Wordle

Wordle is a fun site to create what I call word art.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Here's a link to my del.icio.us wordle.

Since the word clouds created by Wordle are Java applets you don't have any embed codes to allow you to post your Wordle creations. Instead you can take a screenshot or do as I did and print to a pdf. Then I used the snapshot tool to copy the Wordle image, pasted into Paint, and saved as a jpeg. Below are a couple other examples of my del.icio.us Wordle.




Thanks to John Pederson for his twitter post, OMG! My Wordle. http://skitch.com/t/rp8 and to Vicki Davis' Cool Cat Teacher Blog: A little Taxonomy with your Folksonomy and finally to Jonathan Feinberg the creator of Wordle.

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Apture

I read a blog post at A Library By Any Other Name about Apture. Look for the Apture links that were created for Texas, Chihuahua, and Oatmail Raisin Cookies. Texas and Chihuahua have a W enclosed by a box in front of the underlined word, which stands for a Wikipedia entry. Cookies has a camera, which stands for a picture.

When you go to http://apture.com you will see a demo of Apture without sound. Submit your email and complete the signup process. You will receive an email from Apture that you'll have to click on the link that is sent to confirm your registration. OR if you go to http://apture.com/experience, you will see across the top of the page three choices: About Apture, Experience Apture, and Add Apture to your Website. Click on Add Apture to your website. If you haven't signed up yet, the signup process will appear.

If you have created an account, Sign In. The first thing you have to do is add a new site. This would be your website or blog. Click on the link and enter the name and url. Just follow the rest of the steps to configure and install Apture. Once you have gone thru this process, I think that I got a tutorial that I could go thru with a basic explanation of how Apture works.

You have to complete an entry first. Then you go back and insert the Apture links by highlighting a term, name, whatever. A popup window will appear with various choices for the type of links available. To add the Apture links you just need to be viewing your website or blog. I don't think that you even need to be signed in to your blog account, but you do have to be signed into Apture.
There is an Apture dashboard that appears when you press the "e" key. You can sign in from the dashboard. I haven't needed to go back to the main apture site.

Once you get past the installation and tutorial I don't think that you'll have any problems figuring out how to use Apture. You'll find a wiki with documentation about using Apture, if you want to read more here. And of course, checkout Apture's blog.

Apture is a great tool for making your blog or website a multimedia experience! Not just Wikipedia or pictures, but also sound and video. I love it.

apture

May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award

I just got done watching & listening to David Macaulay's 2008 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture, Thirteen Studios.

I knew that May Hill Arbuthnot was the author of one of my college reading textbooks, Children and Books, but I'm ashamed to confess that's all I remembered. I've since discovered that she also wrote another book that I read during my professional life, Children's Books Too Good To Miss and even further back in elementary school when reading the "Dick & Jane" series, (that really dates me, huh?). She was also

a strong believer in the efficacy of direct speech.... a forthright vigorous lecture can set fire to a piece of literature that had failed to come to life from the printed page.

This lecture series was begun in 1969 by the ALA's Association for Library Service to Children in Mrs. Arbuthnot's name. Each year the award winner prepares a lecture considered to be a significant contribution to the field of children's literature.

David Macaulay's lecture took us on a journey from his first creative efforts in college through to the present day via his working spaces or studios. I was already familiar with some of his works, those that high school students would appreciate, but certainly not all. He is an engaging speaker, informative and humorous. Well worth the 60+ minutes. (The first 10-15 minutes are other individuals involved in preparing this year's venue, celebration, and presentation of David Macaulay.)

The video archive is available here.

iGoogle

I decided to use iGoogle has my homepage. It has more varied and easily added content gadgets. AND I was wrong about Ajax programming not being available on iGoogle. I have since discovered that when you pass your cursor over links that a summary does appear as it does on Pageflakes.

Below are several other resources that might help you use iGoogle.

This Edublogger post, Setting Up iGoogle For Your Personal Learning.

Here's a video with basic info about setting up your iGoogle homepage by Ryan Wade.




