Wednesday, June 29, 2011

What Do You Love?

Google has a new tool out that is not yet widely know called What Do You Love available at http://www.wdyl.com

This new sites lets you do a really comprehensive search on topics.  Results are then returned for images, videos, maps, and most of the other Google tools.

Looking for information on Cats on Google?  A search on WDYL returns a quick overview of Google's tools on the subject:



So check it out on What Do You Love!


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Sunday, June 12, 2011

Google's Les Paul Doodle is Here to Stay!

This week Google celebrated the life of legendary guitarist and inventor Les Paul with a very cool Google Doodle.

The playable and recordable doodle was put up for Paul's birthday on Thursday, June 9th.  And held over by popular demand to Friday.

But it now has a permanent home at http://www.google.com/logos/2011/lespaul.html

So rock on all you Google fans, Rock On!

For those who missed the very playable Google Pacman Doodle, it's also still available at   http://www.google.com/pacman/

And for a list of all Google Doodles, click HERE.


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Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Now You Can Dial

[Cross-posted from http://www.DailyDross.com .  Here's an old-school OneCoolTip on how to dial a phone from the good folks at AT&T!]

You think it's tough teaching your parents how to use the Internet?  Think about how hard they had it when they had to learn to dial a telephone!

This AT&T video from the 50s shows how to dial a phone.

Hey's, it's tough to do!

So let's practice:
  • Be sure of the right number
  • Wait for the dial tone
  • Refer to the number while dialing
  • Turn the dial until the finger hits the finger stop
  • Avoid confusing the letter "O" with the number "0"
  • The difference between ringing and busy signals



Source: AT&T Tech Channel


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Sunday, June 5, 2011

World Class Education Online at the Khan Academy

For all of our advancements in technology, education has changed very little in the past 100 years.

Kids go to school, listen to their teachers then come home to struggle doing their assignments using only their memory, text books and maybe good notes to guide them.

Don't even ask a parent to help.

But what if there was another way?

Not to replace the role of teachers, but to help students understand subjects from world-class experts in the materials.

It's already here.

The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization created in 2006, by Salman Khan.

It's mission is "providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere".

The website supplies a free online collection of more than 2,300 video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and economics.

In this ideal new world, students watch the videos and then use the in class time to work with others, collaborating with each other and their teachers.

And anytime they need to get a refresher on the subject, a short video will guide their way.

Each video tutorial is about 10 minutes long.  Why 10 minutes?  Because that's the limit YouTube placed on the original videos.  But after posting, Khan has learned that a 10 minute video is the right amount of time to understand a topic.

To browse the library of video lectures, click HERE

As a sample, here is an example of Sal explaining simple equations.







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Saturday, June 4, 2011

Create a Word Cloud with Wordle

Wordle: Gettysburg AddressPerhaps you've seen a "Word Cloud" before but didn't know how to make one.

Use Wordle to do it, http://www.wordle.net/

You can add text (perhaps copied and pasted from a web page or text document) or add a URL to let Wordle create your word cloud.

After it is created, you can format and even save to the public directory.


As an example, this word cloud is Abraham Lincoln's famous Gettysburg Address shown as a Wordle Word Cloud.





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