Until I saw this TED talk, I didn’t care much that free Web 2.0 tools like Google and Facebook were collecting massive dossiers of information about my online habits. I thought they were just using it to serve me more relevant ads and improve my user experience. It seemed like a small price to pay for access to the many awesome online communication and collaboration tools they provide.

In this talk, I learned that sites like Google and Facebook actually skew your search results to show you different information based on what they think you’ll like. The speaker shows how different people got different Google results when searching for “Egypt” in the wake of the politial protests there this spring. Rather than giving you an accurate view of hits relevant to your search, these sites favor certain sites over others in an attempt to show you content it thinks you’ll like.

Seeing this talk reminded me of the billboard I recently saw near the Bay Bridge in SF, loudly proclaiming:

The Experiment

I decided to go Google-free for a week and use DuckDuckGo for all my searching needs to see how different the search results would be.

I did a very interesting little experiment: I searched “income inequality” in DuckDuckGo vs Google (see links for results). I didn’t see much difference in the search results until I noticed a search result in DDG that I don’t agree with– that Income  Inequality “doesn’t matter“. Anyone who knows me (and who knows me better than Google?) would take it for granted that I think income inequality is a problem. Of all the different things one could say about income inequality– I thought we (as a society) were all on the same page that it’s not a good thing. I probably fit squarely inside some Google framework of a Bay Area, liberal educated white middle-class NPR listener who would be shocked and horrified by such callous libertarian thought. I think this is part of what the speaker in the TED talk was getting at– that internet filtering removes viewpoints that challenge our own. My time with DDG is making me wonder if my search results help reinforce my certainty that my view of reality is the correct one.

This little revelation led me to try the mother of all divisive search terms: “Abortion”.

If I had any uncertainty at all about this important decision, I would rather be looking at search pages that don’t make that decision for me ahead of time, wouldn’t you? Now of course abortion is an extreme example, but the fact that DDG returns such diverse search results gives you an appreciation for how many different perspectives there are on reality, and how that diversity can look in search results.

So What?

Like me, you may not worry much about the profiles that companies are amassing about you. It does seem to be a small price to pay for the incredibly useful tools like Google Docs, Facebook, and Google search. However, these services are making lots of money collecting and selling your personal data to advertisers– Lifehacker aptly puts it: “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product“. While I have (so far) felt ok opening myself to this kind of vulnerability, it gives me pause to think that I’ve been recommending that my students do the same. Is this responsible for teachers to do when the real-world consequences of exposing personal data are not fully understood? Will we one day find ourselves regretting that we gave up so much of our personal data to cloud companies, and when we do, will we feel responsible that our students did it too? Should teachers seeking students’ liberation and empowerment be on the vanguard of software efforts that preserve and enhance user liberty and control such as Diaspora, FreedomBox, LockerProject, and Free/Libre Open Source software?

Aside from privacy issues though, the Orwellian issue of how our experience on the web is distorted has implications for students’ development of critical thinking skills. Central to critical thinking is the idea that reality can be viewed from very different lenses and perspectives. If our search engines and social networks (for many, their web portal on the world) provide us with a distorted view of reality, do we lose the ability and the desire to consider divergent viewpoints from our own? If students’ online experience can be tailored to their tastes like an iTunes Genius playlist, what are they missing out on? Where is the chance to see the unexpected, the infuriating, and the serendipitous? Don’t we have a right to steer them towards experiences that push them out of their comfort zones? And if so, should we be starting with the search engines and software tools that they will depend on after they’ve left our classes?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments…

Related articles

• DuckDuckGo Brings Private Searching And Zero Click Results To Android (androidpolice.com)
• Should Google and Facebook Be Filtering Our Content For Us? (webpronews.com)
• DuckDuckGo Questions Quality, Accuracy Of Search Engine Traffic Numbers (searchenginewatch.com)
• Google’s New Search Layout Test: Borrowing From Blekko & DuckDuckGo? (searchenginewatch.com)
• DuckDuckGo: popular search engines don’t offer true search results (geek.com)
• DuckDuckGo Zero-click Info API (mashape.com)

John Ward, RIP

This post discusses how to build your own Personal (or Professional) Learning Network. Instead of starting by telling you which tools to use, I want to talk about why you would do this in the first place….

