Earth Day 09

Happy Earth Day!  This image was generated at Tag Galaxy, where I  entered the tag earthday and it grabbed images from Flickr.  Watch out because it is addictive.

Jimmy Wales @Suffolk

Last month we had a nerd date and went to see wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales speak at Suffolk University.  The topic was Free Speech, Free Minds, Free Markets: Competition and Collaboration.  The Bostonist has a great recap of the evening.   Wales addressed the future of Web 2.0 and shared his latest project, which is a search-wiki called Wikia Search.  This is an open source search engine where user’s can rate results, pushing good results to the top of the page rather than those with the most money. 

Thoughts that resonated with me from the lecture:
1. Community Control of products leads to a more global/universal mind thanks to distributed intelligence.
2. A belief in the inherent good of people, meaning that there are more normal people than bad on the internet.  Yay Internets!

The Museum Effect

Make your dreams of having your art work exhibited in a museum come true with the Modern Art Museum Effect.

Wordle

Generate a word cloud of your website or a document with Wordle. Here is what I got when I put my blog in:

World Water Day

World Water Day is on March 22nd and the Tap Project  is a campaign that celebrates the clean and accessible tap water available as an every day privilege to millions, while helping UNICEF provide safe drinking water to children around the world.  Participating restaurants invite their customers to donate a minimum of $1 for the tap water they would normally get for free. For every dollar raised, a child will have clean drinking water for 40 days.  Boston is a participating city so I may have to donate during my travels tomorrow.

Free Rice

Free Rice is a non-profit website where you can practice SSAT/SAT vocabulary words, and for every word you get right, rice is donated to the United Nations to help stop world hunger.  It is pretty addictive and all of the advertising dollars are put toward rice that is distributed by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP).

One Laptop per Child

The One Laptop per Child Project has a special Give 1 Get 1 Program starting November 12th for a limited time. Their mission is to provide a means for learning, self-expression and exploration to the nearly two billion children of the developing world with little or no access to education. The sturdy hardware, software and interface are all designed specifically for a child and many activities for the laptop are the result of a collaboration of over 2,000 programmers from all over the world. In addition, they are solar and have hand cranks. A donation of $200 will pay for and deliver one XO laptop to a child in a developing nation, and in November you can get one for yourself and have one delivered to a child for $399. I really want to check one out, but at the very least donate one to such a great cause.

Spell with Flickr

Here is a fun Flickr tool called Spell with Flickr that lets you type in a word or sentence and it spells it with photographs. If you don’t like the first letter it gives you click on the letter and you can scroll through until you are happy. I may use this to make some cool signs for the walls at school.

Yahoo Teachers

I signed up for Yahoo Teachers back in July and am looking forward to the public release. It will be a free tool built by teachers that will allow teachers to easily share lesson plans. I watched the sneak peak and there is a product called the Gobbler that lets you easily gather parts of web pages for a lesson plan. It is an awesome widget that allows you to grab text, images and links simultaneously from a page and drag and drop them into your Yahoo Teacher projects. The combination of collecting information with gobbler, organizing it as a Yahoo project and sharing it with a worldwide network is impressive to see all in one product. I sure hope it lives up to the hype.

Google gets its Sky On

I was excited to see today via Slashdot that Google Earth has added a Sky feature to use within the product. It allows you to take 3-D journeys through stars, constellations and galaxies. There is all sorts of potential for teacher and student use during the school year.

Here are some helpful websites for users:
Sky: Educational tours (Made by Google Earth users)
Google Earth Blog
Ogle Earth