambox.info e-mail.

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del.icio.us Hints

September 6, 2006 in Technology | No comments

Blogger David Brunelle (Geek for Life) reveals some hints to effectively use the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us.

“Del.icio.us can be used as a place to store bookmarks, share bookmarks, and discover web sites, blogs, downloads, and more, that would otherwise largely go unnoticed.”

[Link]

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Open Source Alternatives

September 5, 2006 in Technology | No comments

Geared mainly towards college students needing to save a little cash, Jason Chen offers a list (categorized by name of software, comparable Windows application, and download site) of some pretty impressive open source software and freeware applications available on the ‘net. Eat your heart out, Bill Gates! [Link]

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