This is a photo of my high school math teacher, Coach John Ward, who recently passed away after a long career of distinguished service at Bishop Diego High School in Santa Barbara. He took me from being a hopelessly poor math student to a very capable one in three years of instruction, despite my deep and abiding dislike of the subject. He did this by consistently providing me with high quality materials, challenging problems to solve, and then expecting me to put in the work– or “plug and chug” as he would say.

Think of your favorite teachers over the years– they presented you with challenging, thought-provoking material and then asked you to think about it, question it, master the skills, and respond in a thoughtful way. By the time we’re in college, we get used to writing thoughtful essays about challenging ideas several times a week. When we leave formal education, many of us get out of this familiar rhythm, and instead focus on “getting things done”. When we’re in this frenzied state, we are not taking the time to reflect on new information and experiences we get from our work.

The process of taking information in, meshing it with what you know, and breathing it out again forms something of a “learning loop” that fits with a Constructivist idea (ed theory, sorry laypeople) of what high quality learning looks like.

You can think of building your own Personal Learning Network as an attempt to create this “learning loop” for yourself using the tools at your disposal. Instead of a bunch of teachers selecting challenging information for you, the Internet gives you access to a world of bloggers, tweeters, speakers, photographers, videographers, and colleagues who will teach you anything you want for nothing more than the price of your time and attention. All they ask of you is to think about it, question it, master the skills, and respond in a thoughtful way. You can participate in this conversation by writing your own blog, tweeting, organizing sources, speaking, and teaching others in the way that works best for you. This is all part of what we educators call “Life-Wide Learning”, where you are continuously gaining knowledge and building skills that help you stay professionally competitive, personally empowered, and connected with a community of people who share your interests– even after you leave formal education.

A Game of Inputs and Outputs

You can think of building your PLN as a game of Inputs and Outputs. You need to find and organize information that will teach you, challenge your ideas, and help you stay on top of interesting new developments in your areas of interest. You also need to get in the habit of “adding value” to the information that comes in to you in whatever way works for you. That could mean writing your reactions to an interesting article you read, making lists of bookmarks you find to make it easier for others to find relevant information, video yourself demonstrating a skill you learned, or sharing resources with people you think could benefit from them. What you do is as unique as your skills and interests are, but the focus should be on sharing your learning with others who could benefit from it. Though this practice can benefit you and your business, think of it as doing well by doing good first. Most people don’t like being marketed to, but everybody likes getting free, relevant information about things they care about.

My Inputs and Outputs

To give you an idea of what my PLN looks like, I included an incomplete list of my inputs and outputs. Take a look. Next, I’ll show you how information flows from my inputs, through my brain, and out my outputs.

Inputs

• Social Media
  • Google Reader
  • Podcasts
  • Blogs
  • Google Alerts
  • Twitter
  • Recommendation Engines
    • GReader Recommendations
    • Twitter Recommendations
• IRL (“in real life”)
  • Meetups
  • In-Person Connections
  • Conferences & Trade Shows
  • Professional Organizations
  • Events/Parties

• Outputs
  • Your Blog
  • Tumblelog/ Buzz
  • Status Updates
  • Bookmark!
  • Videoblogging
  • SlideShare
  • Present in Conferences or Trade Shows
  • Podcasts

Inputs and Outputs: A Workflow

Inputs

A first step towards forming a PLN is to start getting good quality information flowing in to you in an organized way so you can easily consume it at your convenience. My favorite tool for this job is Google’s free RSS reader, titled simple “Google Reader“. Reader allows me to collect RSS feeds (think of them as real-time updates from several different news sites, blogs, and other continuously updated websites) in a simple digest format. It enables me to quickly scan over headlines about anything I’m interested in, read what I feel like reading, and skip the rest. It takes the place of a newspaper for me– in fact, it’s a paperless newspaper where I’m the managing editor who decides what I’ll see! You can choose to include a mixture of “established” news sites (like the New York Times or the BBC) alongside updates from less established sites like your neighborhood activities committee, an industry-insider blog, or vegandad.blogspot.com. You can also organize them into folders like I have so you can switch between your many interests quickly.

Over the years I have collected RSS feeds from major thought leaders, news blogs, and even wiki site updates about information in my field, and this makes sure that if it’s happening in education technology, I’ll see an update in my Reader. I can honestly say that the time I have spent building my Reader into a well-rounded reflection of my interests has made me a more marketable and able worker, and a more empowered individual.