And this video shows how to create your own gadgets by DemoGirl.




Or the slideshare below which is fairly technical.

View Upload your own

igoogle
personal homepage

Personalized Homepages

Home pages, startpages, personalized homepages or portals are some of the terms used to describe the place you land when you open your browser. Right now my home page is the school district where I used to work. It's been two years since I retired and it's time to move on to something more useful to me now. After looking at the Webware 100, I wanted to try out iGoogle, and, I had already been exploring Pageflakes, though not as a personalized home page. So these two sites are where I began my exploration of personalized home pages.

allows users to add tabs, themes and drag-n-drop widgets to your home page. The site has a whole bank of third-party widgets or gadgets to choose from including widgets for news, tools, sports and lifestyle. Users can also add gadgets for their favorite Google products including Gmail, Picassa and YouTube.

iGoogle is very easy to setup, create tabs for multiple home pages with different themes/topics, and add, place, or move widgets on each tab and to other tabs.

Above is sample iGoogle home page. Sorry it's so tiny. You can see that this example has 3 tabs which are located below the iGoogle search box on the left. On my iGoogle I have 6 tabs: Home, News, Humor, Technology, Entertainment, and Education. Each rectangle with a blue bar across the top is a different widget. On my Home tab I have the following widgets: Twitter, FriendFeed, GMail, Weather, CNN.com, Top News Stories by Google, Interesting Photos of the Day, Current Moon Phases, Movies, Horoscope, and Fat Loss Tip. Depending on the widget it can be personalized for your location, like the Weather forecast. Twitter, FriendFeed, and GMail appear as if I had opened each app separately, but with iGoogle I can have them all available and be able to add a Tweet or answer an email. Really cool to have them all in one place.

Pageflakes is a personalized Ajax home page service with key features being customized widgets, an RSS reader and group sharing capabilities. Pageflakes allows you to customize your homepage by adding and editing flakes. You can keep your pageflake private or PageCast to the public.

Pageflakes is not quite as easy as iGoogle to set up and customize. I had to go to the help & support section to figure out how to do some things. However, basically, Pageflakes has the same functions as iGoogle. The example above has 5 tabs and flakes that look similar to iGoogles widgets.

The widgets available at iGoogle seem to be more varied, but not as customizable as the flakes within Pageflakes. In many cases I like the flakes better than the widgets. Most flakes with text, like news items or lists, allow you to select the display style (thumbnail, summary, headline only, etc.); how you can read the post (RSS feed, original site with new, current, or Pageflakes browser window); and # of posts. Also, when you pass your cursor over the displayed text, the Ajax programming kicks in and you see a summary of the event. Really, really cool. It makes it faster to decide if you want to read the entire article. iGoogle's widget customization only allows you to select the # of posts. In lieu of Ajax, iGoogle has summaries which can be opened by clicking on the + boxes in front of each post. Look closely at the iGoogle example above at the bottom of the middle column.

Pageflakes has a feature that I haven't really made use of yet, an RSS reader. The reader allows you to view all of the feeds you have selected as flakes in one place, just like my Bloglines account. I have to investigate this more to see if I can add the same feeds I follow now at Bloglines from within Pageflakes.

The other feature that I have used but not as a contributor yet, is sharing a personal homepage with others called a Pagecast. In my previous posts about Pageflakes I explored The Collaborative Web Pagecast. I haven't been able to figure out how to add applications like librarywannabe did with the Collaborative Web Pagecast. Maybe it has something to do with PageCasting. You can also meet new people through the Pageflakes community and collaborate or learn from each other.

I haven't decided which personalized homepage to use. Pageflakes is so much more that iGoogle, but I'm not sure I need all that Pageflakes offers.

(iGoogle and Pageflakes are not the only examples of personalizing home pages. Here's an article that compares 14 different personalized home page sites or this blog post by Michael Arrington, or this EduBlogger post, if you want to explore others.)

Do you use a personalized homepage? Which one? and Why?

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personal homepage