Math In All Its Forms: Diigo Webslides

Whenever you use the Diigo bookmarking web application, you may categorize your bookmarks in lists. Each list will contain all the bookmarks you put in that particular category, such as Math In All Its Forms. When you want to share the list with others, you have many choices, including webslides.

Webslides are screenshots of the front page of each webpage that you bookmarked within a particular list. This webslide presentation contains all the bookmarks for the list: Math In All Its Forms.

For those who cannot use Diigo on your network, you might consider Diigo for Educators. It's self-contained and has no advertisements. You may want to discuss this with the school's technology coordinator and gain access. Even if you can't access Diigo at school, you can use it for your own research and lesson preparation.

Saturday Specifics: Add aBowman Gadget

Gadgets, also called widgets, can really enhance your website. There are a number of gadgets that can be added from your Blogger dashboard, and one of the more interesting groups of widgets are the animations created by Adam Bowman who lives in Hallowell, Maine.

Teachers will find many uses for these gadgets, as several of them are actually learning tools. There are several animal animations, as well as some Physics gadgets.

Fish: "Add a touch of nature to your page with these hungry little fish.  Watch them as they follow your mouse hoping you will feed them by clicking the surface of the water."


While I'm demonstrating Adam's fish widget, I'd also recommend another of his most interesting gadgets called COINS. The gadgets are mouse activated, so use your mouse to make the coins move and even spin.

Enjoy these gadgets on your own or with your students.

Weather Widget Wrapup

How's the Weather where you live?
Do you need to know?
Knowing the weather and providing students a chance to read and analyze the weather report through online widgets educates them to find trends and even learn to predict based on available evidence.

Even though all weather reporting originates through weather.gov, they do not offer a widget, so you can find many types of weather widgets from a multitude of other sources.

Are all weather widgets created equal? Are the weather reports for all weather widgets created equal? How are they the same? How the various weather widgets different?

Weather.com has a widget that can be used on your website or blog. You can also get a weather.com desktop or mobile widget.

Erie Weather Forecast, KS (66733)

Another weather widget was one I found at the Fort Hayes State University TECS 390 class network is part of a package of widgets that you can use on a website or blog called yourminis: web widgets

While there are over 60 variations of this weather widget, the weather information comes from the Weather Channel. When you provide a city or zip code, the weather report on the widget belongs to that locale.

The Great Yarmouth Wether Widget is the one that would be very adaptable, yet it has an interesting background that could be used as is.


Accu-Weather has a widget with a basic level that is free. There also premium services, but the basic widget has a nice background with a map.

This is the webpage widget, and there is code for a MySpace widget also.

Weather Forecast | Weather Maps | Weather Radar

Be a Book Wizard!

Embed this new widget, Teacher Book Wizard, in your website or blog and anyone can use it to find children's books by author, keyword or title.

Scholastic has used Google gadgets to create an excellent teacher resource, a children's literature search engine. When you find the book you listed, you will receive information about the reading and interest levels, as well as purchasing information.

You can search for your favorite book or new titles to help you develop an instructional unit. I selected a variety of keywords to use in the Teacher Book Wizard Widget and a representative list of available books on the topic were found and listed by this search engine.

I embedded this widget in mymindtoyourmind widget wiki. It will make a nice addition to the variety of other widgets that I previously recommended for use by teachers.

Many of the titles are published by Scholastic, yet the search engine results do include book titles from other publishers in this search engine. This search engine is not perfect by any means, so I would encourage you to also use other search engines like Xoost for hard-to-find titles.


When readers at your blog, wiki, or website use the Teacher Book Wizard Widget, they will be taken away from your site to the Scholastic site. I would like to see this widget open in another tab or window. While this is an inconvenience, it is not a major hindrance.

clipped from www.scholastic.com What is the Teacher Book Wizard Widget and how do I use it? FREE ultimate children's book search engine The widget will help teachers find: Book and author information Reading levels Book-based lesson plans, booktalks and discussion guides Series lists embed the Teacher Book Wizard Widget onto your Web site or blog.

