Capturing ideas has been on my mind lately. I use evernote when working, but I often get the best ideas away from my computer either while on a walk or on a bike ride. I usually have my phone with me, I often message pictures to evernote, but I would love it if I could leave myself quick voice messages.

This email, dropped into my mailbox today. I have one question. Could it be any simpler?

So, I have created a drop and have the link to that in Evernote. No more lost and forgotten ideas.

Check out the message dropio left at http://drop.io/maynewsletter

Uses for the classroom

1. Calls from field trips

2. Use as a homework reminder

3. Use as a parent message

4. Record student responses to a special event or discussion and then embed calls on your class blog or webpage

5. Provide a daily class update

6. Have students call in with their project idea assignments

7. Check out this demo drop showing how a teacher can use drop.io as part of their work  flow at http://drop.io/mrdavidson

Below I embedded the voice message from that demo drop to show one of the many ways you can distribute drop content.

No related posts.

I was asked by a colleague if I still had a copy of a wordle I created last April for a school faculty that I no longer work for. I knew that I had emailed it, but I didn’t have access to that account. The wordle site works without accounts so unless you have the link it is hard to retrace your steps. I did have a hard copy in a journal I keep, so I was thinking of scanning it and sending it, however the scanning software had not been installed on my new mac.

After berating myself for 30 minutes for not keeping better records, it dawns on me. Didn’t I blog about that? A few clicks later, I find the post, and using the wordpress filter found images that I had uploaded during April 2009.

Sometimes you may wonder why you keep at it…My blog is my backup, my record, my memory, my resume even.

No related posts.

I just added a new rss feed to my “all in one place” place.

It was one of those, why didn’t I do this sooner, slap head moments.

I got the idea after a brief exchange in a chatroom between Jackie Gerstein and Joyce Valenza on liveclass2.0 on Saturday. The topic of the day was diigo. Jackie mentioned how she often starts her morning in Diigo checking out the links that have been added to the groups she belongs to. Joyce replied that she does that too. I always learn something in the liveclass20 sessions. While I was in the online seminar to learn about Diigo, as usual, the experience sparked a completely random idea that could not have been predicted.

After the exchange, I’m thinking, hey, I have a whole network in delicious (a kind of PLN subgroup that has been neglected), I bet if I checked their additions everyday it would be useful and informative and would make me smarter. I like the idea of all these great educators saving their resources and me taking advantage of that, collaborating.

This is another node in the flow of information from my personal learning network. One that I have not been utilizing enough.

I can stay on top of my network the laborious way, by going to the delicious site, logging in and checking network…

OR

“I bet they have an rss feed for that” and I can add it to my “all in one place” place. So when I go to that place everyday it will be there, updated.

How to, with Pics

Go to delicious and click on your network

As you can see there are 102,000 bookmarks saved by educators in my network

Scroll down to the lower portion of the page, and you will see the RSS feed link

After you click on it you will get a url that looks something like this

feed://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/network/lindseybarlow?count=15

I actually edited the field and changed the count=15 to count=35, this will make the feed bring in the latest 35 bookmarks from my network. If it is an active day or I miss a few days, then I will miss some of the bookmarks. This is not a big deal, I mostly just scan through the titles and investigate those that look the most interesting. Often a bookmark will appear more than once as the educators in my network have similar interests they tend to bookmark similar sites, especially ones that are shared via twitter. As you can see in the screenshot from the top, netvibes (my all in one place place) conveniently shows who bookmarked the site and its title. Scanning is a snap with this set up and doesn’t add much time to my daily check on what is happening.

Extra Credit

If you don’t have much of a network

If you don’t have much of a network in delicious, don’t worry. There is a shortcut. You can still take advantage of this idea, by tapping into the stream of someone who does have a good network. Replace the lindseybarlow in the above feed url with the delicious name of anyone with an account and you will have created a feed to anyone’s network.

No related posts.

Massachusetts Computer using educators annual conference takes place this week. To have one place to monitor, listen and watch what is going on I created a public page on netvibes that monitors the tags masscue and masscue09.

As soon as actual attendees post online via twitter, flickr, delicious, diigo, and blogs, it will feed to this page, making it easier to connect and listen to what is going on in sessions. I get so much more out of a conference this way, I lose that anxiety about choosing one session from the many great sessions on offer. I know that I can go back and check out links and bookmarks from most of the sessions, if and when I have time.

You can create a similar page for any conference, you may or may not be going to (just change the tag). The same ideas could work in the classroom, it would be just as easy to set up a page to follow any “tag” that is related to your curriculum topic. For collaboration and teamwork make your own tag & have the group post resources which are then aggregated automatically on the page.

Twitter search widget

This widget feeds every tweet that includes the word “masscue”. Helpful to connect to others on twitter and expand your personal learning network.

In the netvibes Add Content section choose twitter search from the essential widgets list.

Delicious and Diigo RSS feeds

To stay on top of what attendees are bookmarking in sessions, go to delicious and search for the tag you want to include. On the page with the search results you will see an rss icon. Click on that and copy the feed address (url). It will look something like this

feed://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/masscue?count=15

In netvibes, go to add content click add a feed, then paste in this url.

Blog Search

This widget will find all blog posts about a specific topic entered into the search. Add this content to your page using the blog search widget

Photos & media

To follow photo posts and other media being archived and tagged at the event, similar feed widgets can be created using

• flickr & rss,
• youtube & rss,
• slideshare & rss

If I was organizing an event, this would be job one, job two would be publicizing it. So, whether you travel to attend a conference in person or crash it via a netvibes page, share what you create & learn so others can follow you there, virtually of course.

Another blogpost with similar focus:

Create a listening dashboard for your organization

No related posts.

They are then required to find the list of videos aligned to the textbook they are using

The result of the challenge is that the student has a clear indication of which resources to  study with what chapter of their textbook.

The resources can be used for topic preview or review, discussion starters and useful additions to their own learning creations.

Teachers were excited to share this resource with their students, responses included

“That Hippocampus is awesome. Really Good.  I am going to assign it to my sophomores.”

OMG, this [Hippocampus] is Awesome!!!!”

For other digital literacy challenges see here and our masscue presentation here

Extra Credit

There are a few other websites that I like that have similar teacher time-saving alignments to the textbook.

For connected math curriculum by the Boston Public Schools there is Select Math

Please let me know if you know any others via the comments.

Related posts:

1. How will you share BLC10?
2. Dropio and voice messages in the classroom