Enough sales pitch– let’s get started!

1. Get a Google Account.
2. Go to Google Reader.
3. follow the steps in the video “Welcome to Google Reader“.

After those steps, you should have a Google Reader with at least a few feeds in it. You might also want to check out these celebrity GReader reading lists by popular bloggers and intelligentsia types that you can simply add to your Reader.

From this point, you can be on the lookout for RSS feeds on your favorite websites, blogs and wikis. The RSS symbol

will appear in your browser’s address bar whenever you are on a website that features RSS feeds. Just click it and it will help you add updates from that page to your Google Reader!

Podcasts

Podcasts are basically RSS-powered blogs which contain audio and video files and are usually consumed on an iPod or smartphone. They are another very important part of my information intake every week. Just like my blogs, I line them up in a podcast player for when I’m ready to hear them (driving, walking the dog, etc.) and I don’t worry about it if I miss them. It’s like a DVR for interesting audio and video shows on a whole range of topics.

Most people subscribe to podcasts in iTunes, and then let iTunes sync the media to their player. I recently discovered that my Android phone’s Google Listen podcast player can actually use a Google Reader folder as its podcast subscriptions folder and download podcasts over the air! Here’s my list of favorite podcasts– all organized by Google Reader. If you prefer listening to news rather than reading it (or a mix of both), check into the top 50 podcasts on PodCast Alley.

Twitter

Twitter is another very valuable place where I can queue up challenging and entertaining ideas from the world’s best and brightest until I’m ready to read them. Some people dismiss Twitter as a frivolous medium– saying “it’s only people talking about what they had for lunch”. I’ve found it to be a vibrant community of smart people in my field giving real-time updates and discussions about newsworthy links, reactions to the news, and thoughtful quotes.

If you’re interested in Twitter, don’t concern yourself with what you’ll write first. Unfortunately, people do tend to write about lunch before they’ve had a chance to see what can be done in Twitter. The best thing to do with Twitter (at first) is to search it. Ask Twitter what’s going on with a topic you care about, and I think you’ll be surprised to find a compelling mix of formal and informal perspectives that you can’t find anywhere else. I watched Obama’s 2008 election on Twitter, and I saw a mix of people from all over the world giving their reactions to that historic event.

As you start to find people whose perspectives and voices you get some benefit from, follow them. It’s a great way to form relationships with people you can learn a lot from. (It might also inspire you to contribute your own voice to the conversation!)

Twitter organizes conversations around topic tags called #hashtags. You can make any word into a hashtag by adding a pound sign to the beginning. Twitter turns these into links to all of the postings on that topic. Website Whatthetrend.com can help you find conversation topics that are relevant to your interests.

To learn more about Twitter, check out the great Twitter Guide Book from Mashable.

It’s worth noting that Google Buzz, the Twitter-like thingy from Google, can subscribe you to updates from your friends in Twitter and/or Google Reader so you can see both in one stream. After you get to this point, take a look in Google Buzz and see if it shows a good mix of news for you.

Next Step: Outputs

In Part II of this post, I will discuss the “Outputs” stage, where you can show off your learning and use it to connect with other like-minded individuals.

Related articles

• Using Twitter and Other Social Media for Professional Development (shawnurban.wordpress.com)
• Twitterers To Follow (gfulibrarian.wordpress.com)
• Professional Learning Network Plans (maysayparn.wordpress.com)
• Personal Learning Networks (An Excerpt) (weblogg-ed.com)
• Tearing Down Your Classroom Walls (freetech4teachers.com)
• The Downtime Learner theory (deangroom.wordpress.com)

Did you know you can save time and effort by starting a Frequently Asked Questions Discussion Board in your course?

Do you get tired of answering the same student questions over and over? Save time and effort by starting a Frequent Asked Questions forum in your course! It is a public way for students to share questions and answers about technical problems they’re having, questions about deadlines, or even clarifying course readings. The more activity in your discussion boards, the more you can build a lasting knowledge base that addresses any question students might encounter. It won’t be long before you can simply say “Go check the FAQ” instead of staying up on Sunday night answering redundant emails from frantic students.

