Tales of a Technology Omnivore

I LOVE this new Web 2.0 Guide for educators I found when checking out Ning in Education Forum. It’s lists different Web 2.0 technologies, which tools are popular, how they work, educational uses, and videos with more explanation. RSS, Blogs, Wikis, Social Bookmarks… it’s all there in a VERY easy to follow guide that is chuck full of useful multimedia and well written content. If you want to use 21st century tools to teach then Web 2.0 is the way to go.

Check it out: http://web2tutorial.wikispaces.com/

I love teaching people to blog using Google’s Blogger service. It’s SO intuitive and makes for a great starter blog especially if you intend to teach your participants to use other Google services — they’ll already have an account made (gmail, google docs, igoogle, etc).

One of the downfalls of blogger is the navbar because it has a NEXT BLOG button which leads you to a random site which may contain inappropriate material. Not good for an educational site. So here’s how to get rid of it:

Go to Template > Edit HTML > and place the following code in the template:

#navbar-iframe {
height: 0px;
visibility: hidden;
display: none;
}

PLACE IT where you find other #xxxxxx’s

AND you can access it from anywhere?? Well that’s the way the world seems to be going with virtual internet based storage space! There are services popping up all over the place that allow you to store your files on one computer and access them on another. I’ve taken the plunge with Windows Live Skydrive and it seems to be meeting my needs. 1GB of free storage accessible from any computer (even my Mac) and works through my school system’s firewall! There are certain files I wish I always had access to (logos, letterheads, etc). This allows me to be at any machine and work with those files — allowing me to be productive! It has personal folders, shared folders, and public folders. That’s right, create a folder to share with friends where they can add/remove/delete at your permission.

For student projects, this type of system is the answer to the collaboration dilemma! No more passing around thumb drives with work, students can share documents with their INVISIBLE 1GB virtual thumb drive!

Technorati Tags: virtual , drive , storage , skydrive