Education. Technology. Ideas. Travel.
My daughter Kate spotted this rather insightful cartoon in the Sunday paper last week and was quick to show it to me. She said she thought it was something that might be useful to me in my work with other teachers, so apparently it’s not just the cartoon that is insightful… I think the cartoon is funny, but would be funnier if only it were not so true…
How many people do you know who refuse to adapt to newer technology because the “old way” still seems to be so much more efficient?
I think I just experienced one of those “Oh my God” moments when you see a new technology that takes a task you potentially do often and simplifies in a way that you never thought possible. The reason I say that you “potentially” do it often is that these tasks are usually either difficult or time consuming or just plain inconvenient because they involve too many steps, so you tend to avoid them where possible. An example would be sharing what you see on your screen with someone else across a network. Still images aren’t too hard, but capturing an animated movie of what you are doing on your screen is tricky and usually requires special software, and then the task of sharing that movie over the Internet usually requires a few more steps, plus the issues of incompatable file formats, Mac/Windows issues, yaddah, yaddah… Too hard!
So when I just downloaded and installed Jing from the Jing Project, I was blown away by just how much they have simplified this process. I literally sat in front of the computer repeating “Oh my God!” several times. Perhaps I am just easily impressed, or perhaps this is just the sort of thing that I see very clear uses for, but I am amazed at what Jing does, and even moreso at how it does it. I can see tons of uses for this in a school… for example, teachers could create their own support pages for software the kids need to use so that they don’t have to answer the same questions over and over… students can be creating movies to document their software skills… you can make tutorials for teachers showing them how to do specific tasks… or an end-user could use it to show you exactly what is happening on their screen… and lots more. The finished out is a .swf Flash file.
The Jing Project website will explain more, so check it out or check out my little sample. Let me know if I’m just being easily impressed.
Have you ever needed to create an anagram for a word or phrase? An anagram is where you take all the letters in the word or phrase and rearrrange them to form a new word or phrase.
For example, the word “betchaboy” can be rearranged into Hey Bobcat, Tabby Echo, Batch Obey, Ace Thy Bob or Echo by Tab. I never said they had to make sense, but they might make good names the next time you need an alias for some website login where you don’t want to use your real name.
Short words are pretty easy to make anagrams from, but the longer they get, the harder it is to come up with something coherent. Unless you enlist the help of a bit ot technology to help you of course… try heading over to the Internet Anagram Server, type in your name, word or phrase and see what you get.
If you come up with anything really good, share it in the comments.
Tags: anagram