You can incentivize participation by letting students know they can get extra course points for participating in the help forums (either by asking or answering questions). By giving helpers and “helpees” equal points for using the forums, you remove the stigma of asking for help while motivating classmates to spend their precious time and energy being good Samaritans.

I gave students clear guidelines for the quality of questions and answers I was willing to reward, and which ones were obvious ploys for some free points. Then I quietly smirked to myself as they frantically gave and received help on a range of topics so they could get that “free” 5% in my course.

Technologically, you might look into using Google Groups or even Edmodo.com as tools to serve as a discussion board.

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• Your School’s Online Discussion Boards: What You Need to Know (distance-education.org)
• 10 Free Computer Tech Help Sites You Might Have Overlooked (makeuseof.com)
• How to Use Discussion Boards in Online Courses (brighthub.com)
• FAQ Pages: Best Practices and Examples (noupe.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Lost your job? Put down that remote and listen here! Burrowing a groove in your couch is not getting you any closer to that dream job you want. Why not use your unemployed hours to build your resume?

I recently secured my dream job after three depressing months as a laid-off, former high school teacher. I was telling a friend how I made the transition to an Instructional Designer at the university level, and he said I should write an article about it– so here it is!

Last year, I learned of the position of Instructional Designer– basically someone who helps college professors integrate technology in their course designs– and I knew that it must be mine. As a teacher I have grown increasingly interested Web 2.0 tools as a way to enhance learning in the 21st Century. This interest has inspired me to explore blogging, not just for my class but as a way to document my own learning on topics of tech in education. It also led me to my current love affair with WordPress (both as a blogger and designer).

When I got laid off last August, I decided I wanted to use the time to learn WordPress (how to set one up, design it, and understand it deeply), and to get involved with organizations that were doing cool things with computers here in the Bay Area. I thought (rightly, it turns out) that if I stay active and keep exploring the road between me and an Instructional Designer position, it could only be a good thing.

I started volunteering with the Marin Computer Resource Center, a non-profit that takes donated old “e-waste” computers and rebuilds them into working machines, then gives them to people in need. They are awesome. They taught me how to take old computers apart, fix ‘em back up, and install Linux on them. I got a free education in computer repair, saved some landfills, helped some people, and my awesome manager Benji offered to serve as a reference for me in my job hunt. Even without a job, I had an employer who was willing to rave about me. This paid off later…

I joined a number of Meetup.com meetups related to blogging, social media, and web design. These free or low-cost meetups helped me meet a lot of people with interesting experiences in the field I wanted to go into. It was great to get a sense of what the world of hardcore bloggers & designers looks like from the inside, and to learn more about current issues in the field.

This led me to an amazing resource in Oakland called TechLiminal, a technology salon where they host classes, evangelize WordPress and Drupal, and help community members take advantage of social media technology. One morning I went down there and introduced myself, and was surprised to find that I could come hang out and work, learn WordPress design, and sit in on classes. I told Anca, the owner, about my passion for blogging and my experience as a teacher, and she asked if I would like to guest-host the Blogger’s Support Group on Friday afternoons?

That experience led to an ongoing teaching position at TechLiminal, working with bloggers and serving as a writing coach and WordPress geek. It didn’t pay very much at all (it was donation-based, so I usually walked out with less than it cost to park!) but the experience was invaluable. We would raise questions and challenges that drove my learning forward, and they forced me to write constantly, which I did– about educational technology.

To keep up with the “Blogging Challenge” we set ourselves, I wrote a post or two per week, discussing various Web 2.0 technologies and how they might be used in the classroom. I learned more about how to publicize my blog and attract viewers using social bookmarking tools.

After a few weeks of this intensive writing schedule, I realized that I had a pretty decent collection of interesting articles here at TedCurran.net, so I got a free email address at this domain, ted[at]tedcurran.net, and started adding it to my resume.

Not too long later, I got an interview with a university, and my “boss-to-be” noticed my email address, put TedCurran.net into her web browser, and saw real, written evidence of my understanding of tech in education. A blog, when done right, is an ongoing document of your thinking, learning, and growth on a certain topic.

During the interview, she told me that she had read my blog and that she was impressed with the ambition it shows– that I actually stayed active and kept growing while I was out of work. I can only think how much more attractive this made me look as a candidate. I had pages and pages of written proof that I understand tech in ed, web design, and Web 2.0. In addition to the body of writing I had built up, I now had two new employers who were willing to provide a reference for me even in the time I was out of work. I firmly believe that this is what made me stand out from the rest of the crowd.

