Go Team

Go Team.

Animoto!

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

The Extreme Presentation(tm) Method: Choosing a good chart

A Chart for Picking Charts

The Extreme Presentation Method has a great flowchart for selecting the best way to visualize your data.  As with any good graphic design, it really speaks for itself, so go have a look.

Great for students (and, ahem, colleagues) who are addicted to pie charts.

Primary Sources from the mid-50′s: Mike Wallace Interviews

A treasure-trove of mid-twentieth century interviews for your teaching pleasure.

The University of Texas, perhaps trying to make amends for unleashing my sister’s bachelor’s degree on the world, has posted a public archive of interviews from Mike Wallace’s 1957-1960 interview program.

History teachers covering the Cold War will find hours of material here, including US defectors, a pre-Vietnam Henry Kissinger, the former leader of the American Communist party, and on and on.

Through the site, you can download the original video or audio, or cut straight to the printed transcript.

Free Stock Photos at the Stock.xchg

One more way to avoid overused clipart in your presentations, newsletters, and handouts is by using stock photography.  You see stock photos everywhere–particularly in advertising.  Look at those smiling, happy people in insurance ads: most likely they came out of a stock photo database under the query “+smiling +happy +people”.

But, since photographers have to eat, stock photos cost money–something teachers have in short supply.

Which takes us to the photographer’s Stock.xchg.  This site offers a great selection of free stock photos, searchable by keyword, category, or photographer.   After creating a free user account, you can click straight through to the high resolution version of any photo you like.  Most can be immediately downloaded and used for free in any non-commercial materials.  (If you do plan to sell something using the images, you have to work that out with the photographer.)

Just one more way to clean the clipart out of your PowerPoint presentations.

Online file conversion: Sha-ZAM(zar)!

If it’s lunch time, I’ve already seen three kids who can’t open their files on the computers in the tech lab. Occasionally the problem originates between the keyboard and the chair, but more often it’s down to that old culprit: proprietary file formats. The most common offenders these days are:

• iWork: no licenses in our lab
• Office 2007: Oh, how that name mocks Mac users
• MS Works: Yes, they still make it.

Zamzar to the rescue. Zamzar offers a clean, simple interface that allows you to upload a document, pick a format to convert it into, enter an email address, and submit. Following a short wait, a link drops into your email, and you can download the freshly converted file to your desktop.

Zamzar works with the new Office 2007 XML format as well, so Mac users rejoice: you can get usable copies of .docx and .pptx files without installing Microsoft’s 100MB beta conversion application. It even claims to handle .xlsx, which the official application inexplicably ignores.

The site goes further still, offering audio and video conversion (up to 100MB), all without installing any software.

On a note of caution, Zamzar is a magic black box, so it’s pretty difficult to know what’s happening to your data once they get it. The have a privacy agreement and a data policy, but sending your bank statements, list of passwords, or embarrassing video might prove bad ideas. Also, since they get your email, you’re almost certainly going to hear from them–and anyone that they choose to share your address with. There’s nothing obviously sinister here, but, as always, it’s worth being a little careful.

More Free, Printable Graph Paper

Based on an emailed suggestion from my good friend John Lemley (who apparently can’t figure out the comment system. You heard me, Lemley.), today’s installment brings you more free graph paper, this time from Incompetech.com.

Like Printfreegraphpaper.com, mentioned previously, Incompetech’s site has a huge variety of grids, lines, and angles to choose from. Each style has its own set up of options, to give you just the paper you need. Overall, the interface is a bit more complicated than Pfgp.com, but the complexity yields much more choice.

The collection also goes beyond mere graph-paper, into all manner of lined sheets. The site offers several variants on the Cornell note-taking system, three-lined handwriting paper, and practice sheets for Chinese and Japanese writing. Musicians can snare (sorry.) staff paper and tab sheets. They even have dotted graph paper, for you next game of “Dots & Boxes.”

Sadly, electrical engineers will still have to go to Printfreegraphpaper.com for their Smith charts, but you can’t have it all.

English as She Is Spoke: The International Dialect Archive

Putting together a lesson plan the other day, I stumbled across the International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA). The site, run out of University of Kansas, has collected and catalogued hundreds of audio samples representing English dialects from around the world.

