geek.teacher

About six months or so ago I became a big fan of Delicious.  For a long time I didn’t use it, because I didn’t see the point of keeping my bookmarks online.  Then, as I got more interested in all of the resources available online, I knew I needed to go with it for two reasons:

1. There are too many resources!  I’m up to nearly 400 bookmarks now, which is simply too much to keep efficiently organized in my bookmarks menu.
2. Not wasting my efforts.  I’d see something at work that I’d want to review later at home, or I’d find something at home that I could use at work with my students.  Online bookmarking solves that problem handily.

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A few months back, after checking out the options available, I switched over to using Diigo.  It offers more options, and has some nice grouping features.  Also, I primarily use it because it can send links to delicious every time I make a new bookmark, and would import from delicious when I started, but delicious doesn’t offer the same options.  This way I have a backup of my bookmarks, as well as access to tools that interact with delicious.  This way, too, if I’ ever someplace that blocks one but not the other, I won’t find myself lost in the middle of a lake without a paddle.

Like most of the social networking tools, I more or less exclusively use it as a professional resource.  I do the personal posting thing in Twitter to some degree because everybody does, and it’s what makes the community a way of getting to know people, but I’m really there for interacting with other educators.  This blog primarily, but not always, deals with education.  Any nings I belong to are education-related, and of the major social networking sites, the only one I’m on is LinkedIn, a professional resource.  Diigo is the same for me.  It’s all about things tangentially related to education.

One of the ideas I hit pretty early on, and have become increasingly consistent about, has been using my online bookmarking as a kind of developing online resume.  Now, whenever I comment on a blog, I always make sure to tag it with commented.  This way, every once in a while I can go back, take a look at the things I recently tagged that way, and go back for followup discussion.  No more asking for e-mails of followup, which clog my inbox.  No more subscribing to another RSS feed for only one thread of comments.  I know some people use CoComment to keep track of this stuff, but it doesn’t support Safari.

Any other tips out there for getting the most of these kinds of tools?  I know I need to start looking at the social part of social bookmarking a little bit more, but I’m sure people use them for all sorts of clever things I’m not thinking of.

As a bonus, here’s a Wordle of my tags:

Click to view full size

I was pretty pleased when I did this the last time…I created a Wordle from a month’s worth of tweets.  I did it the hard way back then, painstakingly copying and pasting from my history pages.  Fortunately, Tweetscan will now do the hard work for me, which allowed me to pretty quickly and easily create the following, which, for the most part, represents six months of serious tweeting.

It really blows me away how some words (just) are a total crux of my writing, which for some reason seems awful to me.  I had to edit that sentence in my mind 3 times to get rid of the word right then, and had to do it a couple of times for this sentence alone.  Agh!  It’s also fun to see the people that I send the most @ replies to, and I would like to point out that regardless of word order there, the following words do not normally appear in sequence when I Tweet:

As the holiday season fast approaches (Seriously, stores?  Christmas decorations already?), it’s a time when one’s mind turns to good will towards others, at least when not scoping out the latest pre-Black Friday sales.  I just last night saw that this year’s Child’s Play charity is now active.  

Since 2003, over 100,000 gamers worldwide have banded together through Child’s Play, a community based charity grown and nurtured from the game culture and industry. Over two million dollars in donations of toys, games, books and cash for sick kids in children’s hospitals across North America and the world have been collected since our inception.

I have been proud to donate in the past, and am proud to contribute yet again.  Last year they added my local Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. This year the children over there will see the following books from me:

• Where the Wild Things Are
•  Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
•  Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

So if you have it in your hearts and wallets, I encourage you to donate even a small amount to this great charity that really contributes to better quality of life for children stuck in hospitals.

I love my iPhone (8gb, first edition, won it from TUAW for free).  Love it.  My wife loves hers, as well (8gb, 3G, $200).  While it’s not a perfect cell phone, it does so many things well and gets so much more use than any previous phone I had that I can’t help but adore it.

One of the best parts is how incredibly versatile the phone is.  I can take pictures and instantly e-mail them to my Flickr page.  I can make audio recordings with iTalk and transfer them to my computer over my wifi network.  I can browse my Reader feeds and One-Click order a book I see in Borders for 1/3 off the price in the store.  I can tweet to my heart’s content, talk to people on IM and Skype, listen to my favorite songs and watch videos while I travel or exercise, and, oh, yeah, I can make phone calls with it.

I’m anxiously looking forward to the official release of Qik, or some other video solution, as video is the one missing media-recording piece for this device.

All of this stuff is awesome, but it’s partly awesome because of the looking forward part of the process.  3G and GPS alone were not quite enough to get me to upgrade my own phone, although they were tempting.  Instead I’m holding out for most likely next year’s model, which I hope will include a better camera and at least 32gb of space so I can fit my entire music collection on it.

Before I got my iPhone, I had a Sony Ericsson w810i, which I also really liked as a pure phone with some nifty features built in.  It was my first phone with data capabilities and a camera, so I really enjoyed those aspects of it.  It was also more open in its Bluetooth configuration, which still irks me about my iPhone.  To this day, the one thing I miss the most since I switched is the tight integration the w810i had with BluePhoneElite.

The Ericsson part of the SE team recently released some projections for cell phones 4 years from now.  The highlights:

• 12-20 megapixel camera
• Full HD video camera
• 100+ Mbps wireless internet

So in 4 years, one device will be a replacement for many higher end devices of today.  Our students will have them.  Will we be ready?

Google just keeps the hits on coming.  They were nice enough to provide an embeddable electoral map, so I can watch results in real time!

I got a Flip video camera a couple months back on a great deal, but didn’t have much immediate use for it.  The other day, however, I saw that PBS and YouTube were sponsoring VideoYourVote.  I like the map-based search function on it in particular.  I decided this morning to take the Flip with me and record my experience.  It’s not particularly dramatic.  I didn’t get intimidated and the machines seemed to work fine.  But it gave me a chance to record an important moment and play around with a new toy and the newer iMovie a bit, so I’m glad I did.

I’m going to do my best to participate in activities this month for Teach42’s 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger.  Day 1’s activity is to Update your About page.  I have done so, although I will need to go back sometime later and add in a whole bunch of links.

What I saw this morning (complete with wrong e-mail address…guess I need to fix that): 

What I saw 30 minutes after I e-mailed support: 

Thank you, Dreamhost!

FULL DISCLOSURE: i do get a referral bonus if you buy service with that link.  Not that I particularly care, but some extra money wouldn’t be terrible, you know?  I’m genuinely posting this because I’ve been consistently pleased with the customer service and features my webhost gives me.

School and Ninjas!

Upon seeing the headline, , there are basically two thought streams that can come to mind: (1) Thoughts about the state of affairs when it comes to lockdowns of schools following Columbine, and (2) Thoughts that the very idea is ridiculous, because nobody would have actually seen the Ninja.

Needless to say, the latter came to my mind first.

Thanks to @dajbelshaw for the tipoff. While you’re at it, make sure to check out his new social networking site for edte.ch people.