Freeware should be fully functional and useful. Here is something I like: Gallery. What is does is to allow you to use your website server to host an interactive photo and media (a feature that is continuing to develop) gallery. I have been using Phlog, Snapfish and MyImageHost to do these tasks, and I like them, especially MyImageHost. But with Gallery I will be able to allow users to add images to galleries. And of course, the galleries are ad-free. This makes this a sound educational tool - teachers can be given direct access to a classroom gallery, uploading photos from classroom desktops. Galleries can be templated so that the "look" is consistent across grade or school or district. From my point of view, this is something that IT staff should be working to provide, something that teachers should learn about. Take the time to take a least a look. In a later posting I will talk about set up and link to a gallery.

There is something new in the course management toolkit. KEEP comes to teachers from the Carnegie Foundation - and it is currently (always, I hope) free. The tool is a collector and presentor, engaging educators (and their students, if they wish) and their peers in thoughtful presentations of content. Beyond Filamentality and Trackstar hot listings, this tool pushes users to prioritize and describe. Not only is it wise in structure, it is wise in view - yes, it is easy to do, it works seamlessly (albeit I tested with a cable modem connection), and WYSIWYG. Give it a try!

I have just uploaded the (almost) final version of the Cool Free Tools for Teachers workshop support site. When you access the site, you will be able to jump directly to the Hot List of tools that I think are the best bets for actual teacher use. I have also included a long listing of tools that just about made it to the Hot List. Here are some highlights:

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QuickTopics has been around for quite a while and is, surprisingly, still free. In fact, it has been made even better by the addition of two additional tools. QuickThread lets you create a QuickTopic thread from any two email messages - handy if you are on a roll with a listserv or a colleague. DocReview which makes an uploaded .html file editable by anyone accessing the forum - works much like Words Comment feature except that comments are posted to a threaded discussion. How cool is that! When you remember that any word processing document can be saved as .html, you get an idea of the power of this tool for the laptop classroom (or HW assignment). Images are NOT displayed, one thing that could be improved upon.

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My second choice for a super cool tool, after NiceNet and CHNM Scrapbook, has to be the free account from Advanced Survey. They actually apologize for the little logo on the clear, clear survey displays. As soon as my survey has more responses, I will let you know how the data filtering works. I have a feeling IE on my Mac is going to struggle with that task.

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And speaking of surveys, CHNM's Survey tool is another winner. Not only does the Administrator have enormous control over the survey content, appearance and user-group, the survey itself can remain inactive until it is time for it to be used in the classroom. This is not a checklist survey, but a narrative response survey. Responses can be e-mailed to the Administrator (making it a test mechanism) or posted for all respondants to see, making it a wonderful tool for inquiry in the classroom.

Another tool with a similar value is S.L.A.T.E. from the Landmark Project. Designed as billed as a Web Quest builder, a task it does very well (a rubric builder and a quiz or feed-back tool are built in to the design), S.L.A.T.E. can be used for inquiry activities as well - you can, for example, ask questions about a painting or photograph. The feed-back generator can collect and post comments from "collaborators" instead of having responses e-mailed to the teacher.

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Other sites will be highlighted in this column. In the meantime, please do check out Cool Free Tools for Teachers - there is even a Sight Suggestion Form on the homepage.

Excuse the long absence. Not only have I been completing my 1/2+ of the online ed tech text, Education for an Information Age, 5th Edition , I have been writing a book in TK3 called Beyond the Book: Making e-Texts into Your Texts. It is subtitled: "A Book of Ideas" and that is what it is. But what is TK3?

This is, to quote myself, "a forward-looking application, tailored to teachers who are comfortable with the media tools highlighted [previously] and eager to develop and distribute their own courseware in a self-contained mode (as opposed to an e-Learning mode)."

What TK3 does is make e-books, better, quicker and with more multimedia than is possible with any other application available to the teacher.

You can download a trial (45 day - a deal) at the sight of the producers, Night Kitchen.

Village Photos: "Village Photos has a very easy to use interface that lets you get up and running fast! You can organize your images with custom photo albums, with automatic thumbnails, making it easy to manage your pictures." There is a 120k size limit, but no limit on uploads..