I know that this isn’t the most universally useful tool that I’ve listed here, but consider my position: this week, I started teaching Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God to a twelfth-grade group comprising mainly native Japanese speakers.

Now, all my students are perfectly fluent in English, but the dialect of African Americans in Florida around the turn of the 20th century is not something that I could expect any of them to know off-hand. Confronted with pages of dialogue written in an unfamiliar dialect, my students assume Hurston is, at best, a terrible speller, or, at worst, intent on causing them personal misery.

IDEA helps bridge the language gap by presenting pages of downloadable mp3 files, organized by region. The archive includes native speakers from around the world, as well as representative dialects from second-language English speakers. All of the samples come from a couple of short extracts, available as a text download from the site. The audio files also include a brief biographical statement by the speaker, providing more context for the dialect (as well as some interesting stories).

Outside literature in dialect, the site has obvious applications in courses covering linguistics and for theater classes.

Edit: Now with working links! Thanks, commentors!

Big Files

Taking a folder of work home to grade is so 1999. Stacks of papers, loose worksheets, five-page essays the student lazily “crimped” together since they couldn’t find the stapler that’s been in the same place all year.

Drop.io says goodbye to all that.

Drop.io is one of a host of options for on-line file storage and sharing. Like most, Drop offers a range of choices from free to paid storage, but their most impressive feature is ease of use: no log in, no password, no waiting. Just name your “drop” (an online folder for your stuff), choose your files, and click the counter-intuitively named “Drop It!” button, and you’re done.

Anyone who might want the files you’ve saved can get at them through drop.io/yourchosenname. And if you’ve rather that anyone can’t get to your files, you can password protect your drop when you create it.

This week, when I needed a way for students to save audio recordings of an oral commentary, Drop.io saved the day. The 100MB ceiling for each drop was a bit low, so I just created three separate drop boxes for the kids to use.

A quick email with instructions and links to the drops I created, and my students can upload their bloated audio files from wherever they are. My weekend listening plans are set!

Originally found on Lifehacker.com

Office Online: Clip-Art’s Worst-Kept Secret

A request to all seven of my readers (Hi, Mom!):

Stop using the clip art that comes loaded with MS Office when you make your presentations and newsletters. Three reasons:

1. The default Office clip art is uniformly hideous.
2. Everyone has already seen it. A lot.
3. You will feel inexplicably compelled to include a screenbean in your layout. This must be avoided.

So, if you shouldn’t use the Clip Art in the Clip Art menu, what are you supposed to do? I’m glad I asked you that rhetorical question:

Microsoft Office Online’s Clip Art Section

It seems that between rounds of monopolizing the computer market, terrorizing users of open source software, and burning down orphanages, Microsoft found time to do something nice. Really nice.

Searching or browsing takes you into the collection. Office Online has a really intuitive interface that lets you scroll through pictures of thumbnails, and mark the ones you want to eventually download (these go into a “shopping cart” style list over in the left-hand sidebar). When you’re ready, click download, follow the instructions, and the clip art will be loaded automatically into your local gallery.

Office Online: Clip Art offers tens of thousands of free images for use in documents, presentations, and web pages. The index is searchable, browseable by category, and regularly updated to put themed collections on the front page (check out the harvest motif, just in time for American Thanksgiving).

One of my favorite features is style grouping. Click on a clip-art thumbnail to see a larger image, and if the item is part of a larger series, it will have a “style number.” Click that number, and the system shows you all the clip art in the series. This is a huge help for keeping a consistent theme through presentations.

And clip art is really just the tip of the Office Online iceberg. The site is packed with useful stuff for Office users. I’m not going to go into any of it now, though. I need material for next week, and I plan to milk this site for a dozen or so blog posts.

A note to Mac users: when you download the clipart file, you will probably have to add “.cil” to the end of the filename. Otherwise, the file won’t open in Office. Now, I don’t want to suggest that this is some Microsoft conspiracy to make Mac users’ lives slightly more difficult, but that is unquestionably the case.

And a note to all those fancy-pants Office 2007 users: Maybe I’m out of date, and the default clip art has been updated. You can tell me in the comments. I’m on a Mac though, so until we get Office 2007 sometime in 2013, I won’t be able to see for myself.