PSU TechED Presentation Debriefing #1

Image via WikipediaToday, at Pittsburg State University, I presented two technology education workshops. The first techED conference workshop related to sharing the beginning concepts of social bookmarking systems. My goal was to share how teachers use these online systems to teach research skills, including note-taking. The second was a presentation, a basic overview of widgets, tiny self-contained snippets of code that make objects become interactive within a website, wiki or other online portal.

Both workshops were well attended, and overall I was satisfied with the results. Those attending asked excellent questions, and I will write about each set for a few days.

In the del.icio.us session, most participants discussed how this online bookmarking would work for the stated purpose, research and note-taking. The teachers made great observations, some I am still processing. As always happens, there were issues, some of which included different operating systems, different learning rates and different browsers.

The analogy I like to use when thinking of the different operating systems is a car analogy. Using different operating systems is similar to driving different makes of vehicles. This difference in operating systems, to me, is the same as if I was driving my husband's GM pickup or driving my Saturn. There are definitely differences in placement of the lights, windshield wipers, and other important systems, but once you refocus, all cars move on down the road. I know that most people don't see the different operating systems, Mac and Windows in such simplistic terms, YET once you get to the internet, all operating systems work the same.

There is a third option: GNU Linux or Unix and its flavors. These open source operating systems appear to be gaining user numbers for many reasons, yet I don't think we will be seeing the opensource operating systems being used in K-12 education in any great numbers.

The browser issue is another bucket of worms altogether. I try never to tell people which browsers to use, but historically, MS Internet Explorer is the target of attack from various people and groups bent on creating havoc on the ordinary user. That historical note always leaves me wondering why schools insist on using MS Internet Explorer and not Firefox.

While I really had to stay on my toes and could be a bit smoother in my delivery, I achieved my stated goals for each of the sessions. Having an opportunity to earn "Service to the Profession" professional development points makes me a better educator. I enjoyed working in an environment where people asked pointed questions.

Part of this debriefing will address ways to streamline the hands-on workshop. One thing I already know is that forty-five minutes was not long enough for even a basic introduction of del.icio.us. When people are rushed, they become pressured and may have difficulty learning new material. I don't want to do that to people again. I could have effectively used thirty more minutes.

All in all, it was an exciting thought-provoking experience, and I enjoyed all aspects of it. The participants were very gracious with each other and me. I hope they take some ideas home that they can expand on within their own classes.

Widget Workshop

Widgets are wonderful, helpful, contained, coded, practical, and fun. When I first discovered widgets, I didn't know that these little snippets, these tiny programs in a box could be so powerful.

Amazingly, my first widget was media player widget called Dizzler. I wasn't even thinking of using widgets as educational tools. I wanted to listen to music while I was online, and the widget from Dizzler fit the bill in the beginning. One very cool aspect of widgets like this is the flexibility of the LOOK of the widget. You can pick a SKIN that can make the widget look different. Mine was a butterfly, and I enjoyed using it. Later, I found other media player widgets.

As time went on, I discovered widgets that could keep track of the number of people who visited my site. My first tracking widget was My World Visitor Map.

When I was invited to join an educational social network, I first learned of static widgets. They are often called badges. They are usually widgets that you click on to get to the mentioned website. If you belong to a certain network, like Classroom 2.0, then you can get a badge to put on your website to help others find their way to Classroom 2.0. Most badges are invitations really.

The focus on widgets here is historical. I am using widgets to describe some of the simple ways a person can use widgets for a variety of purposes that WILL change over time. As a person's experience develops, it seems to me that their use of widgets matures.

For myself, I began to look to other educators blogs, websites and profiles where I gathered many ideas about the direction my interest and use of widgets would move. The next widgets I downloaded were interactive widgets, widgets that have content that you can manipulate. Some great examples of that type of widget include Voki, Flickr gadget, and del.icio.us tag cloud. These widgets may be considered excellent teaching tools and remain favorite interactive instructional tools, even now.

To learn more about widgets, read Learnings from the Widget Roundtable, a discussion by Dave McClure (who helps teach the Stanford Facebook class, and runs the Graphing Social Patterns conference), Justin Smith (of Inside Facebook), Rodney Rumford (of FaceReviews), and Jeremy Owyang, of how widgets could be classified.