DV for Teachers

RainyMood.com is a nice noise-generator for helping concentration. It helped me concentrate on this post!

If you’re looking for effective software, of all kinds, to use to run and teach in classroom, The Freewares of 2009 has a lot to offer you. It’s a month-by-month listing of the author’s favorite free software. Each item has a thoughtful comment about using the software, often with first-hand reporting. A very valuable year-end list.

Via My Apple Menu.

Wordle is great for making word clouds, which you can use in your classroom in many ways. Ellen sent me this

really useful little tip that opens up all sorts of new possibilities – a way of including phrases in word clouds. Look below and you will see what I am talking about. The phrase that Sylvie demonstrates is “Once upon a time”.

Read the details at Jamie K Eddie’s A really useful Wordle trick, and her neat-o followup tip here.

The fine community at Macintouch points to the Mac-specific area on Old Version Downloads – OldApps.com. Find old versions of lots of software, for Mac and PC: older email programs, audio editors, picture editors, FTP programs, and more. They even have older versions of Apple’s QuickTime. Looks like a great resource, especially if you’re spiffing up an older machine to save money.

And teachers always want to save money.

Quick, to follow up on later: 10 useful Twitter presentations. Have a Twitter account? It’s a heck of a lot more than what some celeb had for breakfast. You can use it to create an almost instantaneous professional network that can give you the help you need when you need it. Check out these presentations to learn more about how it can work for you.

Update: More on Twitter! Mashable, the social network site about social networking (meta meta meta meta, on and on), gives us this on Twitter for Beginners, and the fine folks at Twitter themselves give us a nice look at what Twitter can do for business. If it works for business, it can work for education too. Read up on this and you’ll get an idea.

I’m at altitude, on my way to a weekend away with Ellen to Boulder. Got a free pass for in-flight wifi, so I’m going to post some of the too-many open tabs I’ve been meaning to close among my browsers. Yes, browsers—I use both Firefox and Camino most of the time, and once in a while I use Safari. This post is about a great add-on that makes the web more usable, by controlling all that animated distracting hateful nasty Flash. It’s great when you want to watch a video, but all the ******* ads that I see lurching around the screens when I walk through the labs makes me pity all the folks who don’t know that it’s an option. As the developer, Wolf Rentzch says, “The web is so much better without Flash.” He’s right.

So, with that, read about and (on your Mac, anyway) install ClickToFlash. From the website:

Ever wanted to get rid of the scourge of the web that is Adobe Flash, but still retain the ability to view Flash whenever you want? With ClickToFlash, you can! Using ClickToFlash, all of those icky Flash bits that have infected most webpages on the internets are replaced with a nice, smooth gradient and the word “Flash” set in a nice, pleasing font. When you want to view the Flash, just click on it!

The advantages of ClickToFlash are numerous. Since Flash isn’t loaded until you specifically ask for it, your CPU usage will stay at normal levels when browsing the web. This has tons of benefits: web browsing stays speedy, your Mac laptop won’t get as hot, and your Mac’s fan won’t come on as often. In fact, we guarantee* that ClickToFlash will quintuple your battery life and that it will protect those precious parts of your body on which you rest your laptop! (* note: not actually guaranteed)

Although similar to Flashblock for Firefox and Camino, ClickToFlash offers features over and above what Flashblock offers, and it offers them for Safari. Best among them, ClickToFlash supports viewing all those ADORABLE meowing cat videos, annoying dog videos, and hilarious rickrolls from YouTube without using Flash at all! That’s because YouTube also offers H.264 videos, which are used when viewing YouTube on the iPhone. With ClickToFlash, you get access to those same, higher quality videos.

Come join us! The web is so much better without Flash.

Lifehacker sends us Seven Easy Ways to Integrate Your Google Apps. I have got to study this to understand all the ways, once set up and understood, to make these apps work for me.

Mashable, the relentless site for news on social networking and blogging tools, today posts Back to School: 10 Terrific Web Apps for Teachers.

I would love to hear if any classroom teachers are using any of these.

Megabyte Computing offers a QuickTime X Preference Pane, adding some options back to the interface that Snow Leopard, a.k.a. OS X 10.6, removed. I’ve asked the developers for more information and hope to hear back from them soon.

Mothers Ruin Software gives us Suspicious Package for seeing what a pkg installer file will put on your system before you run it. A nice idea. Via.