Taking control of your Calendars: Part 2
Ok, hopefully you're read Part 1 of this article and you now have your calendars all set up in Google Calendar instead of iCal.. Now let's get that all synced up to your phone.
One of the biggest benefits of Apple's MobileMe service it the way it keeps your iCal calendars in sync with your iPhone. Unfortunately MobileMe costs $129/year here in Australia (even though it's only $99 in the US and our dollar is almost 1:1 at the moment... don't get me started on that!) The good news is that you can get exactly the same sort of synchronization at no cost by using Google Calendar instead of Apple's iCal, plus you get all the extra benefits of sharing calendars that only Google's cloud can offer.
If you're a Google user then you've probably set up Gmail on your iPhone. The trouble is, when you set that up you probably did the obvious thing and went to Settings, selected Mail, Contacts, Calendars and then chose the Gmail option. That seems kind of obvious, but there's a much better way to do it. When you choose the iPhone's Gmail option you get the option to set up Mail, Calendars and Notes. Notes? What about your Contacts? Wouldn't you rather have those?
Instead of choosing the Gmail option, you should choose the Exchange option. You'll still use it to set up your Gmail, but by using the Exchange protocols it actually does two important things. One, it allows you to set up Mail, Calendars and Contacts - much more useful than notes. And secondly, it opens up the option to use Google's Sync Services.
On your iPhone, get started by going to Setting and selecting Mail, Contacts,Calendars. Tap the Add Account... option. Tap on Microsoft Exchange (I know, I know... you're using Microsoft Exchange to set up Google's Gmail on an Apple iPhone... how weird is that?)
In the Email field, enter you full Gmail address. You can skip the Domain field. In Username, enter your full Gmail address again. Enter your Gmail password in the password field. For Description, give it a meaningful name, like, oh, I don't know... Gmail? Finally, I'd suggest you make sure that SSL is set to On. Tap the Next button.
The phone will take a few seconds to verify your account, and then the screen will expand to reveal a field for Server. In here, enter m.google.com, and then press done.
You'll probably want to turn on all three options for Mail, Contacts and Calendars. Mail Days to sync can be set to whatever you like... I have mine set to 1 Week. The Mail Folders to Push should probably be set to Inbox. That's it.
If you now check your iPhone's Calendar you'll see that you now have a Gmail calender in the list. Awesome. If you've previously had Gmail set up on your phone the regular way you can (should) delete it, or you'll have two copies of everything.
But wait a minute... your Google Calendar has all those lovely layered calendars, and the iPhone is only showing one of them. What's going on? Where are the others?
By default, the only calendar that you see is the Primary one. If you've set up your work Exchange account, your primary calendar will be set to sync with your Exchange account since that's a limitation of Google Calendar Sync with Exchange. To see the others you'll need to do a couple of extra steps.
On your iPhone's mobile browser, go to http://m.google.com/sync and select your device (you can set up multiple devices, such as your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad) On this page you'll see all the secondary calendars you've set up on your GCal. Just tick the one's you'd like to appear on your iPhone (up to 25 of them) and then tap the Save button at the bottom of the page. Done.
Now if you go back to your iPhone's Calendar app, you'll see all the secondary calendars in the list! Make sure there's a tick next to all the ones you'd like to appear in your calendar list and you're good to go. You now have perfect realtime syncing of calendars between your Google Calendars and your iPhone. Just like MobileMe gives you, but without the cost. You also get your Gmail Contact list showing up on your phone's address book too.
Speaking of contacts, once I decided that this Gmail mail/calendar solution was a clear winner, I also exported all of my contacts out of Apple's Address Book on my Mac, then imported them into Gmail's Contact list. It was silly maintaining two lists of contacts, and although there was a fair bit of overlap of the same people in my cloud-based Gmail Contacts list and my Mac-based Address Book, they were still two different sets of data, which used to drive me crazy. A single list of contacts makes much more sense, so by importing everything into the Gmail contacts and enabling that as my iPhone's primary address book, it combines everything into one place. Of course, there were duplicate entries, but that was easily fixed in Gmail but going to the Contact list and from the More Actions menu selecting Find and Merge Duplicates. Too easy. I now have one single list of contacts, stored in the cloud, always up to date, and accessible from anywhere.
So far, I've got my school Outlook calendar feeding into my Google Calendar, aggregating it all into a single cloud-based calendar, and syncing it all back to my iPhone and iPad (as well as every computer I use). Perfect!
But what about iCal? I do still find iCal handy as there are occasionally times when I'm not actually connected to the web. Google Calendar doesn't have an offline mode (yet!) so it would still be useful to have access to my calendar via iCal. If only iCal could pull its calendar data directly off the Google cloud...
It can. Here's how.
Back on your Mac, open up iCal's Preferences. Go to the Accounts tab and click the + button to make a new account. Under Account Type choose Google, then enter your gmail address and password. Give it a moment to validate that, then go to the Delegation tab. As long as you've set your secondary calendars up at http://m.google.com/sync, you should see all your secondary calendars in the list. Tick the ones you want to appear in iCal and close the Prefs panel.
The secondary calendars will appear momentarily in iCal under a Delegates fold-down triangle. Each delegated calendar will be hidden one level down under an alias to itself, but just click the small triangle to reveal it and make sure it's ticked. You now have a fully synced iCal calendar, including secondary (delegated) calendars, that all emanate from your single, source-of-truth Google Calendar. The best of all possible worlds! The only thing you might want to do now (for both iCal and GCal) is spend some time picking better colours for your calendar layers. (It's a bit annoying that the colour schemes don't carry across, but hey...)