The Moral of the Story

There’s no better way to prove that you can do the work than actually doing it– pay or no pay. This downtime in your career can be a golden opportunity to regroup, figure out what direction you want to move in, and start working towards it. If you can’t find someone to pay you to do the work you love, start doing it for free and blogging about it!

Related articles

• How to create a blog (heatherwilchesbrooks.com)
• World wide puddle (blogs.law.harvard.edu)
• Blog Job (theyoungjourno.wordpress.com)

“Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration!“
-Thomas Alva Edison

“I discovered the meaning of life but I forgot to write it down.“
-Hugh Gallagher

You know those times when you are struck with a brilliant, life-altering, million-dollar, save-the-world idea at the exact moment when you can’t do anything about it? As a person who works with ideas, you will probably have more brilliant ideas than you can ever put into action. Paradoxically, we’ve all had the experience of finally “getting in writing mode” and realizing that the ideas just won’t come. I think this is because the “inspiration” and the “perspiration” parts of your brain seldom come to work on the same day, and good note-taking is the key to helping them work together.

By capturing ideas in an organized way, you can come back to your “inspiration” moments while you are in your “perspiration” mode– thereby tearing down the barriers to getting started.

HOW you capture ideas is a personal choice that has a lot to do with how you like to work, where and when you get your best ideas. There is no one-way to do it, but the best idea-catchers have these features in common:

1) You can take it with you everywhere. This is where systems like a little paper notebook, voice recorder, or cell-phone based idea-catcher work best. I always have my smartphone with me, so I can always capture voice, photo, and text-based notes on Evernote (my favorite idea-catcher of them all). My best friend carries a folded piece of paper in his pocket and swears it holds his whole life together. It doesn’t matter what it is, just that you have it on you at all times.

2) It doesn’t take much thought to get started. You don’t want an idea-catcher that requires too many steps (like remembering a password, logging in, checking your email) before you can record this idea. If it takes more than 10 seconds or two steps to get started, you may lose that precious idea. I like making voice notes to myself, so I keep ReQall.com on speed dial on my phone. One click and I am dictating voice notes to myself.

3) It can store ideas of all types. You want an idea-catcher (or catcherS) well suited to the many forms your ideas may come in. You may find it more effective to use a suite of tools to capture to-do’s, interesting website bookmarks, snippets of writing, tweets, audio recordings, photos, videos, and whatever else you need to save.

4) You can easily come back & review your ideas. Saving your ideas is great, but a good idea-catcher system should make it easy to come back and view your ideas in an organized way. You don’t want to wade through a mess of weird files and scrawlings when your “perspiration” mind just wants to get started!
This is where Web 2.0 technologies really shine, because they make it easy to tag, categorize, and search your notes. My beloved Evernote is my repository for everything from song lyrics, to do’s, business cards, blog posts-to-be, meeting minutes, etc. etc. etc. I have a tag for “song ideas”, so when I am sitting down at my home studio looking for some lyrics to sing, I can fire up Evernote and be recording in seconds.

While Evernote is great for that, many blogs, tumblelogs, online office apps, and even microblogging services (like Twitter) allow you to tag & search your ideas for future review.

SuggestedTools:

Evernote– ideally suited for everything I’ve discussed here. The more you work with it, the more you’ll find it can do!
ReQall.com- Voice to “To-Do List” webapp
Mind Mapping software (like FreeMind)
RememberTheMilk.com- To-Do lists done right
Stickies/ Text- simple and easy evergreen solutions
Voice Mail- call yourself and dictate notes!
little pocket notebook- some people swear by them
Twitter- easy to do, easy to review!
Audio recorder (like Audacity)
Web bookmarks (like Del.icio.us)
Web clipping (like ClipMarks)
blogging (like WordPress, Posterous, or Tumblr)
Google Voice – A revolutionary mixture of phone, voice mail, email, SMS, and awesome. Great for catching ideas!

Don’t Forget the Perspiration!
We’ve done a pretty good job of storing our “Inspiration”, but remember that this is only 1% of the job. Your job as a creative individual is to take these pieces of inspiration and weave them into something that the world can use. As Merlin Mann so eloquently states (and I’m paraphrasing), there is no magic tool for this. You just have to do it. A lot. And be prepared to suck. A lot. The people who find ways to move through this ugly, challenging phase of creation become the masters of their craft.

