Haugen’s Tech Tips Blog

Wow… Alan Levine has done us all a great service by compiling a list of fifty online tools for storytelling, from slideshows to timeline tools to sites that let you combine text and diverse media formats. In addition, he’s used each tool to tell the same “Dominoe story” and often links to other examples. This provides a great means of comparison. Don’t miss this fabulous resource!

I blogged before about One Laptop Per Child’s Give 1 Get 1 program. Kudos to David Pogue of the New York Times for putting the promotion in such a clear light, and for his review of the new laptop’s features, limitations and capabilities.
My son and I were talking today about whether or not this might be what we do for our holiday giving this year: something for our family, something for others. Having traveled in rural parts of West Africa, South America and Indonesia, my eleven-year-old knows more than most about the people these laptops were designed for. We like the idea of making a connection in this way…
So about that laptop…

• A pull-string battery charger will give 10 minutes use for every 1 minute of tugging – or purchase the $12 solar charger. In unelectrified regions, this is a boon! (Never mind that the battery is good for 2,000 charges and only costs $10)
• A novel screen technology runs in either a crisp backlit color, or a super-low consumption black on gray mode that even works in broad daylight
• With its new ‘mesh networking,’ all XO laptops in range of one another can share documents and more, including a single internet connection. Shares are seen as a color-coded ‘map’ of users, who can, at the click of a button, share any project they’re working on. The mesh network also enables sharing software updates and more
• Features? Web browsing, word processing, calculator, pdf reader (for textbooks, etc.), a few games, a few music programs, paint program, chat and more. Not only that, kids can look under the hood right at the programming language involved and tinker with it – with a one-button restore option.

And the most underrated opportunity? The chance to leap-frog right over the limitations and expense of print as the means of obtaining and maintaining access to information in developing areas. $200 may seem ‘expensive’ from the perspective of a rural underresourced school, but when it connects students (in a two-way conversation) with a world of schools, libraries, audio, video and more, it becomes, as the worn out ad says, ‘priceless.’

Paul Hamilton has amassed an amazing collection of Free Resources from the Net for (Special) Education that you won’t want to miss! Well organized and very comprehensive.  It’s also an inspiring design for a resource-sharing blog.

Now this is amazing to me: dotSUB uses a Creative Commons license and a wiki format to provide video captioning in multiple languages. Anyone can view the videos in any of the available languages. To upload, caption or translate a video, you need a registered account.
The opportunities here are endless, for people learning languages, sharing cross culturally, those struggling with literacy or those who can’t hear.
Explore the site and try it out. Then add it to your toolkit!

Karen Janowski does it again… an extensive blog post on free technology tools for universal design in the classroom. Karen is one of the most down-to-earth and get-it-done people I know and she has a great way of communicating. Bookmark her post and keep coming back for updates.
Now, what I’d really like to see is a wiki on the same topic, so we could all add in our two bits. Maybe a QIAT wiki…