Author archives

• HOW TO: Use Google Reader Like A Rockstar
  (tags: rss)

• Gmail: Free Gmail Stickers Teach You Gmail's Keyboard Shortcuts
  (tags: gmail)

This is great news for those of us using Keynote (instead of PowerPoint) and publishing slides to SlideShare. You no longer have to convert to PPT or PDF to upload your slides! You do have to create a ZIP file of them, which is just a matter of right-clicking (or control-clicking) your Keynote slides file and selecting “Compress (name of file).” Then upload the new file that’s created (it’ll end in “.zip”) to SlideShare.

Read more about this new development on SlideShare’s blog. (Thanks Daring Fireball.)

As a followup to last week’s post on my favorite iPhone-friendly websites (or “web apps” as I will henceforth call them), here’s a list of applications I’ve downloaded from the iTunes App Store. You can download these apps and others by opening iTunes, then selecting App Store. (Of course, it should go without saying that you’ll need an iPhone or iPod touch with the 2.0 firmware installed.) Use the Search field to locate these specific apps, if you’re interested in purchasing them yourself.

Amazon.com Mobile: (free) This is brand new; I just downloaded it 30 minutes ago. A compelling feature I want to check out is its “remember” function that allows you to snap a photo of a product and then look it up in Amazon based on that photo.

Digital Clock: ($0.99) I was in love with this for about a day, because I have a thing for clocks. I’ve yet to have a real use for it, though.

Easy Wi-Fi: ($1.99) I’ve talked about this one before. Pretty much mandatory if you want to use your iPhone on KU’s wireless network. This is also useful for accessing wireless networks at Starbucks and McDonald’s (iPhone only for these services, but iPod touches can use it to access KU’s network).

Facebook: (free) This app makes it easy to keep up-to-date with your Facebook buddies, even when you’re on the road. Useful time-killer.

iBowl: (free) Simple bowling game for the iPhone. Entertaining for awhile.

Google: (free) Google’s iPhone app’s claim to fame is its alleged ability to allow you to search via voice. I haven’t tried it yet, but I hear it’s buggy (as in, you may get results you weren’t, uh, expecting–caveat emptor).

Google Earth: (free) Google Earth. For your iPhone. Download this for the wow factor, if nothing else.

Light: (free) There are several free flashlight apps. Get one of them. All it does is turn your iPhone’s screen bright white. You’d be surprised how handy this is.

NetNewsWire: (free) This is the iPhone version of my Mac RSS reader of choice. I think I need to tweak it to make it a more effective tool for me–I probably don’t need to keep up with 200 feeds while I’m mobile.

Pandora: (free) Jim Knight turned me on to Pandora, a service to help you find new music based on music you like. The iPhone version is super-slick, and a nice alternative for when you get sick of the music already on your phone.

Recorder: ($0.99) The one thing I probably screamed for the loudest when the iPhone first came out was a voice recorder app. Now there are several to choose from; this is the one I went with.

Remote: (free) Remote lets you control iTunes, uh, remotely. That’s all well and good, I guess, but the reason I like it is I can use the iPhone’s touch keyboard to interact with my Apple TV.

Scrabble: ($7.99 for a limited time) Scrabble, for your iPhone. I’ve only played against the computer, which has been kind of on the easy side so far, but it has a networked play option as well.

SportsTap: (free) If you obsessively track sports scores, this one’s for you.

Twitterific: (free; premium version also available for $9.99) This was the first iPhone Twitter client. It does the job, but I’ve been meaning to check out some alternatives that have since come out. The free one sprinkles in an occasional ad amongst the tweets.

Voice Dialer: (free) Another brand new app; this one lets you search and call your contacts by voice. Now if only I used the phone part of my iPhone more often–

Wikipanion: (free; Plus version available for $4.99) Wikipanion gives you a nice, iPhone-friendly interface to Wikipedia. Not the only one out there, but it’s free and useful when you need to do quick lookups.

Got any iPhone apps you can’t live without? Tell us about them in the comments below.