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Image via Wikipedia

Everyone loves Firefox because there are so many great user-created Add-Ons that make your web browser into much, much more. Add-ons allow you to customize your browser to make tasks easier. This extra performance comes at a slight cost; the more add-ons you pile on, the more sluggishly your (formerly fast) browser becomes. Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a few different copies of Firefox– each optimized for your various tasks? Sadly, you can only run one instance of Firefox at a time. Or at least– one instance of Firefox NAMED “Firefox”. Over the years, some enterprising upstarts have taken the Firefox codebase and built new browsers on top of it.

Flock browser is geared for Web 2.0 addicts. It automatically logs into your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Gmail– the list is enormous and ever-growing. Suffice it to say that if there ever was a browser meant for fun (not work), Flock is it.

Another Firefox-powered browser, Wyzo, is optimized for the rabid BitTorrent downloader. It has BitTorrent built in, along with an enhanced download manager, CoolIris, and some other nice updates to the original Firefox recipe.

While each browser has its own intended strengths out of the box, you can also outfit each one with the Firefox add-ons that help you get all your tasks done quickly and easily. What I’ve done is just one way to approach this, but it shows you what can be done.

Firefox

Firefox itself has become my work browser. I have to manage my (Google Apps for your Domain) email, calendars, school blog sites, to-dos, and plan lesson presentations (which for me, involves scanning through lots of photos online so I can illustrate what I want to say). My Firefox is optimized for this task with a few plugins which support these tasks:

• Xoopit for Gmail– shows you a list of all of the files, photos, videos, and attachments in your Gmail, visually
• Greasemonkey– enables me to run Better Gmail 2, Better GCal, and Better GReader from the geniuses at Lifehacker
• CoolIris- an incredible addition to any browser that allows you to see photos in a beautiful 3D interface
• XMarks- to sync my bookmarks and stored passwords between browsers and computers
• Zemanta- offers suggestions for license-safe media to add into emails and blog posts, great for SEO on blogs
• Google Gears- so I can access all these online services even when I’m offline
• ScribeFire– a blogging client inside your web browser. Perfect for dragging, dropping, commenting, and publishing from the window you work in. Also helps with SEO and works with all major blogging services

On a final note, another great reason to have several different browser is that logging into a Google service as one user basically dominates your whole browser. When I log into Firefox with my work Google Apps account, it gets very confused and buggy when I try to use my personal Gmail for online services. Better to have one browser for work, and one for play. Speaking of play…

Flock

Flock has become the official browser of my personal life. I love its sidebar which gives me at-a-glance views of my Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube peeps while I browse. I log in with my own personal Gmail and Yahoo email accounts so I can access Flickr, Blogger, YouTube, and GoogleEverything easily. It’s the browser I turn on when I want to do my own thing.

• Xoopit for Gmail– especially good here for scanning through videos, photos, and files people have sent me– serves as a photo album
• Feedly- A beautiful new front-end redesign for Google Reader that allows you to catch up on all your RSS news while easily sharing it with your peeps
• Greasemonkey– I love Facebook Fixer, AutoPoke, and Remove All Facebook Ads
• Mozilla Ubiquity: This gives me access to my Ping.fm status updater, rememberthemilk tasks, and any bookmarklet that I can dream up with a quick key combination
• CoolIris- an incredible addition to any browser that allows you to see video and photos in a beautiful 3D interface– here it’s a great way to scan through YouTube in a very pleasing interface
• XMarks- to sync my bookmarks and stored passwords between browsers and computers

Wyzo

I just added Wyzo to become my dedicated web design/ developer browser. Not necessarily because of anything inherent in Wyzo’s makeup, just because I needed another iteration of Firefox to fill up with all the great tools people have developed to make Firefox an awesome WYSIWYG code editor. This way, I can open up Wyzo the way someone else might open DreamWeaver.

