When I was in grade school I loved learning about the state and I loved Tetris. Statetris rolls them up into hours of fun with a flashed-based Tetris game that uses states as blocks. BoingBoing explains the game best when they write, “Get ’em into the right spot or the US will overflow into Canada and everyone gets socialized medicine!”
I’m definitely saving this one for when my own kids get a little older.
Last week Brian Bartel and I presented at NSTA’s National Congress on Science Education. We discussed the basics of online communication. There were about 25 people at the session but I love the fact that I can still share the information through a variety of ways online.
Zentation appears to be the best tool. Synchronizing was a little quirky at times but the final product was worth the effort. They provide a variety of ways to embed your presentation on your own site. I choose their small Flash-based version below.
A few days ago I saw a woman on television that has cerebral palsy which causes her to have a serious stutter. One thing the program showed was the difficultly those who stutter experience when they are making phone calls. On the show, the woman was trying to call tech support. Unfortunately, the people on the other line kept hanging up on her because they thought her stutter was either a joke or they just didn’t want to take the extra time necessary.
If only she could get an initial introduction out to explain the stutter, maybe the call would be completed. I think Audacity could help here. With this free and easy audio editing program, callers could record a brief introductory message that would ask the listener for their patience. Using Audacity, the caller can snip out the pauses and then play the message that would start the call.
I took some time to play around with Google’s new My Maps feature. Now you can create personalized maps for just about anything. Last month I created a map for me and my wife before we set off on vacation to celebrate our ten year wedding anniversary. It really helped me plan for the trip. The map gave me a perspective of several unfamiliar locations.
Google also lets you open your map in Google Earth. If you have Google Earth installed, simply click the 
KML icon at the top of your map and you’re off. If you’re not familiar with Google Earth, this is an easy way to get started.
That was for fun. Now let’s put the map to work. I created a map for our science teacher organization’s upcoming board meeting. I put a pin for each person invited to the meeting with a pop-up bubble containing their role in our organization, picture and contact information (that’s why I’m not sharing this one).
With a tool like this (and current gas prices), I suspect several meeting-goers will be inspired to carpool.
Now this just makes me laugh.
“UK pollsters YouGov have just completed a survey on the web’s most-hated words” [link]
Here they are:
Oh, who cares- let’s see who can string’em all into one sentence.
Brian Bartel and I finished our 52nd podcast episode for the Wisconsin Society of Science Teachers. We celebrate a year of podcasting with an interview with Derek Baird. He talks to us about Yahoo’s soon-to-be-released service Yahoo! Teachers. Yahoo! Teachers lets you create projects with other teachers and network with colleagues in your discipline.
Running Time: 18:40
Listen now:
[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/wsst/periodicity5206222007.mp3]Download this episode directly or subscribe to get every episode.
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Show Notes:
Before you take off for the summer, take a moment to write down your passwords for things like eSembler, Chancery and etc.
If the idea of writing down a password conjures up scenes from Wargames and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, don’t worry—it’s really not a bad idea.
It is better than choosing a poor password. The Dalebert comic (below) is not too far from the truth. Here is a recent list of the 10 most common passwords:
passwordYikes!
Security guru Bruce Schneier writes:
People can no longer remember passwords good enough to reliably defend against dictionary attacks, and are much more secure if they choose a password too complicated to remember and then write it down… writing down your impossible-to-memorize password is more secure than making your password easy to memorize.
He’s not alone. Microsoft’s Jesper Johansson made the same suggestion.
Another suggestion that I like comes from security expert Steve Gibson. During his podcast Security Now, Steve explains:
Most people have never taken some time to create their own policy, their own personal password policy. They’re on the web, they’re doing something, and suddenly something says, okay, give me a password, create a password. And so, you know, they think of – they just do the first thing that comes to mind, whatever that might be. And so I wanted to take some time to discuss the issue of passwords and cause our listeners to sort of say, okay, wait a minute, this is an important thing. I’m going to, you know, take five minutes and figure out what I want to do about this, rather than continuing not to think about it and not to think that it’s important. Because I think it arguably really is an important issue.
Steven suggests that you create a little algorithm that helps you create a new password for each place you log into.
…take every other letter from the domain name, or every third letter. Come up with a rule for capitalizing them. Swap some letters around. You know, just sort of make up your own algorithm – and you don’t share with anybody else, and don’t use anything that I’ve talked about on the show, of course – and use that to create a password. Maybe take the name and, like, mix in the year of your birth, alternating that with the letters.
Steve talks about passwords in Episodes 4 and 5 of Security Now. I used Audacity to splice together the good parts into one show. Give it a listen.
His site also provides:
When you think about all the important and private things that your passwords protect, you owe it to yourself to give passwords some thought.
I’ve talked about Pandora in the past. It is a great site for discovering music and it’s an easy way to play some tunes in the classroom.
One drawback to Pandora was that naughty words popped up in some of the songs. Fortunately, Pandora has a fix to this little problem.
Click “Settings” in the upper right corner to see an option to enable an explicit lyrics filter.
Now I can play my “White Stripes” station without worrying about the words my grandma doesn’t like.
Recently I heard an interview on Wisconsin Public Radio about email. The guest was David Shipley, coauthor of “SEND: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home.”
Shipley gives tips to help avoid email pitfalls and discusses how to write the perfect message.
I encourage everyone to give it a listen; it was a fun interview.
The authors also have a website where you can read examples of bad emails.
We all have our horror stories, here’s what bugs me the most:
Aaaah that felt good. Now post your pet peeves in the comments section below.
With all the messages that get sent around at work, we need to prune our email inboxes every once and a while.
Outlook lets you move (or even delete) messages that meet certain criteria. For example, you can delete all messages that are from spam@temple.com or you can move all messages that contain the word homecoming into a “Homecoming” folder.
Outlook makes this easy with its Rules Wizard. You can find a quick step-by-step tutorial to get started.
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