• Ads: Teacher Sells Ads On Tests To Cover Printing Costs
  Need a way to offset costs in the classroom? Here's what one teacher did.
  (tags: education fun)
• Save time with OS X services | Working Mac | Macworld
  I forget about Services quite a bit, but they're very useful. Read this article if you have a Mac.
  (tags: mac tips)
• Education 2.0: Never Memorize Again? - ReadWriteWeb
  What do you think?
  (tags: education learning)
• App Shopper: iPhone Apps, Deals and Discovery
  Handy directory of iPhone apps.
  (tags: iphone)
• Guitar Hero leads children to pick up real instruments - Times Online
  Interesting research–after playing musical video games like Guitar Hero, kids want to learn to play for real. (Also interesting that they're learning old school tunes.)
  (tags: videogames learning music)

Did you know that Mail, the default e-mail client in Mac OS X, now supports RSS feeds? It’s been in there for about a year, actually. I don’t use it myself because I already had an RSS client I really like, but if you’ve yet to get into RSS and need a gateway, this is worth a look (especially if you’re already using Mail for your e-mail).

Apple has a nice, brief tutorial video on how to use RSS in Mail. Unfortunately, they’ve disabled embedding their video clips from YouTube, so you’ll have to click to view this video tutorial. Totally worth it, though.

Now that you know how to use RSS in Apple Mail, don’t forget to subscribe to this blog! feeds.stratepedia.org has other feeds that may be of interest.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter (@ruralocity) know how much I’ve been digging TweetDeck the last few days. It’s got some compelling features that make Twitter even more useful, especially as the number of Twitterers you follow grows.

I was going to do a little screencast about TweetDeck, but thanks to the wonders of social media and YouTube, I don’t have to. Here’s a nice clip that should give you an idea of just how handy TweeetDeck is.

In this clip, Rich Brooks shares how to use TweetDeck to create groups of Twitterers. That way, you can filter out people you don’t want to miss from everybody else. I have a group called “real people” who are just folks I know in some capacity elsewhere. Rich also shows how TweetDeck’s search function works–I think this has changed somewhat in more recent versions, but it’s still a very handy function. I have a column set to show me all tweets with the word “stratepedia” in them. (Many people were using Twitter’s keyword search capability to keep up on the attacks in India, just to show you how potentially powerful this feature can be.)

Although the above screencast (like most others you’ll find about TweetDeck on YouTube) was done on a Mac, TweetDeck will also run on Windows XP or Vista. You’ll need to install Adobe AIR first, then TweetDeck. TweetDeck is free, but “donationware”–if you like it and use it, consider giving the developer a few bucks, like I plan to do this evening.

I omitted something from my list of iPhone-friendly websites last week: Uh … Where? is another good one. If you’re like me, you never answer the phone when you don’t recognize the number. (OK, if you’re like me, you never answer the phone.) Uh … Where? can help you at least track down where the call’s coming from, so you can decide whether you want to call back or not.

A link to this got pushed to the blog automatically this morning through Stratepedia’s handy Delicious account, but it’s worth another mention: The Virginia Department of Education has begun augmenting traditional textbooks with online materials, giving teachers and students access to cutting edge materials in physics.

As noted in this article from the Washington Post, the traditional textbook publishing cycle is too slow for teachers who want to introduce learners to emerging concepts such as biophysics and nanotechnology. Instead, selected teachers are being asked to write chapters on these topics and put them online for other teachers in the state to use. This concept, called the “flexbook,” is also gaining traction in higher education.

This brings to mind Jim Knight’s current practice of making materials available to coaches in “beta format,” and makes me think about how SIM manuals are currently published. How might the flexbook idea be put to use in the work we do?

Stuck-in-the-Past Va. Physics Texts Getting Online Jolt (Washington Post, Nov. 30, 2008)

• Stuck-in-the-Past Va. Physics Texts Getting Online Jolt - washingtonpost.com
  Schools in Virginia are using expert-written, online materials developed through an open source model to augment traditional textbooks, in order to have access to cutting edge concepts in science education.
  (tags: publishing education)