So I’ve had some discussion with a number of teachers using a variety of mothods to share files with others, both within and outside of the school district. Some are using email, some traditional file sharing, some using online service and others still posting to web server space. I really don’t do a lot of file sharing, but when I do I always have access to web server space for ftp or http download, but the average educator doesn’t have that luzury. So I’ve had my eyes open for a decent free service that would be one I’d recommend for this purpose and I’m finally settled on MediaFire.

MediaFire offers UNLIMITED storage, allows file sharing, is completely free and doesn’t even require a login. If you do create an account its easier (obviously) to manage your documents, but if you are in a situation where you need to quickly share a file with someone and would rather not attach it to an email (let’s say its a big file) simply visit MediaFire and upload the file - it’ll give you a link code and even an embed code to slap it on your webpage or wiki or blog. Now just create an account by providing an email and password and viola - your document is archived for future easy access. The only limitation to this excellent resouce is the 100MB upload limit. That means you can’t upload files larger than 100MB, but come on…not many of your documents (at least at this point) are going to be larger than 100MB unless its an entire album or a long video.

But wait…there’s more. MediaFire allows you not only to share individual files with other people by emailing a link or embedding within a webpage, but you can also create folders for your files and share the entire folder contents the same way. Very cool.

I just recieved my spiffy little Edublogger membership badge from Patricia Donaghy who manages things at the International Edubloggers Directory. I’m proud to be a member, albiet a small fish in a big sea.

Anyhow, in checking out Patricia’s blog, I noticed this interesting post about a facinating online tool called Visuwords. I tell you what, even if you aren’t a word geek this tool will still be interesting to you. Makes more sense if you check it out but the basic premise is this - provide a word, any word….then a beautiful graphic reporesentation of the relationship of that word to other words and phrases dynamically generates within the browser. You can dig into deeper associations by double clicking on subsequent words and word combinations.

At least you’ll learn what a hyponym, hypernym, meronym, and holonym are. Trust me, its much cooler than it sounds.

VISUWORDS

Here’s a free screen capture/recording software that seems to work pretty good. Plain and simple screencasts galore with uTIPu. Check it out.

Well its that time of year again. Time to get crammed into tiny little rooms with hundreds of fellow geeks and geekettes like sardines in the can. Time to feel the palpable love for technology. Time for the most massive Pennsylvania Educational Technology Expo and Conference ever. Wow there’s a lot of people here.

Today started with a great, relaxing and funny keynote from David Pogue who pontificated on the comglomeration of gadgets and gizmos

My first break-out session was also presented by David Pogue, called something like David’s Gadget Funhouse. A walk through a variety of the latest and greatest in geek toys.

Grandcentral.com - allows you to have calls coming into your one cellphone routed to mutiple devices.
Skype phone -
Popularity Dialer - funny site you can schedule a recorded call to your cell phone (think get out of a bad date)
WiFi Cameras -
Slingbox - set up your home pc to broadcast to net. $250. No fees.
Netflix “Watch Now” - with netflix subsrcription , unlimited online movie viewing
Speech recongmition software

About a week ago I found this article on Lifehacker that discusses some neat things you can to to increase your productivity with an extremely cool (and free) webapp called Jott. Jott has been around for at least a year and I’m surprised I haven’t found it sooner. Just goes to show you how hard it is to stay on top of all the great resources there are out there.

Jott allows you to call a toll free number on your cell phone and use voice activiated prompts to send voice messages to friends/family/coworkers/whoever. The magic comes when Jott automatically transcribed your voice message into text for either or both email and text messaging. No need to train with your voice and the accuracy is commendable.

This thing is really handy. Just set up your contacts on Jott’s site with email and/or cell phone number then set up the Jott number on your cell phone as a quickdial of some kind. When you call you are prompted you just say the recipient’s name and then speak your short message and hang up. That’s it. Your message is transcribed and texted/emailed to the intended recipient automatically. You can also establish groups. In addition there are plugins and strategies that allow you to incorporate the use of Jott to do other things like Twitter, blog, and add to-do items using Toodledo or Vitalist (two great tools I’ll soon post on).