Online Bookmarking Tool

Online Bookmarking Tool – PortaPortal < http://www.portaportal.com/

You’re at home, it’s 10:00 at night, and you just found several good Web links to use tomorrow with your 7th grade social studies class. But how do you easily get back to those sites tomorrow at school? You know how to bookmark Web sites within Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox and most browsers. But if you do this you are just bookmarking them on your home computer and you want to use them at school. What can you do?

Well… there is a simple answer to this problem. Try using the online bookmarking tool - Portaportal. I first heard about this online tool when I was teaching a couple years ago. Several teachers’s mentioned that they use it and found it easy and effective. Basically, Portaportal is a bookmarking utility that lets you store links to your favorite websites online. Now your bookmarks are no longer limited to any one machine. So those links that you found at home for your 7th grade social studies class can easily be accessed tomorrow at school. If you feel you would like to save your links to an individual file as a backup you can do this by doing a “save-as” within your Web browser. This saves the page as a file and when you open it on another computer you can access all of your links.

It’s quick and easy to get started. First, you need to go to the Signup link. Here you will be directed to put in your name, email and to create a login name and password. It is stated in the Privacy link that your email address will not be given out and will only be used as a way of reminding you of your password if you lose it. Once you have created an account you are ready to go. I suggest using the “QuickLink” feature which will be in the upper left hand corner of your screen after you login to your account. This will create a small floating window. When you find a URL you like copy it, paste it into the window, name it and select a category, and press the button. It will be added to your Portaportal site. You organize your sites within Portaportal by creating categories. For example, you might want to create categories according to the subject areas that you teach. (I.e. American History, Language Arts, Science, etc.) There is also an option in the preferences where you can create a guest account, allowing your students to easily access your bookmarked Web sites, too.

If you are afraid that this site may be blocked by your school’s filtering software, don’t worry. It appears that most school’s filtering software, like BESS, does not block this site, and when I contacted the creator he informed me that the usage in Ohio was increasing steadily.

There is a short tutorial which you might want to consider reviewing. This will give you some of the extra features of the program, like how to set up the preference screen and set the look and feel of your newly created portal.

Give this tool a try. I think you will find it very useful!

FREE Educational Resource Site

This morning I was exploring an educational Web site that was shared with us from one of the other Ohio educational technology agencies. The site is called Learnit.org <http://nortellearnit.org/
>. It is a free resource site that includes lesson plans, technology skill videos and other resources. This site came about as the result of the combined efforts of Nortel LearniT and Curriki. If you want more information about the collaborative efforts of these two companies in creating this site read the article in CNNMoney.com <http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0377030.htm>

My favorite part of this site is in the "video tutorial" tab. There is a link titled "imaging" that has lots of wonderful short clips about working with digital images. I was exploring this site as I thought it might be a useful to use in my online digital photography class. As it turns out, I discovered in one of the videos that there is a quite powerful free photo editing download that I never heard of before. I have reviewed many of the free online photo editing tools , but this one has some features the most others do not. One feature is the cloning tool, which allows you to either erase or add portions of your image. I have only seen this feature in PhotoShop. The other is the batch conversion, which allows you to edit a number of photo all at one time. You may want to check this out.

Online Classes

Have you ever taken an online course? If you have, what did you like or dislike about it? Did you find the online environment a lot different than the face-to-face environment?

EDTL 636 online discussion blog

You should have had an opportunity to explore some Web 2.0 tools (Google docs.or PBwiki; Blackboard chat, Blackboard discussion board and/or Skype) either on your own or while working with your group on the Internet Lesson/unit plan project. Did you find using these tools to be easy or difficult to use? Explain. Did you find one to be especially good? Which tool did you find most useful with your group work? Why? Do you think you could use these tools in a K-12 classroom? Explain. What considerations would need to be addressed before using them in the classroom?

Digital Photography - Picasa

What extra things have you learned about Picasa? How can you use this in the classroom?

Digital Photography - open forum

This area is a place where you can share any of your thoughts and ideas related to using digital cameras in the classroom.

Digital Photography - using digital cameras in the classroom

After exploring some of the classroom integration sites share what you learned. Did you discover any new ways that you could incorporate digital cameras in your classroom? How?