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Swiftdesk provides free services: bookmark storage, e-mail, 30mb of file storage, a free website, calendar, planner, todo, calculator. The problem is that I get a server error when I try to sign on for the free account using Netscape on OS X.

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Yahoo Briefcase lets you upload 30 MB of photo images without having to form a group. Slide shows too!

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I am still having problems with the Phlog feed (even though it has been multiply validated), but the photo upload is working fine. It seems to crunch mid-day, so I double uploaded some out of impatience.

I have the luck to be working on a PowerBook G4 with OS X 2+. That means that when I ran across a freeware app called MyJournal today, I immediately downloaded it. Why? Because it saves text as .rtf, making it perfect for creating text media resources for import into TK3. All objects can be saved into a journal, collecting them for eventual use in a book. I believe that it also will upload directly to a blog, which is what I am about to try. Hold on....

Alas! It uploads to Blogger but not to Blogdrive. So what I have to do is to type the text here and then open the Blogdrive Mini-MEditor and paste it in. Bingo!

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By the way, there are tons of uses of MyJournal, which is why it has been bundled on the Maine iBooks. I will be exploring its integration with other apps and keeping this blog appraised of them. Another salute to Apple...

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Another problem - the Mini-MEditor is not working - is not accepting any text. Which means I will save this and repost it later. Hmm...

Got it! The editor works in IE but not in Safari. Now we are in business. All I need to do is figure how to upload directly to Blogdrive.

By the way, I also learned that Phlog's rss.xml feed is somehow not valid. I'll send it to the friendly validator and see what I can learn.

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Never use dashes in a blog post!!!

That is what was messing up the rss feed from phlog. What a great thing validator is! Here is the link: Feed Validator.

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Just learned another thing: in IE, you can not paste a URL into the Blogdrive link wizard. It works in Safari. Oh well, life is all about trade offs...

The only reason for this post is to share some information. I have just demoed and then purchased (for a whopping $12) a little app called Easy Frame Creator (available at: http://www.easyimagetools.com/products/frame/). What this does is what you see:

it creates interesting frames around images without the need for an image editor. Not only that, but masks can be downloaded for free too, from this About.com site. The site also contains how-tos. An important point:

You must download the full image, not the template!

And if you look in the left bar, you will find links to a huge collection of multimedia resources. Not a bad find!!

I posted another image at my Phlog. You can follow that link or the RSS one in the sidebar of this page.

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There is another really interesting thing out there: TK3, from a group called Night Kitchen. This may well be the "textbook of the future" format. Using the concept of "media objects", or assets, which TK3 calls "resources", you are able to build a fully hyperlinked and annotated "book" or manual or whatever. The only problems I have found with the fully-functioning demo are:

the paging in the manual is all off - ignore it, as otherwise the tutorial is excellent. This is the manual that you will be prompted in an email to download.

it is not possible to fully justify your text, too bad, as that makes a text look better. I justified this paragraph using the "align=justify" tag.

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Which reminds me to note: Safari does not show the Preview in Blogdrive. Otherwise, it works more smoothly than IE.

Nancy Willard, of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use made an interesting comment in a post to the WWWEdu list the other day (the list is devoted to discussion of the role of the WWW in Education, but it wanders over all sorts of educational restructuring issues). She was relating some POV from a book called The Tornado of Change. The startling point she made while describing the chasm that lies between the Visionaries of Change and the Pragmatists who are reluctant to embrace it, was this:

Pragmatists trust Visionaries but Visionaries do not know how to talk to Pragmatists and most if not all school administrators are Pragmatists.

My goodness me. Even if this was logical it would make no sense. Now, Nancy said several things in this posting (it will be in the archive if you are curious) that upset others, such as that she had never met a visionary principal, but I had such a startled reaction to this line of thought (which may not even be Nancy Willard's - she was reflecting upon a good read) that I have to vent here and now - I tried to reply to the list but the words would not come out right.

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I want to start by reminding you all that I have written quite a bit myself on the dynamics of technology integration. Read my But not Least... essays called Dis What?, Change Happens, The Flickering Teacher, The Software Web and both Longitude and Latitude essays and you will get some idea of my view of what is coming to be a problem for many schools: teachers who are resisting the "buy-in" to technology integration.

