One of the trends happening with software over the past couple of years has been a transition of applications that cover basic functions, like word processing, from the desktop to the web browser.

The latest entry in the online application sphere is a free online version of Photoshop, which went live as a beta today.  Currently, it’s a “stripped down” version of the application that handles basic image editing tasks with JPEG images and up to 2 GB of storage.  Adobe plans on adding more functionality and premium features for users who pay for a yearly subscription.

article at News.com

Photoshop Express online -  http://www.photoshop.com/express

Share This

Description from the Voicethread website:

A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways - using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) - and share them with anyone they wish. A VoiceThread allows group conversations to be collected and shared in one place, from anywhere in the world.

You can share and comment on video as well as pictures and documents! What a powerful collaborative tool! Watching the samples on the website is a great way to generate ideas for using this tool. You can embed the “voice thread” on your blog or webpage (even your Blackboard course site), making any site a group collaboration site.

Thanks very much to Lucy Haagen and Donna Hall for telling me about this, and Shawn Miller for remembering what it is called! Please try it and tell me what you think.

Share This

The New York Times has an article that looks at how Web 2.0 tools and the popularity of ratemyprofessors.com has impacted the kind of online dialogue that faculty have with students. Faculty interviewed for the piece discuss how they use tools like MySpace and Facebook to give a sense of themselves as a person to students outside of their course. The article also looks at a popular new web video series on MTVu called “Professors Strike Back” where faculty talk about their experiences with students.

article at New York Times

Share This

The Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) offers its annual Institute June 4-7, 2008 at Creighton University in Omaha, NE. From the Institute’s website:

“In its sixth year, the CASTL Summer Institute is pleased to continue to offer a variety of developmental opportunities to faculty, scholars, and administrators who share the desire to develop and promote the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). If you are open to changing or re-focusing yourself as a professional educator or graduate student OR you are curious about how the principles of SoTL might strengthen your teaching and deepen your students’ learning, consider attending the Institute.”

To learn more about SoTL and CASTL, visit the Carnegie Foundation’s CASTL website.

Share This

It is becoming common for users of Twitter to associate images with their “tweets”. The two services used most frequently are TwitPic and Twitxr. Images can be uploaded from a desktop machine, but the intended purpose is for people to send images from their cell phones or other mobile devices. From a phone, one can e-mail the image to the service and that generates a Twitter message, which includes a link to the image. It is also possible to look at the service’s website directly and see all of a user’s images with their associated messages.

Twitpic requires a Twitter account and the functionality is currently limited to posting through Twitter. Twitxr is a social networking site in itself, in that you can have “friends” and “follow” other users. You can also specify locations for each image and then view maps that display where all of the recent images were posted. Twitxr also allows users to send images to Facebook and Flickr, in addition to Twitter.

Share This

This is a link to a 5 minute video on MathCasts http://ti-tfb.net/ti_web/profesori/lindas/trud/etpe2006_uom/mc_prez_short/mc_prez_short.html

MathCasts are ScreenCasts (videos) that focus on math from both an instructor and learner perspective. An instructor can produce a video that shows step-by-step the process for solving math problems. Even more interesting to me, is using MathCasts to capture the learner solving a math problem step-by-step. The equipment requirements can be as much as $300, but with headphones and mics becoming ubiquitous and cheaper, open source software for screen capture maturing; and other hardware going down in price, perhaps this can scale.

Share This

More and more people are starting to use “hashtags” or “twemes” on Twitter. On Twitter, using a phone or an IM client, you can track a specific keyword and people are using these hashtags to track particular topics or facilitate communication within a group. This also allows for communication at a gathering, such as a conference, without having all the Tweeters follow one another. For example, people at SXSW will be adding #sxsw to their tweets. The hash convention was derived from IRC channels.

http://twemes.com is a convenient way to see tweets on popular topics.

http://hashtags.org tracks the use of hashtags of those that follow hashtags on Twitter.

See http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Hashtags and http://twemes.com/p/about for more information.

Share This