One last thing. I actually have my school email set up directly on my iPhone by creating an Exchange account and hooking it directly to our Exchange server at work. This means I actually duplicate my work calendar, getting two copies of it in my iPhone calendar list - once via the direct connection to the Exchange Server, and once by the indirect connection through Google Calendar Sync and via the Gmail setup. However, I deliberately do this because having the direct connection to Exchange gives me near realtime syncing to the school mail/calendaring system, whereas the via-Gmail connection often has a lag time of up to 15 minutes or more. But its an easy fix to go into the iPhone's calendar list and untick the GCal copy of the calendar leaving only the direct connection, and now I really do have a calendar system that works perfectly and all without spending a cent on MobileMe.
Hope this helps some of you... If you use any of this, let me know how it works out for you!
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Taking control of your Calendars: Part 1
At the recent Google Teacher Academy in Sydney we were given a presentation by Danny Silva about making Google Calendar "sexy". Although Danny was probably being a bit tongue-in-cheek about it all, I have to admit it made me completely rethink my use of digital calendars. This rethink was also helped along by a late night geek-session with my buddy Roland Gesthuizen, another new GCT, who was showing me some of the cool things he does with integrating Gmail and Google Calendar.
I'd been using Apple's iCal software that came with my Mac, which I generally quite liked. What I didn't like was the $129 it cost me each year for MobileMe in order to sync my calendar across all my computing devices. The massive benefit of a digital calendar is it's ability to set up a 2-way sync between computer to phone. Adding an appointment on my iPhone and having it magically appear on all my computers was definitely a killer feature. Of course, I also keep a work-related calendar on my school computer using Outlook, and those appointments also form an important part of how I spend my time. I've blogged about this before, but my solution for keeping things in sync was overly complicated and involved a paid-for third party tool called Spanning Sync in order to make it happen. And that was all pre-iPhone. Things got much more complicated then.
I had been using iCal on my three personal Macs, Outlook on my school PC, as well as an iPad and an iPhone; what I wanted to achieve was a total calendaring solution that brings both my personal and work calendars together and keeps everything in sync. I was also interested in having all these events surface in Google Calendar too, since as a Gmail user, that was a convenient place to see my calendar as well.
I'd been treating iCal as my "source of truth" calendar and then making it sync outwards to Google Calendar. As it turns out, I now realise I was thinking about it all wrong. The trick is to make the Google Calendar the "source of truth" calendar and then have it sync out to everywhere else.
For what it's worth, here's how I set everything up (and a couple of tips for how I use it) Remember, all my calendar information was in iCal, so the key for me was in getting all over to Google Calendar instead, and then include my work Outlook calendar in the mix.
First thing I did was to back up all my iCal calendars using the standard .ics format. To do this, open iCal and select one of your calendar layers and click File > Export > Export... This will export that calendar as a .ics file. (Here's more info if you need it) Do this for every calendar in iCal until you have an .ics file for each layer of your calendar. Once you've done this, delete everything out of your iCal till it's all empty.
Over in Google Calendar (or GCal for short), do the same thing. Delete everything out till there's nothing there. (obviously, back everything up first, just in case... here's how to do that in GCal)
Like iCal, Google Calendar also uses a multi-layer approach, enabling you to have a separately viewable calendar for each aspect of your life. These layers all display on the same calendar grid, giving you a wholistic view of all your calendars. In GCal, the very first of these layers in called the Primary Calendar, and all the others are called Secondary Calendars. For example, I have a calendar layer for my own personal events called Chris, one for each of my children called Kate and Alex, (where I add events relevant to each of them), one for conferences called Conferences, one which tracks holidays called Holidays, one for a club I belong to, one for payments to mark things like mortgage payments and paydays, etc. Each aspect of my life has it's own calendar layer.
I want my school calendar, which is created in Outlook, to also be one of these layers. There is a free tool called Google Calendar Sync which will very simply send all your Outlook appointments over to GCal every 15 minutes or so and place it on it's own layer. However, what I didn't realise was that the synced Outlook Calendar has to be the Primary Calendar in GCal. That's just how Google Calendar Sync works... it's can't sync to a secondary calendar layer. If you plan to sync your Outlook, that's good to know in advance.
If you plan to sync Outlook to your calendar setup, label your first calendar (the Primary calendar) as Work, or similar. Then create as many secondary calendars as you like by clicking the Add option below the calendar list, then give it a name and select the properties you'd like it to have.
Once you have set up your layers, use the .ics file you exported out of iCal earlier to import into the appropriate calendars in GCal. To do this, click the Add button below the Other Calendars list, and in the dialog box that appears browse for each .ics file and match it with the appropriate GCal layer. More detailed instructions on how to do this can be found here.
Next is to sync up your Outlook with that first primary calendar. On your computer that runs Outlook, install the free Google Calendar Sync tool. It's very straightforward, and all you really need to do is put in your Google account details and select how often you'd like it to update. I update every 15 minutes. It could take a few minutes to do the first sync, but after that it's very quick.
So far so good. You should now have all your various calendar layers, including Outlook, visible in GCal. You can toggle each one between being visible or not just by clicking it's name. Of course, because it's GCal you can go into each calendar and share it with other Google users, and do all those other cool things that living in the cloud enables.
Now, let's get all this synced up with your phone... stay tuned for Part 2.
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Speaking Clearly
This is an experiment. I'm using DragonDictate, a program for the iPad that lets you talk directly into the computer as it turns your words into text. A teacher at school today asked me about using dictation and word recognition software for her students that had trouble with learning.
