Category: Tech Review

Waze for Smart Phones: The Wisdom of the Crowd for Driving

Waze provides “real-time maps and traffic information based on the wisdom of the crowd.”

Here are a few items of note from the Waze website. (Source)

  • At waze, our vision is to work in cooperation with drivers worldwide to create the world’s first live driving map, providing users with the real-time road intelligence they need for better everyday driving.
  • Waze is a social mobile application providing free turn-by-turn navigation based on the live conditions of the road. 100% powered by users, the more you drive, the better it gets. Join the community of drivers in your area today!
  • Waze is a social mobile application that enables drivers to build and use real-time road intelligence. The service includes constantly-updated road maps, alerts on traffic and accidents, and data providing users with the fastest route to get to wherever they need to go.

(Hat Tip to Wes Fryer for bringing Waze to my attention.)

Educational Uses

Waze could be integrated with geography, driver’s education, and social studies.

Data generated by Waze (collected from the live maps) could be used in math and science classrooms.

Please share additional educational uses in the comments.

Related Articles

Easily Connect with Students, Parents, and Colleagues Online

Posterous Groups is the simplest way to communicate with your students, colleagues, family and friends. Posterous Groups may be the next evolution in email communication.

Messages and attachments submitted to the group will be emailed to everyone in the group. Send any type of file to your group and Posterous will convert it to the most web-friendly format available. Photos will be sent to your group members inline, and if you send multiple photos, Posterous will automatically create a photo gallery for you. Submit a YouTube URL to the group and Posterous will grab the embed code and automatically embed it in your site. Email replies can include photos, videos or any other rich media and will be automatically shared with the rest of the group via email and stored on the group website.

A Few Benefits

Most everyone has access to email and understands how to send and received messages and attachments.

No account required. Anyone can participate in your group simply by emailing your group address while receiving email updates without ever having to visit your site.

Your group can be public or private.

Posterous Groups have been optimized for viewing on mobile devices. Your students and their parents can access your Posterous materials from their cell phones and iPads.

Multiple people can have full control of your group. That means you can share administrative rights to the website/group with others if you choose to do so.

Worth Noting

Best I can tell (and I certainly hope I’m wrong) it isn’t possible to have a Posterous website and a Posterous Group integrated together in the same domain. This is disappointing because it means that we can’t connect blog posts and web pages with the group features in one site. This can be worked around by setting up a Posterous site and a Posterous Group and linking them together, but it means having to administrate two different instances. This isn’t difficult for teachers comfortable with technology, but will likely be a bit overwhelming to those entertaining the idea of developing their first class web presence. In this case, I’d suggest they simply stick with setting up a website (in most instances).

Get Started

Get started by creating a group for your classes, clubs, groups, teams, or students’ parents. You can also start groups for your family, friends, church, and more.

Related Articles

Skype’s New Resource Specifically for Teachers

Skype in the Classroom is “a free directory that connects teachers and helps them use Skype to enrich students’ educational experience.” It allows you and your students to meet new people and connect with classes from around the world. Skype offers an immediate way to help students discover new cultures, languages and ideas, all without leaving the classroom. (Source)

“There are lots of teachers out there doing amazing things with Skype. But many of them say their biggest obstacle is finding other teachers and classes to connect with. [Skype is} developing a free online directory to make it easy for teachers to connect with other teachers and resources from around the world…Once you sign up with your Skype account and create a profile, you’ll be able to search for other teachers and classes by subject and region. You can also share inspiration and tips to help kids learn with Skype.” (Source)

Start by creating a profile, then explore the directory to find teachers and resources that match your interests. You can then share inspiring links, videos and tips with other teachers.? Feel free to connect with me, too.

NASA’s Puffin: Your Personal Aircraft?

“Engineers from the NASA Langley Research Center unveiled plans to build a personal flying machine that would run on a set of electric motors. [Discovery News] reports on the aptly named Puffin, which is still in the early stages of development.” (Source)

Educational Uses

This video could be used to introduce a study on the principles of flight (Example Lesson Plan).

Learners could problem-solve how much impact the design of the Puffin craft would have if it weighd 600 pounds.

Challenge learners to brainstorm ways that the craft might be able to: fly 100 miles on a single charge, carry 2 passengers, and more.

Our Family’s Favorite App

I decided to share AudioBoo during my presentation at TeacheMeet Memphis. Our kids and I have a lot of fun with this service. AudioBoo makes podcasting and audio blogging a snap and can positively impact your classroom (See previous posts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5). Here are my notes as well as the Ustream archive from my session. My full presentation notes are also available on my wiki, Learning Telecollaboratively.

