Interesting idea from UTC professor for 3D periodic table

Chattanooga Times Free Press | Chattanooga: Professor puts spin on periodic table

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga professor Dr. Hinsdale Bernard has been working on a three-dimensional model of the periodic table of the elements since he was a chemistry teacher in Trinidad in the late 1970s. He recently received a patent for the model he has been developing. His "Periodic Table in Three-Dimensional Form" is meant to be a learning tool that would appeal to youngsters from elemetary school to college age.

Also interesting that you can't embed Chatt Times videos..

Get it together

Clutter: Extreme Lifehacker Home Office Makeover

Disorganization leads to lack of free time, lack of free time leads to believing you'll never be able to get it all under control again, and that is how I ended up as a terribly scattered person in a wretchedly cluttered office.

Are you watching or not?

Wired Campus: Facial-Recognition Software Could Give Valuable Feedback to Online Professors - Chronicle.com

Many professors who teach online complain that they have no way of seeing whether their far-away students are following the lectures

This new software helps analyze whether or not students are watching, understanding, and engaged in web streaming courses, which is something we are tackling at UTC with my 797 project.

Photoshop tips

Image Editing: Get 101 Photoshop Tips in Five Minutes

Photoshop enthusiast and frantic video editor Deke McClelland fits 101 tips for Adobe's premiere product into five minutes of video

Kurzweil on the cheap

Having just been on a tour of the Office for Students with Disabilities at UTC this week, I was glad to know what this guy was talking about below. This thing is pretty neat, though I wonder how it reacts when webpages are changed..

Awesome Highlighter (online resource) | Free Resources from the Net for (Special) Education

I’m a big fan of Kurzweil 3000, and one feature of the program that I especially appreciate is the way text can be highlighted and then extracted into a new file. This can be an extremely valuable study aid. Another helpful study aid in Kurzweil 3000 is the option of easily adding sticky notes to pages of text. Altogether Kurzweil 3000 contains the best set of tools I know of for helping learners deal with a wide range of challenges that can create barriers to learning.

I'm just saying, if my students did this while I'm on vacation..

..I would totally be OK with it.

Post-its Note Art: 8-bit Edition | Office Supplies Blog

Geek Art is Art where science, technology, or video games were the primary source of inspiration

American chinese food becomes official chinese food

Kung pao chicken made official for Olympics | Oddly Enough | Reuters

"Bean curd made by a pock-marked woman," as the Beijing Youth Daily rendered the spicy Sichuanese dish, is now "Mapo tofu." And "chicken without sexual life" becomes mere "steamed pullet."

Virtual Field Trips via videoconference

This article talks about a group of California students learning about ecology by videoconferencing with the marine biologists 100 miles away. Technology and Gas Prices Send Students Of Virtual Field Trips

When seventh graders in Stockton took a field trip this week to see elephant seals, they didn't even step outside their school. Instead, with the help of a projector and a video camera, the students teleconferenced with a state park guide on the California coast.

Cool thing is, I'm totally doing this with the Governor's School for Prospective Teachers this week when we videoconference with Mexico. The students here will ask questions in Spanish about how school works there and what subjects they enjoy, then their students will answer in English.

Mousepose

Note to self: Buy this.
Boinx Software - Mouseposé

turned on, it dims the screen and puts a spotlight on the area around the mouse pointer, easily guiding the audiences attention to an area of interest.

John Templeton Foundation - Answering Big Questions

So this article links to the website of this group, which throws big money at research into life's big questions. It seems like a lot of these deal with reconciling God and Science, but I think that is just the topic for this year, since a lot of the published works deal with economics.. John Templeton Foundation

Educational Technology

The Templeton Foundation was started in 1987 in order "to serve as a philanthropic catalyst for discovery in areas engaging life'sbiggest questions". Over the years, these questions have included investigations into the laws of nature and the universe, along with thenature of love, gratitude, forgiveness and creativity.

This is especially interesting to me since I met Templeton at a conference in the Bahamas on Free Enterprise and how it helps (allegedly) the world's social problems (I took this photo). I leaned quite a bit more left in this area before the conference, but I see where a lot of their ideas have merits, so, YAY CAPITALISM! However, does the website remind you of the Hanso Foundation at all?

Great e-cards...

See here, he just had lunch. What a looooo-ser..

Thanks for the link Ryan!

EDD Conference 2008 - Learning Region

UTC News Releases » Ed.D. Learning Conference addresses partnerships

With the ultimate objective to realize a “learning region,” participants discussed ways new partnerships could be initiated and structured. They identified groups, institutions and organizations which may have an interest in partnering and how they could be constructively engaged.

Other than being the generic tech-nerd, I was able to participate in breakout sessions and to enjoy some pretty great presentations on web 2.0. Also, we wiki-ed, which was a first for me. If anyone knows where our wiki went (somewhere on pbwiki.com I imagine) please let me know.

Onboard Memory + USB Devices = Win!

Isn't it time we started putting device drivers for USB connected devices onto an onboard memory card?

Can you imagine plugging in your new printer or webcam and instead of also inserting that archaic CD-ROM you get an option to instantly install needed drivers and software as soon as you plug in the USB cable?
I think you can buy 256 or 512 MB flash drives for pennies now, so, come on people, let's make this happen.

Google's phone OS is coming out soon...

Video: Google demos the HTC Dream at I/O conference - Engadget

Some things to consider... Who owns the media? Web 2.0 meets Television.

Denver Open Media - This is a good overview of how corporate TV works and future trends in "open source-styled" programming for Public, Educational and Government channels.

So, how do we do something like this in Chattanooga? The idea is to have a local version of currentTV, where all of the content is user-submitted. Is there enough local content to make this happen? If not, could there be? (Thanks to Phillip Lucky for getting these ideas in my head.)

Zorbin' USA!!!Target

OMG, I'm like totally freaking out!

Zorb Smoky Mountains © 2007

I've been dreaming of that sweet Zorb sensation since MTV Road Rules - New Zealand, and the first one in the US is in Gatlinburg! Kill me now, I'm so happy..




Update: We're totally getting one of these from Target!!!

Insert Youtube videos directly into your presentation..

..with Google Docs, but definitely not with Powerpoint. Here is a presentation I made for the Tech OVerview EDUC 199 class:

Basic Editing: Inserting videos

This would totally change my life.

Since I'm moving more and more to web-based apps, particularly Google's, this would really be a useful tool. However earlier this year Google announced support of new open-source smartphone code to support a variety of manufacturers.Krakow says Gphone is delayed to 2009. Wait, what? - Engadget

the whole Gphone buzz was pretty much killed dead when Android got real.

So which is it. Gphone or no?