I think it's a great idea, although the problem will probably be that in order to have speech recognition recognise your voice you do need to speak really clearly in the first place. For many kids, especially the ones that struggle with learning, speaking clearly can be almost as difficult as writing. Still, I think we will try the experiment because, well, the software is free and it would be interesting to see just how well it can handle the students voices.
I'm dictating this blog post into dragon and I'm going to publish it pretty much as it was recorded mistakes and all if you see mistakes in this you'll know why. And if you don't see mistakes in this then you can assume that DragonDictate has done a pretty good job of changing my speech to text.
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Finding the Right Model for ICT PD
I guess many readers of this blog would know that I work as an ICT Integrator at a large independent girls' school in Sydney. Large chunks of my day are spent working with our teachers and our students to help them understand a little more about technology and how it might be used to make teaching and learning more engaging and effective. Of course, teachers always seem to be very busy, and one of the difficulties in trying to deliver some form of ongoing PD is simply getting them to find the time to do so. I've tried a number of different models for delivering PD; some work quite well, others not so much. It usually comes down to finding time, and making it meaningful.
In case it's of any use to you, I thought I'd share an email that I sent to all the teachers in our junior school (R-6) yesterday. It's an outline of how I plan to be delivering ICT professional development to them next term. I've found that this model seems to work best for our staff, and it seems to give the most effective results. I think this is because it's delivered in a real situation that is authentic to them and also places a good deal of responsibility onto the staff to embrace the use of ICTs for themselves. (one of my beliefs is that you should never do for somebody what they can, and should, be able to do for themselves) Perhaps most importantly, our teachers seem to like this PD model and they seem quite enthusiastic about what we're doing together... so this is what I said to them...
Dear teachers,
Although the focus of what I do here at PLC is technology integration, it has always worked so much better when you allow me to help you link this technology integration directly into the things you plan to teach as part of your day to day activities... in this way, the use of technology can richly support and extend the learning for the students. Over the past couple of years I feel that we have all worked together to make technology less of an “add-on” to the curriculum, and it has become more of an embedded tool for helping engage and enrich our students. Together, some of the techniques and strategies we have tried in the Junior School over the past few years includes podcasting, blogging, live webcasting, digital mapping, digital storytelling, web 2.0 tools, video news reports, social networking, manipulating digital images, and so on. In the process, your students have come into contact with a wide range of technology tools that are an increasingly important part of the world in which they live.
In working with the Junior School staff, I have tried a number of different models for providing professional development in these tools, from offering before and after school workshops, holding lunchtime sharing sessions, shared planning time, and so on. With the incredibly hectic schedules that most of you have, some of these PD models have been more successful than others.
Starting in Semester 2, all staff will be required to undertake specific ICT professional development each semester. In the Junior School, we all agree that the best way to deliver this PD to you is in your actual classroom situation.
The most successful PD model for our teachers seems to be when we create time for collaborative planning time with the ICT Integrator. Under this PD model, I meet with each year group three times per term in order to plan and facilitate the integration of ICT into a classroom project. We meet early in the term to plan a unit of work together, meet again midterm to monitor the progress of that work, and again at the end to evaluate and assess the work. Of course, if you need extra assistance with delivering an ICT project then I am more than happy to come into your classes and assist, or to help out with computer class time, but I feel that the core of my ICT integration support is best done by assisting you to develop the skills and knowledge you need to deliver your own classwork with a rich ICT component. The recent Year 2 “Great Inventions” project is a good example of how I see this working.
Starting in Term 3, we will resume this PD planning model that we’ve used before as it seems to prove the most successful with Junior School teachers. After looking at the Junior School timetable, I’ve listed some suggested dates below that we could use for meetings in weeks 2B, 5A and 8B of next term. These all take advantage of times when specialist teachers have your students. Please take a look and let me know ASAP if there are problems with any of these dates and offer some alternate dates that are more suitable for you in these weeks.
(I've removed the actual dates listed here, as they aren't relevant to anyone reading this post...)
Ideally, in our first meeting (Week 2B) we will look at a task or theme or topic you plan to teach that ICT might lend itself to, and then we can come up with a plan for how we might integrate ICT into that unit. We will look at modifying or creating activities for the students that leverage ICT skills, and if necessary learn those skills ourselves. I would encourage you to think about how we can make the tasks we design highly student centric, providing your students with higher order thinking skills and open ended opportunities for creative thinking.
Our second meeting (Week 5A) will be to follow through on how the project is going, what can be improved, what can be tweaked, and also to ensure that any ICT skills are being delivered to both you and the students.
Our final meeting (Week 8B) will be used to evaluate and wrap up the project. We can evaluate it, look at what worked well, and work out how we might modify it to use (or not use) next year.
Hope these dates suit you. Looking forward to working closely with you all next term.
We've used this PD delivery model in the past and it seems to work quite well. I start by checking out the teachers' timetables and working out when they are free (mostly when their students are with specialist teachers for Music/PE/Languages/etc) and then I propose a list of times to meet, asking them to check and confirm that these times work for them.
Anyway, just thought I'd share that in case you can make use of it. My next few posts will be sharing some examples of how we have made this work in various classes.
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Good Learning for a Good Cause
If you live in Sydney, want to know more about the cool things you can do with Adobe's CS4 Creative Suite products, and would like to support a really worthwhile cause at the same time, you might like to check out this Adobe Creative Suite Master Class.
