Stuff and Things

Hi,

First, a picture that will change your life as you know it:

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2010/07/chewbacca-on-a-squirrel-fighting-nazis/

That's right - it's Chewbacca, on a squirrel, fighting Nazis. I think the world just ended.

Secondly, if RSS feeds, blogs, and wikis make you want to find an English-TechnoBabble dictionary, may I recommend Common Craft : http://commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english
& http://www.youtube.com/user/commoncraft?blend=1&ob=4#p/u/9/muVUA-sKcc4 . The first link is to an explanation of RSS feeds, the second an introduction to Google Docs. Common Craft uses paper cut-outs and 'plain English'. To use yourself, they're free, although the films are not technically 'free' - if you wished to use them professionally (i.e. in a presentation or a lecture) they're for sale. But as an individual you can watch the whole version online.

A similarly useful site is 'animated explanations' that (naturally enough) uses animations to quickly explain a concept. Here's one on twitter - http://www.animatedexplanations.com/Animation.aspx?animation=391 - and one diagramming how the heart functions - http://www.animatedexplanations.com/Animation.aspx?animation=342 .

I linked above to the YouTube Common Craft video explaining Google Docs. You can not only create regular Word/text/spreadsheet/presentation documents on Google docs, but also 'forms', for creating things like free online surveys. http://www.speedofcreativity.org/2010/07/30/create-a-free-online-survey-with-google-forms/

This is a wonderful video linking math to rock climbing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnoL8hiN65A

My Wonderful World is created by National Geographic to celebrate geography and encourage its study in students. It seems a bit geared towards the younger set, but I thought it may be useful to some : http://www.mywonderfulworld.org/index.html .

And lastly, you can now see weather on Google Earth. In real time! That's amazingly cool. (Lisa: Or you could just look out the window.) Whatever, I'm not leaving my bat-cave just to look at the weather. That's what computers are for : http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/07/rain-or-snow-now-you-can-see-weather-in.html .

Regards,

Ron Neufeld

Canada's Best Boarding School

Video Converter for Class Video Projects

Hi,

Classroom video projects are useful. Rather then the old 'poster' of "cut&paste", it can demonstrate the students explaining/demo'ing/acting a concept or idea themselves. Actually doing a video project, however, can be especially frustrating - students with multiple different video formats, operating systems, video editors, etc. I'm often confronted with a "this editor won't work with this video" because either they have a Mac file on a windows machine, or a windows file on a Mac machine, and currently they're not speaking to each other. If Mac would just buy Windows it would solve everything, but until then (and just today) I ran across a free video converter:

http://videoconverter.hamstersoft.com/

Unfortunately it only works on Windows (Vista, 7), and not on a Mac. Given that in any project there is always a mix that includes a Windows machine, that shouldn't be a problem.

Regards,

Ron Neufeld

Canada's Best Boarding School