The point I make, I think, consistently and whatever the metaphor or framework is this: Change can not be made without a systemic dialogue and systemic collaboration. I offer the following points for consideration:

I have worked for several administrators who "trusted" Visionaries (who one them called Gurus) - Visionaries came, pontificated, demonstrated, and left. The trusting administrators were left with an empty balloon and NO CHANGE;

I know personally and professionally many Visionaries who "talk the talk" of the teacher in the trenches and do so because they feel it is all-important;

I know of many Pragmatic teachers who embrace change without vision, and do it well.

I know of many pragmatic educators who are skeptical of Visionaries.

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I reject the Tornado of Change. It is not merely a rationale for allowing things to stay the same, technology-wise, in schools, it places no value whatsoever on the teacher who is moving from Reluctant to Engaged - because he or she want to do it. No matter how many metaphors and models we create, the simple facts of professional development are these:

If you know the individual teacher, you stand a good chance of initiating relearning;

If the individual teacher has on-going support and respect for efforts, the relearning will continue;

Administrators who don't bother to relearn are going to stonewall change.

End of soapbox.

Pictures are important. Just to run down a few ways in which you can easily get your photos up for others to see and download:

Yahoo Groups! is a choice. After the free registration, you can create albums of uploaded images. You can even create a list to which you will be able to mail updates.

Photoshop Elements and iPhoto will both create an .html photo album that you can distribute via your web host (by uploading) or your intranet.

a .Mac account will make it easy to upload images, but you have to pay for the account.

Google for "free photo hosting" - you will find a very long listing.

Make a blog and upload your images to it. If you are clever, you will be able to find one that does not require .html or having the images available on a server.

NiceNet accounts and Think.com accounts, for teachers (my audience here) make image upload a snap.

Which brings us to my latest find:

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Phlog

I have Andy Carvin to thank for Phlog. You might want to go directly to his blog to read about it (April 03, 2004 posting: MobilPhlog. Basically, all you do is set up a free account, with a minimal amount of information, then email your photos to the address they give you. You can send them as attachments or, as I do, drag them into the body of the message. I chose to have thumbnails shown instead of full images.

Be sure to check out the rss feed to this image page in the right column!

It probably doesn't come as any surprise that this is, infact, a blog! That is how the RSS feed is possible. So my feed is going from one blog to another. Pretty handy and costing me no server space. A few things that might keep you from making my mistakes..

Be sure to delete any signatures before sending off your message.

The Subject line of the message is the blog entry title - make it short and informational.

You have to send images in separate messages.

You can use Phlog as a blog too! It is not as nice as this one yet, because it does not have templates - if you want to change the look, you need to know CSS.

Notice this - no ads!!

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Next message will ramble over some ideas I am having about The Reluctant Teachers.

Well, today I did some interesting things. First I indexed my Search engine. To do so, I had to search for the engine provider (which is Fluid Dynamics Search Engine, access the help file to learn how to administer the engine, then access the help deeper to learn how to reset the password. Luckily, all was in the right place on my WestHost server, and I was able to update the index. It took almost 2 hours. But adding a search function to a large educational site is worth it, I think.

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I am thinking as I write today about how much HTML is Just Enough. I have come to this tentative conclusion:

1. img tag
2. link tag
3. mailto: tag
4. knowledge of color coding
5. some basic understanding of the structure of a table
6. how to use paragraph and break tags
7. the font tag and what it can contain
8. the head and the body and what goes in each.

That should do it for most hand-coding.

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Then I reactivated my Bulletin Board. This is a free script called WWWBoard from Matt's Script Archive. I remember that I worked on the coding a bit, but need to do so again (I don't like the way the form looks). Not very difficult, though.

I investigated again two free boards, to which I will link you later.

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Then I read a post somewhere that sent me to a really nice Gender Gap site called Sites Girls Like, which led me down several paths and eventually to a personal web page by a very smart girl. From whom I learned about My TagBoard, where I made a Chat for a my Free Web Tools workshop. Bingo!! Some knowledge of the above code was helpful, but not necessary. I used Dreamweaver to do a little tweaking.

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And then I added a survey/poll to the page, from Sparklit. I like this tool, much better than it was two years ago. For one thing, email addresses and web page URL's are no longer required to get a FREE poll code set.

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So, another busy day in support of lowcost online education. Some day I will find the time to learn .php, and get really down and dirty.