The event is running on September 30 from 9:00am to 4:00pm at the Zenith Theatre in Chatswood. It's being run by the folk at Adobe's Sydney offices, and all the time, energy, marketing and facilities to run this event have been donated, so quite literally ALL the proceeds will go to the Cancer Council Australia. Cancer is a terrible disease, and you don't have to look very far to find someone you know - maybe even yourself - whose lives have been touched by it.
If you'd like to attend, you can book using this form. If you want a copy of the invitation as a PDF (so you can help spread the word) let me know and I'll email you one.
Hope some of you are able to attend. Take a look at the list of topics covered during the day and you'll have to agree that it will be a pretty awesome day of learning and creating. For $100 you get some excellent software training, while supporting a very worthwhile cause.
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The Adobe Summer Institute Wrapup
I'm finally back home from a fantastic week in San Jose at the Adobe Summer Institute. The Summer Institute is a 5 day conference/workshop event run by Adobe's Education division for members of their global Adobe Education Leaders program. I was inducted into the AEL program last year but was unable to attend the 2008 event in San Francisco. This year I was determined to attend the San Jose event and I'm really glad I went.
When you do in fact know a fair bit about technology and how to use it, it becomes harder to find professional development experiences that challenge and extend you. One of the reasons I was so keen to attend the Summer Institute was that I felt it would push me to learn more and build on some of the knowledge I already have. Having been a Photoshop user for many years, and spending many hours inside programs like InDesign (and PageMaker before that) and having taught Flash and Dreamweaver to students, I've always been quite immersed in Adobe's Creative Suite, but the nature of these tools always seems to be such that the more you know about them, the more you realise you don't know.
The other AELs came mainly from all over the US, with quite a few from the UK and a handful from other places like New Zealand, Hong Kong and Belgium. I was the only Aussie. We started the week on Monday evening with a Welcome Party at our hotel where we got to meet the other AELS and some of the folk from Adobe. It was good to meet new people and make new connections.
Tuesday started early for me with a Photoshop exam. This was taken as part of the Adobe Certified Associate, a recognised certification for Photoshop users. Happily, I passed the exam without too much trouble. The rest of Tuesday was filled with meeting with the Adobe product teams, where we got to hear about future product roadmaps, learn about upcoming features and directions for the Creative Suite, and to offer suggestions for how we thought the products could be improved. Parts of the day were done under NDA so I can't really go into details, but suffice to say there will be plenty of exciting new stuff coming from Adobe in the next year or two. Dinner that night was held at Saratoga Springs, a lovely camping ground in the hills surrounding Silicon Valley, and we had fun and games with some hilarious variations on team volleyball played with water-filled balloons.
Wednesday was filled with AEL to AEL sessions - workshops where we presented to each other many of the things we were doing in our own schools and districts. Watching these sessions, it really struck me what an intensely creative and passionate group of educators this was. Although not everything was directly relevant to my own teaching situation, I still got tons of great ideas from the sharing that took place. Collaborative projects, experimental ideas based on art, design and creativity, ideas for streamlining school administration, examples of how teachers do things in other parts of the world... we got all sorts of cool ideas from these AEL sessions. After a full day of learning from each other, we regrouped in the Adobe Cafeteria for a delicious dinner and drinks, where more sharing and conversation took place in a relaxed casual atmosphere. I was quite amazed as we watched the planes fly over the Adobe building, which was directly in the landing path of San Jose airport, seeming to clear the top of the building with only a few hundred feet to spare. A few of us kicked on to a bar in downtown San Jose where the conversations continued into the night, only louder.
Thursday was another full day of learning, with a intense session run by Adobe's John Schuman. We learned many of the very cool features in the software tools, and in particular how to make them work together smoothly. Our project required us to integrate our work across Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, InDesign and Bridge as we roundtripped files between the various tools. In each of the applications we discovered lots of useful workflows and there were quite a few new concepts that I hadn't come across before. The last part of the day took us into a project using Flash Catalyst, a relatively new product still in beta, that makes it much easier for designers to create interactive content. I'm still getting my head around Catalyst, but it looks like a great tool for rapidly designing interactive media without the need to know heavy-duty coding stuff.
Thursday night was good fun, with a night out to a local San Jose pool hall. By this stage we had gotten to know each other a little better, so it was cool to hang out, shoot some pool and have still more conversations about learning and life. The night finished while it was still young, as the pool tables were reclaimed at the stroke of 9:00pm. A few of us wandered across the road to another party that looked like it would be fun. I turned out to be an Open Source party, sponsored by Source Forge. With free drinks (free as in "beer" - I thought that was hilarious at an Open Source event), tatoos getting done in the basement (no, I didn't get one), as well as Twitter stations, free T-shirt giveaways from the good folk at ThinkGeek, guys playing with Star Wars light sabres, people wearing infra-red night vision goggles, etc, it was a truly geeky event... I loved it!
Friday morning was the last day of the conference and I'd arranged to do another certification exam, this time in Dreamweaver. Although I've used Dreamweaver a lot in the past, I hadn't used it much lately so wasn't feeling too confident in my ability to pass this exam. However, I did pass, and since I had a bit of time to spare at the end I decided to have a crack at the remaining exam for Flash. This one I really wasn't too confident about, since I haven't used Flash much in the last 12 months and there are some big changes to the CS4 version. Even so, I surprised myself by passing the Flash exam too, so I was feeling pretty pleased that I managed to get my certification in Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash all in the same week.
The rest of Friday morning was a general wrap up of the event, with feedback and a debriefing session between the AELs and the Adobe folk. It was kind of sad to have it all come to an end, but we eventually said our goodbyes and all went our separate ways. The sessions were all recorded with Adobe Connect, as well as a ton of Twitter, Flickr and Delicious resources all tagged with ael09, so at least there is a decent electronic record of the sessions.
