Communicate » Tools

Wolfram|Alpha launches

Cindy Kendall — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:33:20 +0000

Yesterday I played with Wolfram|Alpha. What is this, you ask? Think of it as a master computational engine – put in a problem and it solves it; put in a keyword and it give you data on the query subject.

Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

I entered “español” in the search box, not quite sure what it would return. Visually, somewhat interesting. I liked the “more” feature in each subsection and the ability to export the information in PDF format. “Lemonade” reveals interesting nutritional information averaged across multiple sources. “Dali” sadly doesn’t return any of his artwork, just a few dates.

I think if my teenage daughter would have had access to this site while she was taking Pre-Calculus, she would have died and gone to heaven.

Voki

Cindy Kendall — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:38:39 +0000

Voki allows the user to create an avatar and give it voice. It is easy to customize the voki, record your voice (up to 60 seconds) or upload an audio file. I created a quick voki to welcome workshop participants back from break. Do you recognize the character?

Does Voki have staying power? Well, I don’t know. It’s cute, it’s easy – like many technology authoring platforms, it is up to the user to give it meaning. Rumor has it that there are some high school students I know creating a variety of political vokis and sending them to each other, just for fun.

Feel like gabbing?

Cindy Kendall — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 20:08:50 +0000

Via Jessica Haxhi, an easy to use web-based voice recording tool. Gabcast is a free utility to create sound files by calling an 800 number from your phone. No advertising, easy interface. Took me all of 5 minutes to set up, record, and publish here. Audio files can be downloaded as MP3 files. Slick. Audio quality is acceptable – sounds like a phone. By clicking the link below you will be sent over to the Gabcast website. Theoretically, I could save the MP3 file and put it up on DivShare, which may be needed depending on the number and size of audio files allowed in Gabcast’s free account. But for now I will leave it as the code is presented by Gabcast.

Gabcast! Communicate #1

How could a world language teacher use this?

-Students or teachers could call in and create audio files for use on blogs, wikis, or simple assignments.
-Students could each create their own channel and create a library of audio files
-Gabcast has a conference calling feature – I didn’t explore it much, but potentially teachers-students, or student-student could record a voice conversation via cell phone.

Ready, get set, launch!

Cindy Kendall — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 01:10:09 +0000

OK, so after much contemplation, I’ve decided to open a blog here at Edublogs. Why? Because most of the teachers I work with do not have their own web hosting. So in order to serve those teachers more effectively, I’ve decided to use Edublogs and become very familiar with the service here. I could use my own hosting and own domain, but there is great power in modeling for others. So, I’m going to use the tool I would recommend for a professional presence and blogging.

First steps here? Picking a theme, configuring widgets. I’ve discovered Widgetbox – pretty nifty site to put multiple widgets into one panel. For the moment I’m going to do a combination of WordPress widgets and Widgetbox.