Navigator Technology

10 Online Photo Editors: a list of sites you can use to edit photos. Personally I’ve used picnik and photoshop.com and like both of them.

Remote Access: Whose Tools? Theirs.Article about how the students in two classes that were trying to digitally connect circumvented tech that was getting in the way and made their own connections. It illustrates the disconnect between The Way Things Are Done?in education and the world the students actually live in. It’s worth thinking about.

Fauxto.com is an online image editor: think stripped-down version of Photoshop, but online and free. Do basic image editting, use layers and save your work online or to your computer. Caveat no. 1: you must have the latest version of the Flash plugin (free from Adobe) installed. Caveat no. 2: when using the move tool on a layer make sure you click the “apply move” button after you move something (and before going to another tool); failure to do so caused the program to lock up (at least in Safari; I didn’t try any other web browser).

I love Wordpress for its flexibility, user-friendliness, and the vast amount of plugins available for it. Case in point: I wanted to integrate outside RSS feeds into posts and pages on my WP sites and found this plugin:
Inline RSS Wordpress pluginIt works great! I’m now playing around with using it to display the posts from specific categories on certain pages.

I was looking for an easy way to integrate photos with WP and found Gallery2 an open source solution for hosting online photo galleries. Combine this with the iPhotoToGallery plugin and the Wordpress Gallery2 plugin and I’ve got an easy photo-posting solution: the iPhoto plugin makes it super-simple to put a group of photos online into Gallery2 and the Wordpress Gallery2 plugin adds the photos to my Wordpress blog, automatically or manually.

Google has a site for educators called, appropriately enough, Google For Educators. It includes links to the various Google programs and describes ways to use them in education. I noted that you can now get Google’s email, calendar, IM, and web page creation applications for your own domain for free. Sounds like a pretty good deal.

According to this article Google has also recently acquired a company that specializes in hosting wikis. If Google follows form and offers a free version of the product it could become a more interesting web (not that wikis are anything new, but this may broaden the group of potential users).

WordPress Multiuser has reached the 1.0 release. We’ve been looking at different CMS solutions; since this is already in use powering Wordpress.com, it might be worth a look.

On the blog at Techlearning.com David Warlick describes some interesting scenarios for how Web 2.0 tools can be harnessed in education. “Web 2.0″ is one of the big buzz-terms in ed. tech. circles right now; the term describes ways the web can be used to communicate more interactively. I think Web 2.0 tools could have a tremendous impact on education (just as they are starting to on the rest of our society) but getting educators to adopt a vision of what could be is much harder then getting them to adopt a pragmatic, concrete solution. Warlick’s scenarios, therefore, may be helpful in professional development. It’s worth a read. Check out his articleat this link. The end of the article includes links to a lot of the services he describes.