I didn't have to be at the airport until quite late so myself and Saiqa, another AEL from London, decided to rent a car and do some Silicon Valley sightseeing. We dropped in on the headquarters of Apple and Google, then headed in to San Francisco for some last minute sightseeing around Fisherman's Wharf before getting back to SFO airport for our late flights.
Overall, a great week and one I'd be keen to do again. Thanks Adobe for running and hosting the event, especially to Megan Stewart and her team who did a great job of making sure the program went off perfectly. Great conference, can't wait to get back next year!
Technorati Tags: ael09, adobe, sanjose
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How Tagging Solves the Problem of the Physical World
This article was written for Education Technology Solutions magazine, but I've also republished it here, because I can.
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One of the unavoidable buzzwords of Web 2.0 is the term “tag”. Everywhere you look online you come across the term, and everything from photos to news articles to blogposts are getting “tagged”.
But what exactly are “tags” and why are they such a big deal these days? To understand the importance of tagging, first let’s consider the problem that tagging sets out to solve.
There was a time when everything in our lives existed only in the physical world. Books sat on shelves. Photos were in photo albums. Music was stored on CDs. Life was simple. If you wanted to find that photo of your sister-in-law Wendy wearing a silly hat at last year’s family Christmas party you simply went to the family photo album and flicked through the pages till you found it. The photo was a real physical object that existed in one real physical location.
Storing a photo in a family photo album seems pretty obvious, but the problem is that this method of storing, finding and accessing an object does not scale well. If we had to find that one photo from a room full of photo albums the problem becomes a little trickier. The ability to quickly find something becomes exponentially more difficult as the size of the collection of objects increases, and also as the object becomes more miscellaneous.
For example, have you ever wandered the aisles of a supermarket trying to find a particular item, only to discover that it was located in a completely different section to the one you expected it to be in? The more obvious items are easy - milk is in the diary section, steak is in the meat section and frozen beans are in the frozen vegetable section of the freezer. Easy. But as the item gets more unusual or miscellaneous, it gets harder to know just where the supermarket has cataloged it on their shelves. We expect to find tinned fruit salad in the canned goods section of the supermarket, but if you like to put fruit salad on your breakfast cereal it would also be handy to have it located in the cereal aisle, in fact it might even boost sales of the tinned fruit. Both of these locations actually make sense, although the people responsible for stacking the supermarket shelves ultimately have to make a decision and put it in only one location.
Why don’t they just put items in every location where it makes sense? Why not put items in multiple places, making it easier for people to find them no matter where they look?
Of course, the answer is due to the physical limitations of the world we live in. Supermarkets simply don’t have the physical space to put items in multiple locations. Even if they did, trying to shop in a store that had lots of products in lots of places would end up as a confusing mess. The idea makes sense, but it doesn’t really work very well in the physical world we live in. In the physical world these limitations force us to make decisions about the “best” location for every real object.
In an digital world, these limitations of physical objects don’t exist.
Take bookmarking for example. When you browse the Web you often find useful websites that you may want to revisit again, and all web browsing software offers the ability to “bookmark” or “favorite” these sites to make them easy to get back to. We typically find an interesting website, click the Bookmark menu and choose “Save as Bookmark”... when we want to go back to that webpage, we look through our list of bookmarks and select the one we want from that list
As our collection of bookmarks grows into a long random list most of us eventually work out that we need to organise them somehow, so we start putting our bookmarks into collection, or folders. Sites that are personal might go into a folder called “Personal” while sites that are useful for work are dropped into a folder called “Work”. Again, as your collection grows you’ll probably find that you need to be more specific, so you end up with a collection of folders designated with names like “IWB Resources”, “Maths Resources” or “Games”. You can keep adding folders, bookmarking new websites into existing folders or adding more folders if appropriate ones don’t yet exist. Things are nicely organised now, right?
Sort of.
What happens when you find a really good Maths game resource that works well on an IWB? Do you put it in the IWB Resources folder, the Maths resources folder or the Games folder? The truth is, it makes sense to put it in all of these. You could always bookmark it three times, once in each folder, but as your collection grows, you realise that this could get pretty unwieldy and complicated. You could just make a decision and put it in one folder only, but unless you remember which one it went into, you may never find it when you need it. You are now facing the same problem as the supermarket shelf stackers; you have an object - in this case a website - that makes sense in more than one place, but to put it in multiple locations is just going to be confusing and hard to maintain.
The solution is to use tags. Tags are like keywords that get attached to a resource and used as search terms when you want to retrieve it. A resource can have as many tags as you like, in fact the more tags the better. It’s a little bit like saving the resource in multiple locations, except instead of having to actually place it in all those locations, the tags simply create an association with those locations.
Tagging works because the tagged objects are digital, not physical. In the digital world, things don’t ever really “exist” anywhere, so having them “exist” in multiple locations becomes a non-issue. A search for all the websites tagged with the word “maths” will generate a list of every website with the tag “maths” attached to it. The search doesn’t care where each website is physically located. The only thing that matters is that every website has the keyword - or tag - “maths” attached to it.
The fact that the same site might be both an IWB resource and also a game is largely irrelevant. If a tag search was done for websites tagged with the word “game”, then the IWB-based maths game website would still be in the list. The beauty of tags is that they allow resources to be cataloged in any ways that make sense. A decision does not need to be made about the best way to catalog an item, because it can be cataloged in any and every way that makes sense.