• Firebug: huge tool for seeing the code behind websites, editing the XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and debugging
• Web Developer ToolBar: seems similar to Firebug but with TONS of features. It’s new to me– will learn more.
• ScribeFire– a blogging client inside your web browser. Perfect for dragging, dropping, commenting, and publishing from the window you work in. Also helps with SEO and works with all major blogging services
• ColorZilla- a little dropper tool that allows you to pick up a color and see its hex code.
• FireFTP- Free FTP in your browser. Goodbye, Dreamweaver!
• Zemanta- offers suggestions for license-safe media to add into emails and blog posts, great for SEO on blogs

So this is just one geek’s idea about how to transform the various flavors of Firefox into useful tools for your many web browsing needs. As more and more of our computing moves from the desktop onto the interwebs, we will need to have different tools to suit the different tasks we do online. Another way to do this is to create Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) with Fluid or Prism– creating little “single use” apps that do one thing really well. But that’s a lesson for another day.

Web 2.0 has beguiled us to forsake our old offline apps and turn to the online cloud for more and more of our data needs. CNET’s Buzz Out Loud podcast proclaimed that “Offline is the New Online” when Google Gears came out in 2008. Our email files are no longer downloaded into a desktop app like Outlook via POP3– now we get a browser’s eye view of our data on a remote server in real time. Netbooks, stripped down laptops whose appeal relies largely on web-based applications, are the new hot devices. Our newspaper companies are going bankrupt as we favor online RSS readers, but what about when we go offline?

I have started taking the Bay Area’s underground BART train to work, and ever since I have been obsessed with finding offline ways to work with my data. Especially RSS feeds, email, and twitter links are a challenge to work with, but I wonder what other online/offline travails people are having?

I tried syncing my Google Reader with Google’s Gears plugin and found that RSS feeds often link out to the originating site for the full story. This led me to research which news sites have full-text enabled RSS feeds, and I only found a few (including the Guardian.co.uk, Gawker websites like Lifehacker and io9, and some WordPress-powered blogs).

I’m starting to get into syncing my Thunderbird and/or Gmail for offline use, but I’m often thwarted when I receive links to outside sites whose content I cannot view. Twitter would be another great service to read on the train, but again, the links are half the fun.

I am discovering that there are a whole host of interesting Adobe Air Apps that specialize in giving you offline access to your online data. I just used Flump to download my Flickr library, Netbook to access Project Gutenberg offline, and Birdie to see my Twitter tweets offline.

Are you also interested in seeing your online data when you are stuck underground? How do you go about connecting with the online world?

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I have spent my whole teaching career in small, high tech charter schools, and I have seen educational technology grow symbiotically alongside Web 2.0 advances. I have embraced blogs for their power to tackle a variety of classroom teachers’ challenges.

At our schools, there has always been the expectation that teachers will maintain an informative website so students can access homework, handouts, calendars, and other class information. My first school was using RapidWeaver, a desktop program where teachers designed websites whole and then uploaded them to the school servers. As the school year progressed, the upload times got longer and longer as teachers’ sites got more complex. As a result, busy teachers gradually fall off, leaving their websites as a wasteland of outdated and useless material.

I have discovered that blogs are the ideal way to provide information to your students. Why? Because:

• the most up to date information (like tonight’s homework or today’s assignment) is always at the top
• old posts are saved and can be organized in whatever ways you can imagine
• blogs are free and easy to operate
• teachers who don’t want the extra hassle of “updating a web page” can even post to blogs by email!
• Students can “follow” or “subscribe to” your blog posts so they never miss an assignment
• Blog feeds can be combined so, for example, assignments from all the school’s teachers can appear on the same page.
• Your blog feed can even be embedded in your school’s main web page.
• You can maintain various blogs for separate purposes. I even have a private blog that nobody can see that I use to  take notes on confidential student situations.

The beauty of them is that they are so flexible that you will continue to find new and interesting ways to use them. Blogs are a powerful technology that can be used in a variety of ways to make your classroom management more efficient.

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clipped from lifehacker.com Windows/Mac/Linux (Adobe Air): Klok, a free time and project-tracking app for the Adobe Air platform, is a great time-tracking solution for multi-platform users, as well as anyone who likes to keep it simple. Simple projects allow you to simply create and describe time entries on a drag-and-adjust grid, or use a template like “Web project” to automatically create sub-categories of HTML, design, text, and the like. You can also use Klok as a work timer using the “Work On” button, and export reports and invoices for clients. Klok is a free download for any system running the Adobe Air platform.

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