Hero rats

Just watched a cool Ted talks video about rats!

These rats are "hero rats." Some are trained to sniff out land mines, others to sniff out tuberculosis.

The director of the program is a guy who quit his job as an engineer to solve some of the developing world's most pressing problems. I admire him.

I'd like to donate to the cause. Have to figure out my reluctant PayPal account first.

Those rats are both clever and cute!

12th day: Doing good on the Web!

I'm especially intrigued by the Kiva website. I like that the money is loaned rather than straight charity. Not that I'm against charity, but I like the idea of the money being used to help a business venture, something that can help sustain people for a long time. It's the "teach a person to fish" rather than "give a person a fish" idea.

I've done the Hunger Site clicking before, too, but because there's so little investment from me, I just ended up forgetting about it! I guess I should put a reminder on my computer.

What are the ethical considerations to promoting these in a class? I don't think I would feel comfortable doing it as I remember being a poor college student. I would have felt bad if a college prof encouraged me to lend $25 when I didn't really have that kind of money even to part with for a while! Still, it might be interesting to discuss the way they persuade their audiences.

Day 11: Thesauri!

OK, I'm a word nerd, and I LOVED this idea! I may have looked at something similar to it before. It's cool to see the links between words.

I started with the free site, Lexipedia. I like it, especially the idea of "fuzzynyms". But I think it's British, which might not work for my students. What would they do with the term "small beer" for trivial? Or "trifle"? What would they think of "jolly"?

Visual Thesaurus is also good, but the diagrams aren't as large for the non-paying customers.

Still. Very cool.

Day 10: Mind mapping

I love bubbl.us! I will definitely use it in my class. I have students brainstorm topics for blogging because writing "this is what I did today" is boring after a while. It will work great for prewriting--for the students who like visuals and that free-association that this kind of thing requires.

Here's mine:

Day 8: New Search toolz

I like the idea of these, but I'm having trouble making them work for me. The screen shots and variety in the cube was most intersting, but I couldn't get the cube to turn correctly! I tried the arrow keys, etc. like they said, but it would only rotate a bit and kept showing me one side.

Viewzi had the nicest interface. I like that. But it took forever for it to load the screen shots.

Don't know if I'll use these.

Day 7: Mashups

This is what I said on the Coe 13things blog:

The data masher scared me a bit. I kept thinking about Randy Christiansen saying "correlation does not equal causation"! I think that it would be a great way to manipulate statistics and mislead people. Or, maybe you could use it more ethically.

I'll try one of the picture mashups--I think I accidentally started creating it on Lisa's account. . . . oops!

Here's my picture mashup, with one MP3! Or you can view it below. Grab and drag to see different parts of it.

Day 6: Tiny URL

The difference between a kid's Xmas list and a mom's Xmas list:

The kid's Xmas list is what he wants for Xmas.
The mom's Xmas list is what she's going to buy everyone for Xmas!

Here are a couple things on MY Xmas list and tiny URLs with links to the websites:

Nanodots for Robbie
http://tiny.cc/v1bc2

Calligraphy set for Eli
http://tiny.cc/e53yv

Day 5: Wallwisher

Cute idea. I'm not sure I'd use this in class, but I liked posting on Lisa's wall :-)

Here's my wall: post away, anyone who's reading this!

Day 4: Grooveshark

My boys have told me about this. Robbie will say "everyone pick a song so we can make a playlist" and we have an odd Nesmith family playlist with folk or odd rock (Bruce), 70s music (Jane), Green Day (Robbie) and Lady Gaga (Eli).

I don't like to select music, most of the time. I'd rather listen to the radio--in stereo, not MP3 files, which sound thin to me--and get pleasantly surprised. Yet Grooveshark does this, too. When I went there, I just clicked on "Classical" and they started playing a lovely Chopin Mazurka! How did they know I liked Chopin piano music? Vivaldi's up next .

But every once in a while, I NEED to hear a particular piece of music that I don't have. This site might help me there.

For example, Robbie has been working on creating a vo-corder from bits and pieces of junk around the house--found out how to do it on the internet somewhere. He tries to explain the vo-corder to people by explaining the physics behind it. They look puzzled. Then I say "You know, like Peter Frampton." And they understand :-)

So Robbie used Grooveshark to find Peter Frampton music. He was not impressed. But we were glad he got to hear it!

Day 3: Picnik

Lisa introduced me to this online tool when I was working with my journalism students on a website. It is invaluable! We didn't do cute things with it like stickers or sepia tone, but we used it to change the size of photos--especially important when loading on a web page. I think we also used it to put captions/cutlines right with the photo, which made creating the web page much easier.

I love Picnik. I haven't used it at home, but it's a great classroom tool for journalism.

Oh, I like the funny "loading" quips! They make me laugh, which is good. Need to lighten the tension when working on projects.

Here's what I did with a "fun" photo. Yeah, it's true that trumpet players have a bit of an ego. How many trumpet players does it take to change a light bulb? 10. 1 to change the bulb, and 9 to say how much better THEY could do it.

Day 2: Doodle

I've used "when is good" but Doodle is so much more fun to say! I'm pretty sure this is the one Bob Marrs used to schedule our upcoming department meeting.

I like these. Not much more to say!

1st day--poll everywhere

I don't use my cell phone much, so at first this didn't seem too interesting. . . but my students do! I'm looking for ways to keep them involved in class, and they think cell phones are interesting, so this might work.

I use survey monkey in class, and they love the instant gratification of the results graphs--this would be the same for quicker, pulse-taking questions.

I might use this! My practice poll was http://www.polleverywhere.com/multiple_choice_polls/MTgwMzU5NDQzOQ

Go ahead and answer if you want to! It's kind of a rhetoric nerd's poll . . .