In a digital world, photos that are tagged with keywords can be easily retrieved from a huge collection just by looking for one or more keywords. So, if that photo of your sister-in-law was tagged with words like “christmas”, “sillyhat” and “wendy”, then any of these search terms would find the photos. Someone searching for the word “christmas” would find it, along with every other photo in the collection tagged with the word “christmas”. Searching with the term “wendy” would find all the photos of Wendy, and a search using “sillyhat” would find any photo tagged with that term, regardless of who was wearing the silly hat. To find the specific photo you were after, a search using several of these tags would quickly narrow down the search to photos of Wendy, at Christmas, wearing a silly hat. Each tag acts like a filter to only show the photos that match the criteria.
Tagging works because computers are really good at quickly searching through massive amounts of data. Getting computers to find things is pretty easy, but tagging adds the necessary “hooks” that the search can latch onto. Without these tags attached to each resource, computers find it difficult to link each resource to the ideas that you wish to associate with them. The computer might be able to find things quickly, but tagging helps it know how those things relate to YOU. By adding tags to things, you build a collection of metadata around each object that makes it meaningful to you. It lets you associate those objects to ideas that make personal sense to you. And as you tag more and more resources, patterns start to emerge that make it even easier to see the semantic nature of that information, further helping you make sense of it.
Tagging is everywhere on the web however if you are new to the idea and want to see tagging in action, two great place to start are www.delicious.com for web bookmarks, and www.flickr.com for digital photography. Searching these sites using tags is a nice easy way to see the real value of tagging as a way to organise massive amounts of information in a digital world.
For more detailed information about tagging and how to use it effectively, take a look a my K12 Online presentation entitled “I Like Delicious Things” at http://vimeo.com/2415647.
I Like Delicious Things from Chris Betcher on Vimeo.
Image: 'Symmetry'
www.flickr.com/photos/38425817@N00/271683015
Popularity: 2% [?]
When Everything Looks Like a Nail
The regularity of my blogging has dropped off a bit lately, mainly because I'm in the middle of writing a book about the use of interactive whiteboard technology for teachers. Although I've got almost 20,000 words written so far, I am way behind deadline and really need to get the first draft finished so it can be submitted to the publishers in a few weeks. Until I get that done, every time I feel the urge to blog I have to remind myself that there is a (new) deadline looming and direct my writing efforts to the book instead of the blog. I feel bad that my blogging has been suffering lately, but I really need to get this done. So there you have the reason I've not been updating lately.
However, I simply had to take a few minutes to share this wonderful new tool I've found called Scrivener. It's an incredible tool for anyone taking on a large writing task and I really can't believe I've never tried it before. I had heard the name mentioned but assumed it was just another word processor. How wrong I was!
There is an assumption that the defining software tool for writers is Microsoft Word. While Word is a very powerful application and has many, many features that most people never even discover, Word can be a frustrating tool for anyone contemplating the writing of a very long piece of work such as a book. I use Word a lot and know it quite well... in fact I hold a Advanced level Microsoft Office Specialist certification in Word, so I feel quite at home in it. I can generally twist Word to my will and make it do pretty much whatever I need, but it's still a pain in the neck when working on something as large and fragmented as a book.
There's no doubt that Word is a great tool for certain types of writing. But as they say, when your only tool is a hammer, everything tends to look like a nail.
Enter Scrivener. Designed expressly for anyone working on long documents that require many edits, such as books and screenplays, Scrivener takes an entirely different approach to writing. Essentially, it treats easch writing task as a project, collecting resources for writing into a single place and then enables you to break long text into short, movable, definable chunks, letting you categorise and synopsise each chunk and assemble them into the final work. You can break text into chapters, scenes, paragraphs, sentences... whatever you like... and move them around to let your ideas flow far better than Word will ever allow. Unfortunately Scrivener is a Mac only application, but Windows users might like to check out PageFour which apparently does similar things.
Using Scrivener has been somewhat of an eye-opening paradigm shift for me. It has challenged my assumptions about the very nature of the software tools we give our students. It made me realise what a mistake it is to assume that Word - or any "industry standard" software tool - is necessarily the tool for the job as far as student use is concerned. We inflict tools like Word on our students because they are supposed to be "what everybody uses" and we insist that the best tools to teach them to use are the tools used "by industry". The fact is, schools are not offices, and the writing needs of a business person are not necessarily the writing needs of a student. The best tool for a student is not the one that they will use when they get older, but the one that helps them do what they need to do right now.
There is nothing "wrong" with Word, but having now spent some time with Scrivener it is now painfully obvious just how much more we could offer our students if we stopped assuming the tools of the business world were what they should master in order to create written texts. Real writing is a process of collecting ideas and thoughts together, manipulating them into a cohesive form, and editing and re-editing them until they make sense to other people. I now see how tools such as Scrivener approach the task of writing from a completely different angle and enable it to take place in a far more fluid way.
Now back to work! I have a book to finish...
PS: Here's a video that gives a great overview of what Scrivener is all about...
Tags: scrivener, word, microsoft, writing, book
Popularity: 2% [?]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (15.7MB)
Living in the Cloud
Until fairly recently, most of my computing was done locally using "real apps". By this, I mean they are cllient-side applications installed on the hard drive of my own computer. I guess I've always liked the speed and convenience of having my applications - tools like Office, email, calendar, feedreader, etc - right there on my hard drive where I could get to them running at full local speed. Once you've been spoilt by the responsiveness of locally-run apps, web apps that run from the Internet just aren't as snappy.
