QIK bring video streaming to the cell phone

Almost every cell phone is coming with a camera and video mode. Up to now, I've mostly seen videos taken by cell phone on the cell phone that took it. Sometimes one sees video taken on cell phones place on YouTube and the like. Today I came across QIK, a site that allows for live streaming of cell phone video. It's important to say that this happens over the cell phone network. You need not figure out how to connect to a computer. Of course, if you don't have an unlimited data plan on your cell phone, don't use this feature. It could cost you a fortune.

The quality is pretty poor. It could be used on field trips and for streaming of PTA meetings, lectures, and other activities that don't require great video or audio quality. Combine this will instant messaging and this could be a simple way to broadcast a live event with user feedback. You can make your video private. I also noted that videos can be longer than YouTube's ten minutes. I don't know if there is a limit, but at least it isn't ten minutes. QIK keeps the videos on your user account for later viewing.

This is still the cutting edge, but why not give it a try?

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civiCRM for Schools

A few years ago I was at an educational conference in Montreal where the presenter asked the auditorium of 500 or so educators who the customer was in an higher ed environment. After a long pause, people started listing professors and researchers. I was shocked that no one listed students.

"CRM" stands for Customer Relation Management. Typically, this type of software is either used by hard-selling vendors or it's an expensive option for the corporate environment. Finding a CRM system that is inexpensive and oriented more towards "relationships" than it is "sales" had not been an easy task.

civiCRM appears to fit both bills. It's open source and thus low cost. I say "low cost" and not "free" is because even free software requires hardware to run and some level of installation and customization. While I'm not an expert in CRM software, civiCRM's list of features is certainly impressive for the needs of a single organization. The problems I see with it are when one wants to use this for multiple organizations or with an organization with many sub-organizations. Their site discusses installing these features, but until they are in the code, there is no telling what will happen.

While civiCRM can be used as a stand-alone system, it has been designed to work closely with Drupal.

I'm seriously considering using civiCRM for an sophisticated events management system. If anyone has had direct experience with civiCRM, please leave me a comment.

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Explore your ideas with exploratree

Exploratree is a new web site that allows you to create what they call thinking guides. I was impressed with the wide variety of concept maps on their web site -- and they are still in beta.

This site would be great for any form of analysis or brainstorming.
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Easy Wiki for Kids

Wikis are great tools for schools. I've put in more than a few posts on wikis. The main problem for using a wiki for younger kids is that they have to learn an odd syntax to make the page. And making a nice looking page is quite a challenge. PikiWiki is more oriented to multimedia and to drag-and-drop editing. This is a system which younger students can use. It's also free.

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Just Scratch-ing the surface

The BBC has an interesting write-up on a new programing system that allows students to create multimedia presentations without a high level of programing. It works on both Macs and Windows and is free.

Looks very interesting. If you have experience with it, please enter a post.

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Put your computer in oil

I've been thinking about what would happen if I put a computer in a tub of oil, but I was too afraid the result would be a big fire. Apparently, it's not a big deal and it could make for an interesting school science project. Just discussing the issues of heat would make for a number of interesting classes.

Here is an article on how to make the oil-bath computer.

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Google's new presentation application

Google's announcement that they are going to offer a presentation application along the lines of Power Point is of particular interest to schools. The reason I believe this to be the case is because students usually don't require the advanced features of a Microsoft Office. They also don't require Outlook or Access. The applications they need are presentation, word processing, and spreadsheets. They also need a graphic editing and/or paint program. But that's not really in Office, so the comparison is not relevant.

This means that you can have your students use Google Docs for all their school work. Because of the free storage and collaboration features, your work will be reduced significantly. I'll make another posting after I get to play with new application.

And, BTW, Google Spreadsheets now has charts. Students love to create charts.

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OLPC Interface

The OLPC program could be a total bust or it could revolutionize the education of children in poorer parts of the world. I like the fact that they are justifying the $100 price based against books and not against other computers. I think you have to show how money that is already present can be redirected. Of course, much of that money is never used or budgeted, but at least it's there in theory.

