• EdTech Home
• Use Our Services
• Participate in Our Programs
• Join A Community
• Learn About Our Partner Projects
• Conduct Research
• Attend Our Events

• Investigate Educational Technologies
  • Supported Systems
  • Complementary Tools
• Read Newsletters & Articles
  • Showcase Articles
  • I-Te@ch Newsletters
  • e-Newsletters
• Explore Teaching Strategies
• Find Exemplary Projects
• Use Development Aids
• Learn About Us

• Trends in EdTech: December 4, 2006
• docs.google.com
• Social and Mobile Tools for Enhancing Learning
• http://www.piclens.com/
• Article Archive

Read Newsletters & Articles :: Feature Articles

Trends in EdTech: December 4, 2006

Google Docs and Spreadsheets

If you haven't yet discovered this, you need to give it a try. Google Docs and Spreadsheets (the Docs portion was formerly Writely) provides an online environment for collaborative editing of shared documents and spreadsheets. Of course this can be accomplished by passing a Word or Excel document back and forth between authors, but Google Docs eliminates the need for passing things around via email or other means. The document is hosted online and editable via the web interface. And multiple authors can actually collaborate on the document simultaneously. As anyone familiar with other web 2.0 applications would expect, revision history is tracked and it's possible to revert to earlier versions. When the document is good to go, it's possible to make it public right where it is, publish directly to a blog or save it in several different formats including Word, Open Office, pdf, html or rtf.  Google Docs and Spreadsheets is powerful, cool, and a good taste, I think, of what's to come. We like it, we use it, it's how we create Trends in EdTech, in fact. Check it out at docs.google.com. (Another alternative, as yet untested by EdTech staff, are Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet).

- Doug Mills

Connections: Social and Mobile Tools for Enhancing Learning

Leonard Low of Canabera Institute of Technology, Australia, offers a well-researched article (with accompanying podcast) on "Social and Mobile Tools for Enhancing Learning" (from The Knowledge Tree: An e-Journal of Learning Innovation, Nov. 2006). Low highlights the dynamic ways in which mobile technologies such as cell phones and PDAs now integrate with web 2.0 online services such as the digital image repository where "photos can be uploaded directly from mobile phones to Flickr, complete with text annotations and even geospatial data, identifying the exact location at which the image was taken. This geospatial data can be used by the learner – or other learners – using a PDA, GPS-enabled device, or computer, to access images relating to particular locations and contexts. Peers, mentors, teachers and professionals in an area of learning can create informal 'groups' in Flickr, and can add comments to each others entries to support and guide the construction of knowledge." See, for example, geotagged images from Champaign and "Images of 'Rural Decay' in the U.S. South."

- Leslie Hammersmith

View Online Images Full Screen

PicLens is a plug-in for the Macintosh OSX Safari browser well worth a look.  Currently in beta for free download from http://www.piclens.com/ the plug-in adds a small icon to photos on many popular online image repositories, such as Flickr, Photobucket, Google Images, or Yahoo Images. Clicking on this small icon, which is only visible when you mouse over the image, opens all of the images on that page in a full-screen slideshow mode.  Combining this with the ability to do keyword searches in these services allows full-screen browsing of images focused on a very specific topic and is much more convenient than navigating to each image's page, say in Flickr, then clicking the all sizes link for that image to enlarge it in the browser window. The web site says they are developing versions also for Firefox and Internet Explorer.

- Doug Mills