Portal Pages and You

If you are at all like me you probably try to keep up with a variety of Web sites. Some of these sites are for professional content, some of them are personal. All of them are interesting to you. Perhaps you have many of these pages setup as bookmarks or favorites in your Web browser. This works pretty well, but wouldn't it be nice to be able to go to one page and get a glimpse into the content that was available on all of your favorite pages at once? This is where the portal page comes to the rescue! There are many examples of this kind of service but I will present three that I like and use.

• Netvibes
• iGoogle
• Protopage

All of these services have some things in common. They make it very easy to setup and organize custom pages that contain the headlines from many of your favorite Web pages. For example, if you happen to be a news junkie you probably like to check in on the CNN Web page during the day. Using a portal page you can "subscribe" to the RSS feed that contains the headlines from CNN. This allows for a very simple view of the content that is on the page without actually going to the site. If you see something you want to read more about you can simply click through and be taken to the story on the CNN site.

RSS stands for real simple syndication. This is a way in which you can subscribe to content found on web sites or blogs. How do you know you can subscribe to a Web site? Look for this symbol: This is the most common icon to represent an RSS feed. A typical RSS link will look a little bit different than a regular URL. For example, here is an RSS feed for USA Today's headlines: http://asp.usatoday.com/marketing/rss/rsstrans.aspx?feedId=news1 Often times if you go to a site you can very often find buttons for different portal services that the site has already configured to quickly add their RSS feed to your portal page. My blog page has some examples of these buttons.

Once you have collected some of your favorite sites RSS feeds it is time to organize them. All of the sites I have mentioned go about this in a similar fashion. You are able to create tabs and then have boxes or sections in columns on that page. Next, you can move those boxes around in order to arrange your contents any way that suits you. You can then create multiple tabs to create pages by subject. On my netvibes page I have a tab for technology sites, a tab for College of Lake County blogs, and a tab for personal sites. I can switch from tab to tab very easily. It puts an hour of Web browsing into a minute of time. In addition, all of these portal sites also include widgets. This could be weather, games, your del.icio.us bookmarks. Perhaps you have a Picasa Web album you would want to have rotating on your portal page. No problem. Interested in a search box that simultaneously searches Google, Yahoo, and MSN? Done. The possibilities are endless.

Your new home page is waiting, so give one of these portal pages a try today!

That URL is so loooong!

Have you ever been sent a Web link via e-mail but you were unable to click on it because the URL was so long that it was broken in two by your e-mail client? In the database-driven Web world of today we can run into some pretty hefty URLs. Did you ever try to write down an Amazon.com URL? Ouch. Well, what if you wanted to drop your significant other a hint about what you want for Valentine's day on Amazon. You need one of my favorite little Web tools: TinyURL.

TinyURL is very simple, but extremely useful. Lets give it a try.

Say I wanted to show you something interesting I found at Amazon.com. Now, here is the actual URL that I would need to pass along to you:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000R7EHZK/ref=amb_link_471
2222_5?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-7&pf_rd_
r=0RD4C1EBF9N7WRV9R3TA&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=292665201
&pf_rd_i=507846

Ouch! Now, I obviously used copy and paste in order to put that in my posting. However, it is obviously going to take up a few lines. It would also not stay on the same line in an e-mail program like Microsoft Outlook. How do I solve this problem. I simply point my browser to tinyURL.com. Here I find a simple text box where I paste my URL. It then provides me with a new tiny URL.

TinyURL was created!

The following URL:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000R7EHZK/ref=amb_link_471
2222_5?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-7&pf_rd_
r=0RD4C1EBF9N7WRV9R3TA&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=292665201
&pf_rd_i=507846

has a length of 179 characters and resulted in the following TinyURL which has a length of 25 characters:

http://tinyurl.com/2aho7n

You can give the new tinyURL a spin: http://tinyurl.com/2aho7n This new tinyURL could easily be put into an e-mail or blog posting. Try a long URL of your own at tinyURL.com

I hope you enjoy using this great free tool!

An Online Office Suite

Today I want to tell you about a great application of the "Web 2.0" technology. Google Docs is an online office suite that is available from the folks at Google for free. What is an online office suite? Imagine if you could work on a Word file, an Excel spreadsheet, or even a presentation file anywhere there was an internet connection. The online office suite allows you to very easily work with word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation files on the Web like you use them on your local computer version of Microsoft Office.

Another great reason to use an online office suite is to enable easy document collaboration. Have you ever worked on a document with multiple co-workers? You probably started a Word file and the e-mailed it to the next person. They made changes, and sent it on. You really only knew what was happening with that file when it came back to you. On Google Docs you can collaborate on a document at the same time. You can invite collaborators with a simple e-mail. This kind of collaboration could be used for group assignments in a course. The student only needs to sign up for a free Google account. In addition, Google makes it very easy to view the changes and revisions that were made to a document and who made those changes.

Once you have completed a document in Google Docs you can export it as a PDF, a Word document, an RTF document, or even a Web page. There are a lot of possibilities with this online application. You can take the tour from Google or if you want to jump right in you can start now.

