SmugMug

SmugMug is a family owned and operated photo sharing/host site that offers free Pro Accounts, valued at $149.95, to non-profits. Simply fill out the form found here and submit.

I found their customer support to be unbelieveable. I created my account on a Saturday and ran into a glitch so I emailed them and they got back to me within minutes! I was so impressed that I sent out the link to all my Twitter and Plurk friends so that they could get in on the fun.

After creating an account and setting up a domain name for our school, I got started uploading pictures. One great feature is the simple one click upload directly from Picasa. Here are the simple step-by-step directions for adding this feature to Picasa. 

In addition to hosting your pictures SmugMug allows video uploads and one click Geo-tagging directly from the iPhone!  All this and much, much more without the bother of ads. Don't wait, this one is too good to miss.

Leslie Fisher@MACUL

Steve Dembo@MACUL

MIT and High School Courses

MIT is now offering courseware for High School students and the cost...free! Highlights for High School provides students with coursework to help with AP classes, video demonstrations, lab experiments, competitions and more.

Highlights for High School is the latest addition to the Opencourseware that MIT has been providing for over 6 years. While this new endeavor focuses the magnifying glass on processes and content to help high school students and teachers, it is not the first time that MIT has provided assisstance. Dating as far back as 1956 when MIT professors collaborated with high school physics teachers to help define the best approach to teaching introductory physics or when in 1957 MIT students committed to working with middle and high school students, which is still active today.

Additional Resources:

University Lectures

MIT OpenCourseWare

Open Yale

Open Consortium

Spell with Flickr

I have to admit, sometimes I'm pretty simple and like the shiny objects. Spell with Flickr is a simple but elegant program, written by Erik Kastner, which searches the Flickr database of pictures to spell out any word of your choosing.

You simply type in the word(s) that you want spelled and hit enter. After receiving the initial rendering you can change any letter simply by clicking on it. Once you found a combination that you like, copy the code and paste it into your html code.

Below is my daughter's name created using Spell with Flickr:

I'm still working out how to use this in PowerPoint and other "nonweb" based programs.

Board of Education

Kerpoof

Where have I been? Kerpoof has been around for quite some time and yet somehow I managed to miss out, that is until now.

Kerpoof, a web-based, interactive program for children, was created by a Boulder Colorado company on March 1, 2006 and has grown in popularity since. It has become so inviting that Disney couldn't resist and acquired Kerpoof, just a few days ago. This is not the first time that Disney has snatched up a popular program for kids; they also acquired Club Penguin in 2007. Some of the more popular products on their burgeoning roster are Toon Town, Pixie Hallow and Pirates Online.

Now that Kerpoof is a Disney product you can use many of your favorite Disney characters when creating work. Kerpoof is Internet based and so no install is needed. Students can continue work without any complicated saving procedures, no advertising and a single page display.

More information can be found at Kerpoof website or my school blog: Highmeadow Common Campus Technology.

Daily Lit

I spent much of my day today participating in continuous partial attention and while endlessly searching for more, I came across DailyLit. "DailyLit lets you read entire books in short, customized installments sent to you by email or RSS."

Creating an account in DailyLit is rather straight forward by following the links from REGISTER, which appears at the top, right of the page. The username that you choose will become your public identity and will show on your DailyLit homepage and on any posts that you make to the site. After creating your account a confirmation code is sent to your email in order to confirm that you want to be a member. Then the fun begins.

You can search for books by Author, Title or Category. I started by searching for "classics" in the category section, knowing that these books would be free for public use as the copyright has expired. I chose a couple to experiment with and added them to my account. I decided to send these installments to my email because my RSS "in basket" is already quite full. You can tweak your settings to enlarge the font size, and to specify when they should be delivered.


I appreciate the graphics and clean display of the email that is sent. Take notice that at the bottom of each email are adjustments that can be made such as, delivering another installment right away, suspending delivery for awhile or discussing the book in a forum.

Maybe this time my New Years resolution to read the classics will actually happen. Technology just keeps making my life easier.