Tutorials
Publishing to AudioBoo from a Web Browser
Creating an AudioBoo from iPhone

Teacher-Created Examples
2 Announcements
AudioBoo in the Classroom
More Examples

Student-Created Examples

First Day of Preschool


Kids Get Creative


Dear Mrs. Estep…

Let’s Connect
Clif’s AudioBoo Profile

Publishing to AudioBoo from a Web Browser

Our kids and I have a lot of fun with AudioBoo. AudioBoo is a service that makes podcasting and audio blogging a snap and can positively impact your classroom (See previous posts1, 2, 3 and 4). Although the service has previously pretty much been limited to iPhone users it is now available to everyone. Here’s a screencast demonstrating how to use their recently released BrowserBoo feature which makes it possible to record to AudioBoo through any web browser.

Here’s the sample Boo that I created during the screencast above.

Listen!

You can browse through my AudioBoo profile page to look through many other examples of boos that the kids and I have published.

I strongly encourage all teachers to take a look at AudioBoo. Whether or not you choose to use it as a teacher I believe there are students in your classroom that would enjoy using it and benefit from engaging this learning modality.

Sign-up for your AudioBoo account, friend me and other educators, and begin enjoying the valuable contributions this can bring you and your students.

Research and Collaborate with SimplyBox

SimplyBox is a free service that allows you to visually capture any part of a web page. As you collect items that you captured, you organize them in boxes. You can then share these items or boxes with friends, colleagues, … the world. The result is: efficient and visual collaboration around content. They call it “content networking.” (Source)

Overview

Research

  • Collect only the parts from a web page that you want.
  • Write your notes/comments on the content you found.
  • Have a direct link back to the sites each of your items were collected from.

Student Collaboration

  • Collect into a box useful content from the web and add your comments to it.
  • Share the box with your students, even if they are not SimplyBox users.
  • The students can add their comments and content.

Connecting Beyond the Classroom

  • Create boxes with content related to the different topics you teach.
  • Exchange the boxes with other teachers (even if in different schools!.
  • Have them help you find more content and engage their classes in the discussion.

AudioBoo: Simple Podcasting from iPhone

Our kids and I have recently been playing around with AudioBoo. It’s an iPhone app that makes podcasting and audio blogging a snap. Several people encouraged me to start using it back in the Spring when I was at Podstock. I dismissed the idea because 1) I didn’t have an iPhone and 2) I didn’t really think it would be THIS easy!!! Don’t make the same mistake I did. Take a look at AudioBoo, now. Here’s an overview.

Learn with Us (IDT7078)

As I mentioned in a recent blog post I’m teaching a seminar this summer focusing on Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0 Technologies. I concluded the earlier post by sharing the following:

In keeping with the principles of Web 2.0 I encourage the participation of everyone with an interest or expertise in this topic. You may contribute to the discussion and fun by using the following tag/keyword: idt7078. Be on the lookout for ways (Ustream, Skype, Twitter, Plurk, etc.) to informally participate with us. I would certainly consider making it possible for those wishing to enroll in the course and participate from a distance, too.

Greg R. Fishbone replied to my earlier post and asked the following question regarding my concluding statements.

I’d love to participate informally, but how does one follow a keyword?

I think this is a GREAT a question and I suspect Greg is not the only one wondering about this. I’m sharing this information here in hopes of helping Greg and anyone else that may be interested in being part of our learning community this summer.

Google Keyword Search
You can add the following RSS feed to your aggregator (such as Google Reader or Bloglines). New blog posts, wiki entries, bookmarks, videos, podcasts, etc. tagged with idt7078 will then be “delivered” to you as they show up in Google.

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=idt7078&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss

An alternative to this strategy would be to setup a Google Alert for idt7078.

Twitter Search
You can also add a keyword search for idt7078 to TweetDeck or similar Twitter platform if you are using one. If not, then you can add the following RSS feed for the Twitter Search of the course tag to your aggregator.

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=idt7078

Plurk Search
Add idt7078 to your list of Saved Searches in your profile’s dashboard.

New SlideShare Account

I had to setup a new account at SlideShare. I’d had my old account for a couple of years, but I just kept having too many problems with it and their support didn’t didn’t seem interested in helping resolve it. Overall, I’ve been satisfied with SlideShare, so I’ve gone ahead and setup the new account (One advantage of this is that my ID is now clifmims which matches almost all of my other online IDs). I just hate that I’ll loose some of the connections that I previously had with many of you on SlideShare. I’d very much appreciate it if you’d add me as one of your SlideShare contacts (friends), so that I can reestablish my network more quickly. Together we all learn more!

For what it’s worth, I’ve been very satisfied with my account at SlideBoom. It has fewer social tools than SlideShare but SlideBoom has made uploading files easier. I also think the SlideBoom presentations look a bit better.