So What Do I Use for Digital Pictures?

It happens to me a lot. People will ask me, "What do you use to manage all your digital pictures?" For a long time I did not have a very good answer. Often we get some software that comes with our digital camera and we start using it by default. Otherwise, we may just treat our pictures like all of the other files we have on our hard drive. If you have a Mac you may have given iPhoto a try.

I have spent a lot of time looking for something that helped me with the three crucial features I wanted in a photo program.

1. The ability to store photos in a central library but still add them to different albums that made sense to me.
   
   
2. A way to easily print photos on my own printer or send them to one of the many online photo services.
   
   
3. Backup my photos so I could sleep at night knowing that if I lost any of the precious family photos it would probably be the end.

The tool that I found not only met all of my requirements but far exceeded them as well! It is Picasa from Google.

Picasa is a free software download from Google that helps you:

• Locate and organize all the photos on your computer.
• Edit and add effects to your photos with a few simple clicks.
• Share your photos with others through email, prints, and on the web: it’s fast, easy and free.

Take your photos further with Picasa from Google.

If you are looking for a great program that will help you in creating slide shows, exporting your pictures, trying some special effects, and simply allowing you to get a handle on all of those digital pictures that are all over your hard drive than Picasa is a great place to start. Picasa will do a search of your hard drive to find any pictures that are already on your computer. In addition, it will assist you in importing your pictures from your digital camera's memory card. I have found it to be a great program. It met all my requirements and brought a lot more. Find out more about Picasa and give it a try!

A Thing Called Jing!

Some of you have probably heard of SnagIt. For those of you that have not heard of it, SnagIt is a screen capture program. It comes in very handy when you want to explain something. A picture is worth... well you know. Anyway, SnagIt can be used to take a picture of anything on the computer screen. If you cannot find any other way to get some material to your students, you can always use SnagIt to make a screen capture image. Now, you might have noticed that this post is not about SnagIt. Instead, I want to tell you about a free project from the folks that make SnagIt.

TechSmith has created the Jing Project. They don't really know where the project is going but I believe it would be a great tool for online education. Here is how Jing is introduced on it's web site at http://www.jingproject.com:

The concept of Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere.

It’s something we want to give you, along with some online media hosting, to see how you use it. The project will eventually turn into something else.

Basically, they give away this program that allows you to make very easy screen capture images. You can save those images on your local computer or you can use some of TechSmith's free web space at screencast.com to host the image. This allows you to very easily share that image with another user (or student) via an instant message, e-mail, or web page. Sound interesting? It gets better...

Not only can you capture images you can also capture screen videos or screencasts. Here is an example:



This is a short video I made in a matter of minutes with Jing. Next, I let Jing upload it to my shared media space where I was then able to easily post it here on the blog. I could very easily make it available on my Web page or in Blackboard.

Find out more about Jing. Watch this video tour.

Curious about Instant Messaging? meebo me!

Want to hear about meebo? Just press play below.

The first tool I want to introduce is called meebo.

The most basic description of meebo would be instant messaging on the web. For example, if you were away at a conference but wanted to do some instant messaging you could go to the meebo site and login to your AOL instant messager, Yahoo, MSN, or Google talk account and have your buddy list ready for you to chat. No software to install, no funny IM aliases to remember. You login to the site and you are ready to IM with your buddies.

While this kind of flexibility alone would be enough for some to utilize this service there is so much more. One of the problems you may have had with going into instant messaging technology as a way to communicate with your students is that you couldn't decide which service to join. If you were on AOL but most of your students were on MSN then you could not exchange messages unless someone joined the other service. On meebo you can login to multiple instant messaging systems at the same time. You will need to have joined each of these IM services but once you do that you are able to chat on multiple systems through meebo. If your saying to yourself, "that sounds great but how will I remember all those logins and passwords", don't worry because meebo can assist you with that as well. If you sign up for an account with meebo you get some excellent benefits:

1. meebo will securely remember your login information for any IM systems you are using
2. You can create anonymous "meebo me chat widgets" that allow anyone to IM with you on the meebo system (more on this in a second)

For example, if I wanted to make an easy way for you to chat with me I could simply add a chat widget right on this web page. Like this:



If I am available online anyone could chat with me. They do not need to subscribe to any IM service. This makes the instant message a very easy medium for you and your students. You could easily embed a meebo widget into your Blackboard. Students could see if you were online and ask a quick question perhaps saving you an e-mail message or two.

Welcome to InnovaTech!

Welcome to a new blog at the College of Lake County. This is a place where I would like to highlight some of the great tools I come across on an almost daily basis. Now, notice I did not say I was going to post about these tools on an almost daily basis. My goal would be to make sure and contribute at least one per week. In addition, I plan to use this blog as a starting point to link to other media and resources. What kind of resources you ask? Perhaps some instructional videos on Blackboard.

I may even try to do a podcast here and there...

Stay tuned and see what comes next (or even first)!