Lifehacker - Five Best Online Image Editors - Image Editing
Five online applications for editing images: Sumo Paint, Photoshop Express, Pixlr, Picnik, & Aviary Phoenix. All have at least some free options, although premium accounts are required for some features.
Why do schools refuse to use free and open source software options, even when those options would improve accessibility for students? Ignorance? Fear? Politics? Probably some combination of all three.
If an electrician was too afraid of electricity to touch a wire, he'd be an electrician no more. So if an educator is afraid of the information and communication technologies of his/her age, then he/she can no longer be an "educator" in any meaningful way.
I was just trying to figure out how to get a news feed from Google today and was stumped. Google changed the interface and no longer provides a direct link, but you can manually create the feed.
You just have to manually rewrite the search URL, adding “<i>&output=rss</i>“.
Visualize connections in conversations on Twitter. Search for a user, tag, or trends. Tweets that generate conversation appear as spirals as they bounce around between people, so perhaps someone with lots of spirals would be someone who generates lots of conversation rather than just talking at people.
22 Why Reasons People Go Online: Which is Your Blog Connecting With?
Why do people go online? The most popular category is learning: educating yourself, doing research, or keeping informed. Fun reasons like passing time and being entertained as well as socializing also ranked high.
The 100 Best Open Education Resources on the Web | MasterDegreeOnline
Open education resources from colleges, museums, libraries, and other organizations. Includes lectures, podcasts, videos, media, and reference materials.
Cautions about Twitter. A lot of this seems to be about being realistic about the investment of time to really engage people effectively, plus pointing out Twitter's bad fundamentals.
Collection of thousands of TV commercials from the 1950s through the 1980s. Most or all of these are still copyrighted, but educators doing projects should fall under fair use.
Beyond Social Networking: Building Toward Learning Communities -- Campus Technology
Social networking and learning communities--moving beyond just the social aspects to reflective learning in a community. My coworker, April Hayman, is cited in the article.
The WCAG 2.0 guidelines for contrasting colors mean that if color is the only indicator of difference, you need to have sufficient contrast. It's really hard to meet the requirements with color alone, but if you underline your links it's OK.
Because of the WCAG 2.0 contrast requirements, if you don’t underline your links, there’s not much flexibility if you want to be Level AA, let alone Level AAA conformant.
Applications for sharing presentations, books, quizzes, note-taking, and research. Some of these are more general applications than learning ones (like SocialCalendar & Files), but a number of these apps are new to me.
Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: Guest Post by Gaurav Mishra: The 4Cs Social Media Framework
A framework for principles of thinking about social media, aiming to look at the underlying purposes and benefits of the tools without getting caught up in the specific tools or buzzwords.
4Cs of social
media: Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence
Collaboration can happen at three levels: conversation, co-creation and collective action
The third C, Community, refers to the idea that social media
facilitates sustained collaboration around a shared idea, over time and
often across space.
The great thing about collective intelligence is that it becomes
easier to extract meaning from a community as the size and strength of
the community grow.
Not too serious slideshow on social media, with a number of stats on impact. Emphasizes the idea that social media is a conversation, not a broadcast platform for marketing.