A Digital Toolbox: Demystifying Google+ Over the past couple of years I have been increasingly using online technologies to allow my students to learn, create, and communicate in hybrid learning spaces. In working with pre-service and veteran teachers in graduate level classes, or in professional development workshops, I try to provide an online learning resource that individuals can use after the day is over and they are back home. I build these online learning resources and communities to be as device agnostic and location agnostic as possible.
This means that you can learn, create, and communicate at work on a PC, on your couch on an iPad, or in line at the coffee shop on your mobile device. In my humble opinion, the best of these online technologies over the past year or two is Google+. What is Google+ and how do I get started? Google+ is a social network developed and run by Google. To create a profile in Google+ you need to navigate to Use Google+ to develop your Personal Learning Network W. Picasa 3.8 Integrates With Picnik & Introduces Face Movies. But that isn’t all. Other new features make it easier than ever before to upload photos to Picasa web albums and gather EXIF data from photos. Then there is the new “face movie” feature which, despite the odd name, is fun to use. Integration With Picnik Picnik, an online photo editing site that has been around since 2007, was purchased by Google in March of this year. The folks at Google don’t seem to waste much time, as Picasa 3.8′s biggest addition (at least in my opinion) is the ability to edit pictures with Picnik.
This is integrated seamlessly. If you find a picture in Picasa that you’d like to edit, you simply right-click it and then choose Edit in Picnik from the toolbar on the left side of the Picasa window. Picnik in Picasa 3.8 has some overlap with the editing functions that already exist in Picasa. New functions include Rotate, Resize and Picnik’s one-click Auto-fix. Face Movies Another cool feature that has been added in Picasa 3.8 is the addition of “face movies.” Conclusion. Google Docs Gets a Taste of Wave with Collaborative Highlighting. Google may have killed Wave (prematurely by some accounts), but it has added a little bit of real-time collaboration to one of its flagship offerings, Google Docs, with the addition of collaborative highlighting.
The new feature is straightforward and simple, but offers some real potential in working collaboratively, in real-time, on the Internet. According to the Google Docs blog, "you can now see the text that other editors are highlighting as they select it. " This means that, before anything happens, you'll be able to see the text get highlighted. From the image, it also looks like you'll be able to select text and append notes to it, a much-used feature of professors and editors alike in full word processing programs like Microsoft Office.
The difference here is that it is all happening in real time. As we both look at the document and go to make changes, we see one another highlight text and add commentary. Custom Search.
Google Knol Reaches 100,000 Pages. It's hard to believe that Google Knol's 6th month anniversary is fast approaching. The Wikipedia direct competitor, which launched to the public back in July of 2008, is reporting that Knol users have collectively produced 100,000+ knols. That's no small feat for a site that most of us wrote off almost immediately. Google Knol vs Wikipedia Knol's size still pales in comparison to Wikipedia's amassed 2,702,519 content pages. It's probably an unfair comparison, however, given the leader in the user-created content has been building up their base since 2001. As the chart below shows, it took Wikipedia almost two years to reach a similar number of pages. Of course, 2001 - 2005 was also a much less trafficked time for the web, with less users on the web, let alone creating content. Google Knol is available in eight languages and visited by people in 197 countries. Related Resources From Mashable -Top 5 Tech "Killers" That Weren't-100+ More Wiki Tools and Resources.
Eye-tracking studies: more than meets the eye. Imagine that you need a refresher on how to tie a tie. So, you decide to type [how to tie a tie] into the Google search box. Which of these results would you choose? Where did your eyes go first when you saw the results page? Did they go directly to the title of the first result? Did you first check the terms in boldface to see if the results really talk about tying a tie? Or maybe the images captured your attention and drew your eyes to them? When designing the user interface for Universal Search, the team wanted to incorporate thumbnail images to better represent certain kinds of results. Click the images to view them larger. ...and the thumbnails also seemed to make it easy for people to skip over the results with thumbnails when those results were not relevant to their search (page with the thumbnail on the right).
For the Universal Search team, this was a successful outcome. Google Ocean: Has Atlantis been found off Africa? Dr Charles Orser, curator of historical archaeology at New York State University told The Sun that the find was fascinating and warranted further inspection. "The site is one of the most prominent places for the proposed location of Atlantis, as described by Plato," the Atlantis expert said. "Even if it turns out to be geographical, it definitely deserves a closer look. " Bernie Bamford, 38, of Chester who spotted the "city", compared it to the plan of Milton Keynes, the Buckinghamshire town built on a grid design.
"It must be man made," he said. Google Ocean, an extension of Google Earth, allows web users to virtually explore the ocean with thousands of images of underwater landscapes. Launched earlier this month, it lets users swim around underwater volcanoes, watch videos about exotic marine life, read about nearby shipwrecks, contribute photos and watch unseen footage of historic ocean expeditions.
The legend of Atlantis has excited the public imagination for centuries. 6 Reasons To Fire Your Event Planner & Use Google Instead | Why spend hundreds of dollars on an event planner when you can use Google for free? Seriously. You’re going to be doing most of the legwork anyway if you’re planning a party. Why send out precious invitations printed on smooth matte cardstock paper when you can just give friends a heads-up through email? It’s less expensive, and much cooler to anyone with a laptop or iPhone.
So let’s see how Google can save you a lot of money on your next event. Telephone Lookup Whether choosing to hire or fire an event planner, certain research still needs to be done in order to prepare party invitations. How many of your friends’ addresses do you keep stored in your memory? Google Notebook Once you locate an address through a Google search, you can save it just as easily by bringing Google Notebook into play. Plus, you can even search your notebooks just as you would Google itself, to find any clips that you might misplace. Google Street View Google Bookmarks Don’t worry. Google Calendar Google Sites. Bush: Fix Your “Miserable Failure” Googlebomb Legacy Before Obam.
Few realize that outgoing US president George W. Bush has left behind a unique legacy for future presidents, including Barack Obama — that they are all condemned to rank tops for a search on “miserable failure” in major search engines. It’s my hope that Bush will correct this before leaving office, or that Obama will fix it soon after he’s inaugurated. Below, more about the situation and how it could be solved. Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs is my article from January 2007 that covers the history of how it came to be that for many years, a search for miserable failure on Google would bring up the official George W. Bush biography. This was due to a “Googlebomb” where many people had linked to his biography using those words in their links.
Didn’t Google fix all that? Yes, the miserable failure “Googlebomb” was fixed at Google. Meanwhile, the two other major search engines, Yahoo and Microsoft, continue to rank Bush tops. From Yahoo, miserable failure: