Teach42

While I’ve never been a huge fan of flash cards, they certainly have their place in education.  Let’s be honst, practice makes perfect, and sometimes there’s just no substitute for it.

I remember spending hours creating flash cards on 3×5 note cards, spending hour after hour practicing with them, and then after the test trying to figure out what to do with them.  Usually they sat on a shelf for a few weeks until I finally threw them away. 

Mobile Prep takes flash cards and puts a 21st century spin on them.  Your cell phone becomes your mobile flash card studio.  Since you always have it on you, you can study any time you have a few minutes free.  Among the features listed in the demo are the ability to randomize the quesitons and take out the ones you already know. 

Of course, you do need to create all the questions and answers before you can get to studying, right?  Well that’s where things get really interesting.  You can create your own “decks” and then sell them to other students!  So if you need to study the periodic table, you can either create your own set of flash cards for free, or you can pay a few bucks to buy somebody else’s.  If you take the time to make an amazing studyguide for the American Revolution, put it up for sale and maybe you can make a few bucks on the side!  Might as well get paid for your efforts, right?

The idea is good and the site looks promising.  I’m looking forward to seeing how this one develops.

Blogged with Flock

Guess what?

If you guessed that Jessica is pregnant and I’m going to become a father around  January 1st, 2007, then you’re scary good at these guessing games!

 was having a hard time believing it, but when they zoomed in during the ultrasound this morning and we could see the tiny little lime-sized baby (that’s his/her size according to BabyCenter.com), it all became incredibly real. Gotta admit, we both got more than a little choked up when it seemed to wave at us as if it knew we were watching.

I figure it’s never too early to get that child set up in cyberspace. So I’ll be resurrecting Dembo.org, setting up its MySpace page, and getting the little boy or girl a blog soon enough. It’s never too early to start that lifetime portfolio!

Until those things are ready, you can send him or her email via baby@teach42.com. Yes, that’s a real email address. Of course, I’m very concerned about internet safety, so I’ll be screening all of his/her email for now. But I promise, I will forward on all messages straight through the belly button!

Now if only I could find someone to buy my house so we can move before then!

Blogged with Flock

2 Cents Worth » Announcing hitchhikr.com

Leave it to Dave.  One of my favorite things about his presentations are the way he handles his resources and ‘handouts’.  He has a wiki for each presentation with hyperlinks for the information he has talked about.  That’s cool.  Oh yeah, since it’s a wiki, anybody can add their own notes or resources there as well.  That’s also cool.  He also has sidebar that aggregates any blog entries about that session, so when you look up the resources, you can see what other people had to say about it.  That’s incredibly cool.

Now he’s taken that concept to the next level.  Hitchhikr (spelling teachrs are going to hate that name!) is the uber conference aggreator.  In a nutshell, it allows people to submit conferences, and then provides a single place to go that aggreates all blog entries, podcasts and photos.  It’s heavy on the community involvement, in that people can add tags to conferences (for example to make sure that both NECC06 and NECC2006 are both tags for this years NECC) and also remove erroneous tags.

Of course there are RSS feeds throughout thte site, so you can subscribe to a specific conference long before it actually arrives.  You can also subscribe to a list of upcoming conferences so you know what’s coming up. 

I think there are going to be some bugs to work out still.  Actually, maybe bugs is too strong a word.  Details.  For example, if I pull up NECC right now, I see a ton of my photos from last year’s NECC.  More than likely, anybody pulling up NECC wants to see stuff about THIS year’s NECC.  So perhaps we need to figure out some way to filter things out by date (nothing older than 8 months). 

However, those are small details.  The concept is fantastic and the site looks great.  Go contribute!

Blogged with Flock

I can only read about so many people trying out a new browser before I have to give it a whirl myself.  So, today I’ve spent the day using Flock as my browser instead of Firefox. 

First impressions?  I like it.  It grabbed all of my Firefox settings, bookmarks, cookies, and such so I really didn’t notice too much of a difference when it came to just surfing.  I guess that shouldn’t come as a surprise since it’s basically a modified version of Firefox (go Open Source go!).  While it does seem a tad slower, it is still a beta.  Could be they have some issues to work out with displaying pages.

