Welcome to the 1st Blog for September 2010; It was a busy August producing new resources for future sustainability events, experimenting with vidcasts and a potential online radio presence, similar to the TV Channel. The team has been working on our forward plan; if there is anything you feel we should be including do let us know a.s.a.p.

Today’s Finds include…

1:

Google Image Swirl is an image search tool intended to help users visually refine and alter their searches for images.

To use Image Swirl...

• enter search term; the results of the search will be displayed in a grid similar to that with which users are probably familiar.

• Click any image in the grid and a 'swirl' of more, related, images will appear

• Click an image in the swirl and another swirl of images will appear etc., until a single image is located.

Visit http://image-swirl.googlelabs.com/ to try it out.

2:

AddThis is an easy, one-stop shop for sharing tools that can help a learning provider's current and potential stakeholders, share anything to anyone, anywhere.

AddThis helps their website publishers and bloggers spread their content across the web by making it easy for learners, practitioners, administrators, managers, etc., to bookmark and share content to their favourite social destinations.

AddThis maximizes the distribution of content and traffic brought to a learning providers site by integrating with over 300 services all over the world. The personalization tools make it easy to offer the right sharing services to the right user at the right time.

AddThis will also collect data, on any sharing activity, to help learning providers understand their audience and how they're interacting with existing and new content.

Visit http://www.addthis.com/ to find out more and/or to add AddThis to your web presence.

3:

Drawings in PDF files are normally difficult to edit e.g. drawings of rooms or a building stored as pdf files; editing it, until now, would be almost an impossible task. However, having the same drawing in AutoCAD would make modifying the drawing so much easier.

This is what Convert PDF to AutoCAD exploits.

Convert PDF to AutoCAD is a free web service that does exactly what its name suggests – it converts PDF files
to drawing formats that are compatible with AutoCAD.

Using Convert PDF to AutoCAD's simple interface, users can choose any PDF file on their computer and convert it into the DWG or DXF formats. Then you can open these converted files in AutoCAD to modify them.

The site's usage is quite straightforward: you point towards a PDF file on your computer and then provide your email address. Your PDF file is uploaded on the site, converted into DWG / DXF, and sent to the email address you provided.

Visit http://www.convertpdftoautocad.com/ to try out.

4:

History Animated <http://historyanimated.com/newhistoryanimated/> provides animations of the...

• American Revolution;
• US Civil War; and
• US Pacific Campaign in WWII.

In each of these animations visitors will see the animated movement of armies displayed on a map. Each animation is accompanied by captions describing the strategies of the armies as well as the results and consequences of each battle.

All of the animations on History Animated are available for free viewing on the website.

History Animated is an excellent resource for History practitioners who find that the animations are a significant improvement over drawing or pointing to places on a map.

To me, the preview of the Battle of Britain that will, when it is up and running, appear on the New Website, called - WWIIAnimated.com is the jewel in the crown.

This can be viewed at http://historyanimated.com/WWIIAnimated/battleOfBritain.html

5:
New uNET Vidcast (using New & Emerging Technologies) - aclJohn's uNET Vidcast: Using Wrttn

No you don't need a blog, wiki, or website to communicate with learners and/or other stakeholders; wrttn can be used to enhance communication with others. Create - share - email etc.

All can be prepared off line, using notepad or equivalent, and copied and pasted when online access is available. YouTube videos and other items can be embedded.

The Publication – Code Book – mentioned in the vidcasts, is available at http://www.acljohn.com/resources/WrttnTextileCodeBook.pdf.

6:
Second Vidcast (using New & Emerging Technologies) - aclJohn's uNET Vidcast: Google Tweet Search

You don't have to be on twitter to see what is going on and, Google offers a nice timeline option for looking at tweets. This clips provides a short uNET (using New and Emerging Technologies) overview of using Google to search tweets in a more effective way!

7:

O₂ is to provide environmental information for its handsets, allowing customers to choose a phone based on its energy saving features.

Eco ratings have been issued for 65 handsets on O₂'s online store since August 25th and in-store from August 27th.

O₂'s Phones will be given a score out of five for energy efficiency and environmental impact.

At the time of writing this, top place is held by Sony Ericsson's Elm handset, achieving a score of 4.3.

Research by O₂ found that 44 per cent of consumers would choose a phone based on its energy efficiency.

Find out more at http://www.o2.co.uk/thinkbig/planet/sustainableproducts/ecorating.

Note: This blog is also available as…

·         A mobile version at http://acljohn.wirenode.mobi

·         Vidcasts at http://www.youtube.com/user/acljohn.

Items included in this blog are also available in my web portal at http://www.acljohn.com/.

Don’t miss the “IN-TOUCH” Live broadcast (12:45 to 13:15) on Monday, 13^th September 2010
it can be viewed at http://www.livestream.com/locus.