State of the Union Wordle

I really love how you can use wordle to analyze speeches. Here is the State of the Union by President Obama on January 24, 2012. Notice the words that are largest; America, American and JOBS. What else does this tell us about the state of the union?

Here in 60 Seconds

I have so much I would like to say about infographics, but I felt I needed to put this infographic on my blog ASAP. I have just returned home from ISTE 2011 and my head is spinning. I always hate going back to work the day after this conference, because I am in quite a daze (good daze, but a daze all the same). There are ideas, people, inspirations, future creations all running through my head, and I really need to sort them out. OK, with that, I have used 60 seconds to type these words, and in that same time, so much has happened! For better and for worse, the world is moving faster than ever, and educators need to teach to generations of children who are accustomed to moving at this pace.


Infographic by- Shanghai Web Designers

Infographics

Infographics, digital presentations, digital storytelling and others are all names for the act of visually presenting data or information to make it more appealing. As a visual learner, this is something of interest to me on a personal and professional level. Recently I was shown a video on youtube of a visual representation done by Cognitive Media in a style called scribing. The example I will show is of Daniel Pink speaking about Motivation in regards to his book Drive.



This is a very professional and high level infographic, but there are many other types that can allow students and teachers to use this very powerful display method to share ideas and information. Not having access to a group like Cognitive Media, students and teachers alike will need to find other tools and strategies to make their information POP!

The Wild Apricot Blog has a great post on Making your own Infographic. This article has links to strategies, examples and How-To websites. The Wild Apricot Blog quotes Wikipedia,

Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics present complex information quickly and clearly, such as in signs, maps, journalism, technical writing, and education. With an information graphic, computer scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians develop and communicate concepts using a single symbol to process information.

Like much of the information we access in today's educational settings, students need to have information readily available and the ability to quickly present complex information is essential for teachers of these types of students.

One of the best guides to help anyone create an effective infographic is an article by Sneh Roy, The Anatomy of An Infographic: 5 Steps to Create a Powerful Visual. With a working knowledge of the 5 steps a student or a teacher could create an easy to navigate informational visual on almost any topic.

Two of my favorite tools for engaging info graphics (this is just two of many) are Wordle and Prezi. Wordle is a word cloud creator that is easy to use, customizable and allows the user to cut and paste any text into it. prezi is a unique presentation tool that instead of using traditional slides, allows the information to be placed on one single workspace and then the user can navigate, zoom and rotate the view from piece of information to piece of information to make an interactive visual presentation.

While this post only shows a few of the tools and resources for infographics, it is meant as an introduction to the topic and how it can be used more effectively in educational settings and in particular for those involved with Media and Technology within education.

Google Chrome: good but not for me

For the last month, as part of my personal experiment to use only "cloud" based applications on a netbook, I made Google's Chrome my primary browser. There were both pros and cons that came with Chrome and I thought I would highlight both.
On the positive, Chrome was everything that it was billed to be. It was quick to load pages and apps. It was small and efficient and was very simple. There were not a multitude of toolbars, too many drop-down menus and there was nothing too extreme in the realm of add-ons.
On the flip side, this scaled down browser was a bit too scaled-down for my taste. While it worked great for all of the Google Apps, the loss of some of the interactivity that I found in Firefox was missed. Some of the ease of bookmarking, some of the add-ons that I have been accustomed to using were missed.
Keeping in mind, this is my end user opinion, based on my use in one particular situation, I would not say that Chrome is a bad browser, and in fact I would recommend it to those that are using their browsers to surf the internet, and do some basic applications. However, due to my intense internet use for almost everything I do on this computer, I don't think this was the browser for me. For my internet-heavy cloud computing, I think that I will still defer to Firefox to be my default browser.

Living in the Clouds Part 1

For most of my computer use this month I will be using a computer where the only thing I have paid for is the computer itself. I am using a browser to access all my applications, keep my notes, write this blog, store files and photos and much much more. All of the work that traditionally took place in office suite type applications, was stored on hard drives, moved around on floppy disks, then portable media drives, and then USB drives eventually printed on paper are now being done, stored, shared and submitted online. This is known as cloud computing.

If my "experiment" works, it could have multiple implications on the use of technology at my school. There could be economic, procedural and pedagogical repercussions with this type of change. In this first part, I am going to list out what web 2.o applications I am using and for what purpose. While this list is not finite, it will illustrate the backbone of what is being used.

First and formost I needed to choose a browser, and for this experiment as I am calling it, I have chosen to use Google Chrome. This is a very scaled down, low frills and fast moving browser. My usual browser of choice is firefox, but I thought this would be a great chance to run Chrome through its paces. Added onto chrome I have used add-ons for google wave, Picnik, Google Voice, Diigo, Blogger and evernote. The home page I use is an iGoogle home page with links to my most used applications and webpages.

The applications I have chosen are those that will help me with productivity, and other work and home related tasks. What I am not using this for is leisure or gaming.

Basic Tasks: Google Docs, word processing, presentations, spreadsheets, forms.

Email: Gmail, integrated with other google apps and easy to use from multiple computers.

Photos: Picasa & Picnik, depending on how involved I want to be.

Notes and Organization: Evernote, good filing system and web based.

Calendar: Google Calendar, easy to use, ical friendly, easy to organize multiple calendars.

Bookmarking: Diigo, interactive social bookmarking with good tagging tools.

Online Storage: Dropbox, 2 gigs of free storage.

RSS Feeds: Google Reader, integrated system with other google apps, easy to use.

Twitter: Tweetdeck, while this does take a good amount of memory, it is still better to organize your tweets.

Blogging: Blogger, again an easy to use app that integrates with other google features.

Screen Capture: Jing, easy to install and use. While not feature rich, until fireshot or something like it is available for Chrome, this will do.

I am sure that this list will grow, but my goal is not to spend a cent on any applications. If something changes and there is a charge for on of the above programs, I will abandon it and look for a similar application elsewhere. I will post reviews as I learn and grow with this and will blog about that too.