Of course, many will say that locally installed apps are old skool; that if you really think with a Web 2.0 mindset, then running your key software directly from the Internet makes more sense. The world is certainly trending that way, with a proliferation of Web 2.0 apps that now run directly from "the cloud" and computing devices designed to work this way, such as the Macbook Air. Computing in the cloud started with obvious applications like webmail, but have now extended to office productivity software, photo editing, even video production, all workable with nothing more than a web browser and a broadband connection.
Life is all about compromises and finding the right balance. Although I've been resisting cloud computing for a while, my circumstances changed recently and I decided to make a switch to see if I could manage moving my basic tools off the desktop and into the big blue nowhere.
The real trigger for making the move to the cloud was an increase in the number of computers I was working on every day. My main machine has been a Macbook Pro, which I essentially did everything on. I also owned a 20" iMac on my desktop, but that was used mainly for editing podcasts and storing my media with iPhoto and iTunes. I really didn't spend that much time on the iMac, although it's a beautiful machine to use. Since we moved house recently though, I've been using the iMac a lot more, even more than the MacBook Pro. Then when I started the new job I was given a Toshiba 12" Tablet PC as my work machine. It became awkward to manage all my stuff since it was now spread across three different computers, all using locally installed software applications. Suddenly, locally installed apps were making a whole lot less sense, with important emails and documents never on the machine I happened to be using, my work calendar and my personal calendar getting out of sync on different machines, and I figured it was time to start looking for a better way to consolidate my digital life.
So here's the problem... I had three machines grabbing email from 5 different accounts, two calendars that needed to be kept separate but I also needed to cross reference them against each other, a writing project which required collaboration with another writer in a remote location, and a group of RSS feeds that were being picked up on three different machines. My digital life was a mess...
It was finally time to submit to the cloud computing model and take all of these disparate bits and move them to cyberspace, where I could access them from any computer. There are many tools to enable this, but I decided to go with Google's tools since they seem to work really well together and one login would give me access to everything... Gmail for my email, Google Reader for my RSS aggregator, Google Calendar for my appointments, and GoogleDocs for my documents. I won't labour the point about these tools since I assume most people are already pretty familiar with them, and using web apps is hardly a revolution, but I did want to mention a few tweaks and tips that really made the move to the cloud so much more workable for me.
First, Gmail. For a long time, I've been a heavy user of Entourage, and more recently Apple's Mail, and really liked them. Although I've had a Gmail account for ages, I mainly used it just as my secondary mail account. My real mail comes in on chris[@]betcher.org and I didn't really want to switch that. Thankfully, Gmail has the ability to hook into my ISP's account and pull my regular mail into the Gmail service. This means that I can now stick to my long term email address via my regular ISP but get to it with the convenience of Gmail's web-based anywhere-access. I added another POP account I had and I can now send and receive mail from any of these addresses via Gmail, from any machine, with the added advantage of a powerful spam filtering service freely supplied by Google.
Second, my feed reader. I tossed up whether to use Google Reader, Pageflakes, NetVibes or Bloglines. The new Bloglines beta looked good, but had a few annoying behaviours. After testing each system for a few days, I decided on Google Reader. Once it's set up, it works very smoothly with Flock - my browser of choice - to add RSS feeds. The way it displays feeds is really intuitive and each to understand, and it was able to import the OPML file from my desktop feedreader, Vienna. So far, I'm impressed with Reader and I can now check my feeds from any machine, and keep them all in sync.
Google Docs are wonderful. Although I've got a Microsoft Office Specialist certificate and am a pretty capable "power user" of MS Word, like most people I mostly use it to type up fairly simple documents. Google Docs may lack many of the features of Microsoft Office, but they are mostly features I don't use anyway, and the ability to collaborate on documents with other people more than makes up for the missing features. Working across several machines, the ability to have all my documents accessible from one place - the Internet - is an incredibly useful concept. But I was really won over with Google Docs when I saw the Firefox plug-in called GDocs Bar. This plug-in gives one-click access to Google Docs for both accessing your online files as well as uploading new ones. GDocs Bar makes Google Docs so much more functional.
Finally, the other big problem was that my personal calendar was being managed by iCal on my MacBook Pro, and my work calendar was being managed by Outlook on the school's Exchange server. This made it hard to look at both my work and personal events together, as both were kept in separate places although they had overlapping events. The killer link in making the move to the cloud came with the ability to sync both the iCal and Outlook calendars into a single Google calendar. To achieve this, I used a $25 app called Spanning Sync to synchronise iCal to my Google calendar. It works fantastically with perfect two way syncing. I then used the free Google Calendar Sync tool to do a two way sync of my work Outlook calendar into my Google calendar. The end result is that my online Google calendar now pulls data from my two separate calendars and displays it in real time, in one place, easily accessible from any browser. This is way cool...
The bottom line is that I now feel I have a really workable cloud computing experience, with all my key information stored in one place - the web - that I can get to from any of my machines. I know there is still plenty of life left in the locally installed software model, especially for the more computationally intensive multimedia applications, but so far I'm pretty impressed at just how easy and effective it has been to move my most commonly used productivity apps to the cloud.
I just hope we can trust Google.
Tags: cloud, google, network, internet, webapp, web2.0
Popularity: 3% [?]
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:51 — 4.7MB)
Making your photos worth 1000 words
This is a joint post between Sue Waters and myself about integrating Flickr with Picasa, and has been cross posted on each of our blogs.
