PHD Comics – Painfully Accurate

I ran across a great website today… PHD Comics. Perhaps it is because my graduate student days are still painfully near, but so many of the comics I saw spoke to me (like this one and this one).

There were also some very good ones about technology and education like this facebook comic. The winner for the day certainly has to be the internet comic (shown below).

Do you know how I know this is the best one? I spent an hour on this site before I wrote this article. I was doing some “research.”

Oh well, we all need a break every once in a while. Now I remember why I am not in school right now… but the fear of going back one day still haunts me…

Web 2.0 Backpack: Web Apps for Students from Read/Write Web

Good Monday morning to everyone out there. Just in case you missed it, Read/Write Web (one of my favorite sites) published an article this morning entitled: Web 2.0 Backpack: Web Apps for Students. This is one of the most comprehensive lists I have ever seen for Web 2.0 products. Take some time to look around. See what tools you might use, and what tools your students might use.

Area’s covered in the article:

• Office Replacements
• Notetaking
• Mind Mapping
• Studying
• Bookmarking
• Collaboration
• Calendar’s
• Calculation
• Other Tools

Check it out!

iPhone – 3 Features That Will Impact Education

The hype building up to the June 29th release of the iPhone is just staggering. Steve Jobs predicted that the iPhone will revolutionize and/or reinvent the phone in his Mac World Expo keynote speech. With educators already using cell phones and iPod’s in the classroom, how will this new device impact education? What new ‘revolutionary’ features does it introduce and how will those be important to students and teachers?

Sprouts – Educational Review

I came across an interesting new start-up recently called Sprouts. From their website:

Sprouts will be a free online service that lets you create graphical trees of related items using a visual designer. You can create your own projects, or publish your trees to share with others.

The program is brand new and still has some bugs to work out, but it looks really promising. Although the program is in pre-alpha you can e-mail Greg, the designer and he will create an account for you. He is also very open to suggestions and even implemented an embed option at my request. You can see a small sprout I made up below.

I really like some of the features. After you create a node, you can add nodes manually, or via RSS and Search.

You can then edit each node individually and add pictures, tooltips and even notes about the node.

I could see this being very useful to teachers and students for a creative representation of an idea they are working on. How could you use this?

Education in the Future – Videos

Here are a couple of video’s I just ran across that just confirm why changing the way we educate our students in important. Enjoy.

The Connected Classroom

When I Grow Up…

HyperWords – Great Firefox Extension for Educators!

Hyperwords is Firefox extension that allows you to highlight any words on the internet and perform various tasks with them. Some of them are useful on a personal productivity level, but a lot of them are great for educators.

Useful Features for Education (for Teachers and Students!):

Search – Traditional search engines AND an academic search sub menu with Academic Live, CiteSeer, Google Scholar, and NSF Publications. Highlight a word/idea, select one of these options and a search screen will open in another window using that word/idea.

A HUGE Reference sub menu including biggies like Wikipedia (pictured at right). Again, highlight a word/idea and then select your reference source.

A Translation menu that includes capabilities to translate from and to 13 different languages (English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Arabic). Highlight a word or even an entire page and translate it INSTANTLY on the page into that language. WOW!

Here is a great introduction video that shows some of the features in action.

How else might you be able to use this? Activate it in your Firefox browser here.

Usphere – Changing the Way We Apply to College

TechCrunch published and article today entitled: Usphere: Turning The College Application Process Upside Down. They introduce a startup company, Usphere, that allows students to apply to 33 colleges all at once.

Usphere lets students fill out a single application and be considered by their network of colleges. When you’ve completed the application, it’s tossed into their applicant search engine and only accessible by the 33 schools in their network. If a school likes you, they email you an acceptance letter complete with a bottom line price tag to attend.

I remember how draining applying to college and graduate school was, this would really make life a lot easier. This is very reminiscent of LendingTree.com… remember “When Banks Compete You Win!”? Well now there’s “Where Colleges Compete Over You.”

Isn’t it interesting how the internet has not only broken down perceived barriers of the past century, but it has also created a playing field that empowers the person.

8 Ways to use Camera Phones in Education

Yesterday I came across an article about the listed off ten ways to use a camera phone. As I read through this list I realized that a lot of these would be useful in education. It really got my brain turning too. The past couple of years have seen an explosion of cell phones. As I walk around campus now almost everyone has one, and more and more younger kids are getting them as well. Most schools ban them, but some are starting to see the potential. The average phone now a days has more computing power than many of the computers of 10 years ago. So… how can we harness that power in education? Let’s start with the camera phone since there are no additional fees associated with its use.

Here’s my list of 8 things you can use a camera phone for in the classroom, in no particular order.