Anyway, the OLPC people have release screen shots of their system and you can even download the working system to see how it functions. Getting the hardware is another story all together. As far as I know, the general public cannot purchase these units.

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Learning Flickr

I thought Flickr was fairly easy to use until I had to tell others that they should use it. I soon got a number of questions about how to use it. I found a nice article that describes how to learn the ropes.

Flickr is a great way to host photos for school newspapers, art/photography classes, school trips, and school reports. With a little money, Flickr offers many more useful features. Give it a try.

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ConceptShare

ConceptShare is an online design sharing system. While there are a number of online collaboration systems, this one excels at collaborating on images. If your school has a newspaper or year book, this might be a useful tool. It could also be a fun tool for students who need to work in teams on projects with a significant amount of graphic work -- such as an art class. The system is not free, but it's not nearly as expensive as other systems I've reviewed.

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Open Source Science Application

Scilab is an open source software program which handles a wide variety of mathematical calculations. This program appears well-suited to the university and advanced high school student. It runs on a variety of operating systems, so this could be a good solution for a heterogeneous computer environment.

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WordPerfect Lightning

I use to really admire WordPerfect. It had one of the best DOS word processors going. While I seem to find WordPerfect on most new computers, this new research tool, Lightning, may be something you will want. The main downside I saw was that there isn't Mac support. The features look good.

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xFruits to collect and distributed RSS-based info

xFruits appears to work much like Yahoo! Pipes. It takes RSS data and does all types of tricks with it. You can collect a variety of sources and then redistribute the information in ways the original source did not even imagine possible. This could be very useful for teachers wanting to distribute information on certain topics. I could also be used to collect emergency information and then send alerts to staff.

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Arranging Complicated Meetings

I've been having a lot of trouble recently planning meetings where many people have to be accommodated. While I found a few paid systems that did this work, Diarised is a free online system that appears to get the job done. I'll let you know how it works out.

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Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo! has just released a new service called Pipes. It is a system for combining information from a variety of Internet services and then repackages it in a variety of ways. This is not for the regular user. It might be a very good source of projects for your school's computer classes.

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An educational robot

The people who make the automated vacuum cleaner have a version that is for educational purposes. They have just announced it so I don't know much about it other than that it's programmable. BTW, the same folks are making robots for bomb investigations in Iraq.

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Teaching Markets to Students

Betocracy is a predictive market system. By "buy and selling" shares -- no money involved -- various alternative outcomes can be weighted. So, for example, if you wanted to predict the outcome of the next three basketball games, students could trade shares such that the own shares in the alternative they believe is most likely. Naturally, the more popular picks are the most valuable/expensive. This is a great system for learning about markets and economies. The system is in beta, but that does not stop you from testing it out now.

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Video conferencing for multiple locations

Paltalk is offering video conferencing for groups up to ten people. In reality, you're not going to have more people unless you have a 50 inch screen.

This is a great solution if you want to have multiple classes work together from remote locations.

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Getting money for your school projectsD

Donors Choose is a very interesting site dedicated to matching people with small amounts of money with small school projects. If you cannot get a big grant for your next school project, this site may be a good way to get part of it funded.

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Keeping the little kids safe on the Internet

Middle school students and older may be actively looking for naughty content on the Internet, but most younger students simply stumble on it. While filters can help, they are not perfect. In Google, for example, one can still see the image icons for sites that one may not be able to visit. Even with the Google safety filter turned on, a great number of questionable images can appear.
The Zoo.com search engine goes a few steps beyond Google's safe search to make sure the content is acceptable for children. And, there are no images. The chance of accidentally hitting a bad site is greatly reduced. Combine this with a halfway decent filter and your school should be reasonably protected.

One more thing: you're not giving up Google to use zoo.com. They search Google and Yahoo! to obtain the search results. They just clean up the results list first.

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