Sharing the Addiction

Interesting Things Part Two

I have had an evening of playing around on the computer and I have picked up a few more interesting sites.

Searching
Mahalo is a search engine that is written by human beings rather than machine compiled. Each returned entry is guaranteed to be of a high quality and spam free. There is stuff on education but most of it is written at a higher level than primary. What I did see looked really good and I have signed up to ge a writer on Mahalo where I get money for each entry I add. I will let you know if I get accepted! You can install a Firefox add-on that will display Mahalo search results next to your goodle results.

Search Radar is a search engine that helps you refine your searches. When you enter a search term, it gives you a tag cloud of related search terms to help you narrow your search. Under the tag cloud there is a list of sites for the search terms you used. Again you can install a Firefox extension that will show you a list of related search terms next to any Google search results (replacing the Google Ads!)

Powerpoint Type Applications - Slide Rocket
While SlideRocket is not yet launched (I have sent a request in to have an account), this looks very exciting. Many of the online office applications do not seem to prioritise good looking presentation applications and most seem pretty basic. SlideRocket promises to make great use of the potential that being a web based application affords it. It is planning to have links with services such as Flickr so that you can bring in images to you slides. The interface looks great - can’t wait to try this one out.

News From the Cluster
I haven’t really used this blog to share what is happening in our cluster the way that I envisioned I would when I set it up! That is something that I need to change. There is a webquest that a teacher called Hayley has set up at Wilford School that is well worth sharing. She has used a wiki to set up the webquest that is about Hauora (the Maori word for well-being) and looks at Food and Nutrition, Emotional Health, Environmental Issues and Physical Heath (exercise). This is a great resouce that anyone can tap into. The address of the webquest is http://hauora.pbwiki.com

Roundup of some interesting things

1. Search ’shortcuts’
If you are using Firefox, you can set up a search shortcut for sites that you visit often that have a search window. Go to the site, right click on the search window and choose ‘Add a Keyword for this Search’. Once you have assigned a keyword, you can type it into the address box of the browser and then type your search terms afterwards. For instance, I have assigned a shortcut to my search box on my website. I now don’t have to visit the site, I just type me (my search keyword) and then my search terms such as fractions into the address window and I get the search results when I push enter.

2. Webslides
As the video below shows, this service lets you select a group of webpages to turn into a slideshow giving people a chance to look at each page. You have to email them to get an invite to test this and I am still waiting for one but I think it looks pretty interesting.

3. l8r
This service allows you to set a date into the future for an email to be delivered (up to five years). Wouldn’t this be an interesting writing exercise for kids. Write a letter to yourself five years into the future! I found out about this service on this Mashable blog post about 75 different email services available.

4. Fuser
While I couldn’t get this working properly for me, I have still put it here because I think the idea behind it is great. It takes all of your email accounts and Facebook, and brings all of that mail into one place. I have emailed them telling them the problems I have having so watch this space (while I was writing this blog entry, I got an email from their customer service - lightning fast reply! It may be to do with some settings I changed in Firefox so you should check this out)

I’m also revisiting the online office applications that I am already signed up to such as Zoho and ThinkFree as well as trying out new ones like Contact Office and will let you know in my next post what I think of them.