Let's start with a little background on this post's origin
After spending some time yesterday migrating Linda's entire photo collection (well, most of it... did I mention that regular backup is very important?) into Google's Picasa photo management application and then giving her a bit of a tutorial in how to use it tonight, she asked the next obvious question... how do I put some of these photos onto Flickr? A good question. After all, Flickr is without a doubt the best online photo sharing website around. With amazing tools and options, an incredible online community for sharing and learning from each other, and a huge array of APIs that enable Flickr to work with a range of different online and offline services, the decision to use Flickr as your online photo storage tool of choice is a bit of a no-brainer.
However, on the desktop it's a different story. Flickr is purely a Web2.0 service, and there is no local desktop component offered with it. This means that while Flickr is wonderful at managing your photos online, when it comes to dealing with the photos stored on your hard drive the only real options you have is whatever tools are already on your computer. If you have a Mac, iPhoto does a great job of photo management. It's free and comes with every Mac. If you are more serious you can always look at Adobe's Lightroom or Apple's Aperture, but these are quite expensive applications. On the Windows side, there are probably dozens of "photo management" applications but most of them are pretty awful, and some are also expensive. Most people just settle for managing their photos directly in Windows Explorer which is an average solution at best.
Using Picasa for your offline photo management
Enter Picasa from Google. Picasa is a wonderful free piece of photo management software and lets you sort, arrange, adjust, crop, rename and generally manage your photos on your computer. It really is an incredibly sophisticated yet simple tool for photographers and the price tag can't be beaten.... you can't do much better than free. It is available for Windows only, which makes perfect sense since it essentially does most of what iPhoto already does on the Mac. As well as the desktop app, there is also a "Flickr-like" online photo service from Google called Picasaweb. I say "Flickr-like", because although it lets you store your photos online it lacks the same community and API sharing that makes Flickr so compelling. If you're serious about photos online Picasaweb could be a little disappointing. However, being from the Google stable of products, there is some common functionality for exporting photos directly from Picasa on your computer to Picasaweb on the net, which is a nice touch.
The trouble is that while Picasa may be an obvious best choice for local photo management, Flickr is the obvious best choice for online photo management. It would be nice to have the option to manage your photos locally with Picasa and then send your best shots up to Flickr to share with the world. Nice, except that Picasa is owned by Google and Flickr is owned by Yahoo!, and when companies are in direct head to head battle like Yahoo! and Google are, the last thing you want to do is anything that promotes your competition. This is unfortunate, since the losers in that battle are you and I, the consumers. We just want to manage our photos using the two tools we like, but it's not as quite as straightforward as that.
Connecting via Twitter
Talk about synchronicity. As I was pondering this question tonight, the exact same question floated through my Twitter feed. Mrs_Banjer , sujokat and Sue (dswaters) were discussing the very same issue - how to manage your photos on and offline, what service to use, how to integrate them, and essentially they were tweeting on the very same things I was thinking about. One thing led to another, so via Twitter we discussed, chatted, talked and shared links. We pontificated on the pros and cons of Flickr versus Picasa. This is just one example of the power of an always-on personal learning network. Eventually though, I felt I needed to clarify a point in the discussion so rather than overTweet to the world, I Skyped Sue Waters in Perth and chatted about it directly. While we were talking a tweet came through from sujokat asking "someone do a blog on this please this is fabulous but all too quick for me to take it all in". Sue and I decided that we'd do that... write a post about the pros and cons of Picasa and Flickr, but we'd do it as a joint post. So this is being written in Google Docs and is a collaborative effort between Sue and I... over to you Sue.
Now for My Thoughts On Picasa vs Flickr
One of the best aspects of Twitter connectivity is the challenging of your thoughts, beliefs and making you really think; often about issues you had not considered. This was definitely the case with Picasa vs Flickr. I have rarely used Picasa as Window Explorer and Picture Manager have been adequate for my needs but really into Flickr. In all fairness to Picasa more likely that I have not spent enough time exploring the virtues of Picasa -- it did take me 12 months to realise the benefits of Flickr. So my homework for the next few days is to throughly road test Picasa and report back to ensure I have done my usual through research.
It is definitely benefical to import photos from your camera directly into Picasa because it means you don't import multiple copies of the same photo.
Uploading to Flickr
For Mac users, there are several options for getting photos to Flickr. As iPhoto is a standard application found on every Mac it is a much simpler proposition for developers to create APIs that hook directly between iPhoto and Flickr, so there tends to be a number of uploading tools available, the best known of which is Flickr Uploadr. As well as the Flickr Uploader, there are free tools like FFXporter that plug directly into iPhotos Export option to offer direct Flickr integration. Another option is to use Flock as your web broswer... Flock has Flickr uploading tools built right in.
For Windows users who like Picasa as their photo management tool, uploading images to Flickr from Picasa is also a relatively simple process, even if not quite as obvious or integrated as that enjoyed by Mac users. Just download and install Flickr Uploadr on your desktop, open the Flickr Uploader and Picasa windows alongside each other, then drag and drop the images from Picasa library onto the Flickr Uploader. Simple!
Final Thoughts
Also worth checking out David Jake's thorough information on Flickr (thanks sukojat for the link) and Philip Nichols's guide to Picasa.
Besides learning a lot more about Picasa it has been amazing collaborating with Sue to write a post together; using Google Documents, Twitter and Skype.
Sue and I would love to learn more about how you manage your photos.
What are your thoughts? Do you use an offline photo management software? What features do you like about the software you use? Do you share your photos online at Flickr or do you use another photosharing website? And if so, which one and why?
Please take this opportunity to drop past Sue's post and leave some tips for her as well.
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