Flock does provide you with a whole new integrated experience though.  For example, when I star a page (you click a star to add a bookmark), I have it set so it adds the bookmark straight to my del.icio.us account.   If you choose to ‘unstar’ the page, it removes it from your del.icio.us account.  Couldn’t be easier.  It did take me a couple of minutes to figure out how to make it default to opening up the window so I could tag my bookmarks.  Otherwise things would get messy quick. So the built in integration is nice. 

Flickr is also fully integrated.  What do I mean by fully integrated.  FULLY.

I just saved this screenshot as a file.  Then I dragged the jpg from my desktop to this window and dropped it.  When I did, it opened up an ‘upload to Flickr’ window and allowed me to add my tags and set options.  I clicked upload and it took the fie, uploaded it to Flickr, got the code to display the photo and inserted it in.  That’s how integrated.  Oh yeah, and as you can see from the screenshot, you can view your Flickr feed from within the browser, scroll through your contact’s feeds, drag and drop from the browse window onto your computer, and so on.  You gotta play with it to believe it.  It’s slick.

Then we get to blogging.  In case you couldn’t figure it out from the paragraph above, this post was created from within Flock.  It supports most major blog engines and handles most of your average functions.  Heck, it even has a spell check built in, something I don’t have installed in WordPress right now!  I really like the fact that I can resize the screenshot I put up above just by clicking and dragging from the corners.  Very easy.  Oh yeah, as I just discovered, your categories and a tagging engine is built in as well for your blog entries.

I haven’t even touched the aggregator piece of it, and I”ve barely started exploring the search features and ‘web snippets’ piece, but so far I’m incredibly impressed.  This one is definitely worth the download and may be my new browser of choice.

If you give it a try, let me know your thoughts.  I’m curious to find the downside to this slick new browser, if there is one!

technorati tags:Flock, browser

Blogged with Flock

One of the things I always liked about Furl better than del.icio.us was that you could actually choose to make some bookmarks private. Just in case you didn’t want the world to know you were a huge fan of rodeo clowns, you could mark those bookmarks as private.

Turns out there’s a way to do it in del.icio.us too, it’s just a little hidden. If you go into settings, look at the list under the “Experimental” subtitle. Choose private saving and you’ll have the option of turning on the ability to bookmark a site privately.

Hey, it’s not a major feature, but it is kind of nice if you want to bookmark something personal that you don’t want the world to see. For example, if you want to bookmark a part of your school site that isn’t public yet, so you don’t want other people to see the link.

Heh, I get excited over the small stuff sometimes

This is the brilliance of simplicity. Want to teach your students about historical figures? Not just their names and dates, but to really get into their heads? Then have them create MySpace profiles for them!

BionicTeacher shares a project he did in conjunction with an English teacher in his school called Medieval Space, a historical paraody of MySpace. The assignment was to create MySpace profiles for figures like Richard III, and to figure out who their friends would be, what they would be blogging about, what music they’d be listening to and other such personal details. The results display quite a bit of thought and ingenuity.

The part I liked best was their choice of songs. They were started off with Richard III as an example page and I think that was key. His “currently playing iTunes song” was “Only God can Judge Me Now” by 2Pac and that started to loosen them up. His quote was “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” and they did a great job finding more suitable quotes and songs for their pages.

Ok, I feel bad cursing a college professor who certainly seems to be a genius, but I just can’t seem to topple Amir Dembo’s kung fu grip on the top spot when people do a Google search for Dembo!

What’s a guy gotta do to move up in the world?? Of course, he does have an insane number of links with the word DEMBO in it (articles that he’s the author of), so maybe that helps. I would imagine that having the name be repeated so many times probably helps his relevancy score. However, if that’s true then how the heck did Joseph Alexander lock up the third spot? The word Dembo isn’t in his front page anywhere!

I think I know a lot of the tricks of the trade to increase your Google relevancy, but no matter what I do, I can’t seem to get above the number two spot! So if any of you are Google-savants, share with me your secrets. I will not rest until I’m at the top of Dembo Google Search list!