Your Mileage May Vary

Chartle is a free, no registration required Web 2.0 app that allows users to create a wide variety of diagrams, maps and charts, some with unique interactive features. Objects created with Chartle can be shared or embedded in blogs or wikis. It has a many features, some of which are quite complicated. It is also a very young Beta product, and only works in Firefox 3.x on PCs and Macs. With those caveats in mind however, it is an intriguing tool with enough going for it to keep it on any tech savvy educator’s radar.

Chartle.net – interactive charts online!

If you are an educator interested in iPhone programming, a good place to start might be Stanford University’s free iTunes U course. CNET reports that the course has been downloaded over one million times since it’s was uploaded less than 2 months ago. The course features videos of classes taught by Apple engineers at Stanford. Also check out other offerings available at iTunes U.

Stanford’s free iPhone course hits 1 million downloads | Apple – CNET News

The Maneater, the student run newspaper of the University of Missouri, reports that all incoming students in the School of journalism will be required to own either an iPhone or an iPod Touch. Lectures in some classes will be recorded and avaialble for studetns to download to their devices. Adding a bit of local flavor, the article features a quote from incoming freshman Askley Crocket of Collierville. Check out the article with the link below.

The Maneater – J school to require iPod touch or iPhone

J.D. Biersdorfer, of The New York Times, seeks to untangle the confusion around cables with his slide show which illustrates thirteen different kinds of cables with big, easy to see photographs and explains their uses, similarities and differences. It is an excellent primer for the the new techie or a well presented refresher for cable gurus among us.

A World of Cables, Unknotted – The New York Times > Personal Tech > Slide Show

Laura Smith at Downtown Elementary School posted a great lesson on her blog recently. It involved third grade students researching lad forms using a variety of technology tools and then presenting their results using Kerpoof. But read if for yourself at her blog.

Landforms in Kerpoof: A Geography Lesson | Technology News for the Downtown School

The Memphis Commercial Appeal reports today that Collierville High School (of Shelby County Schools) will add an iPod/iPhone component to their existing advanced programming class. IT will constitute the second semester of that course. The students will use Apple Computer’s iPod and iPhone simulators to test their work. Shelby County Schools is a primarily Macintosh district so existing computers will be used in the project.

Class logs into students’ interests : Local News : Memphis Commercial Appeal

Leading test prep company Kaplan has launched a series of Facebook applications that feature test bank questions to prepare students for standardized tests. Of special interest is the SAT/ACT Quizbank Challenge for high school students. As students are already using Facebook in record numbers, it seems they would be more likely to take advantage of these practice opportunities on a site that they already visit regularly. Kaplan also provides applications for LSAT, GMAT, and MCAT test preparation for students seeking to enter post graduate programs in these areas. Check out the AllFacebook article below for more information.

Kaplan Launches More Facebook Apps to Prepare Students from High School to Med School

The Guardian newspaper reports that the United Kingdom is preparing a massive overhaul to it’s primary curriculum, including specifications that students must master Web 2.0 technologies as Twitter, Wikipedia, blogging and podcasting. There will also be an emphasis on keyboarding and spell checking. Schools and teachers would also be given greater flexibility in deciding what items will be focused on in class. Read the whole report at the link below.

Pupils to study Twitter and blogs in primary shake-up | Education | The Guardian

Update: British kids to be taught blogging, podcasting, tweeting. What about the parents? | The Blog Herald

A PCWorld article on wikis in the workplace demonstrates how useful to businesses wikis can be for collaboration, especially when team members working on a project may be in far flung locales. But interestingly enough wikis can be  just as useful when your colleagues are in a cube only a few feet away, as my co-workers and I can attest. Seems to me that this increase in interest in corporate wikis shows that using wikis with students not just can help them master material now, but is preparing them for knowledge work later in life. Also check out this graphic from a blog post on Wikinomics, which illustrates the benefits of using a wiki rather than email for collaboration.

Putting Wikis to Work – Business Center – PC World

One vexing technology task has always been converting Adobe PDFs to an editable format like Microsoft Word (doc) or rtf. You either had tp purchase expensive Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software or a likewise expensive copy of Acrobat Reader Professional. New website pdftoword.com takes care of this issue with a super simple conversion. It is currently in a private, closed beta, but Lifehacker did a thorough review of the service and secured some beta invites. Enter your email address and the code lifeahckers to enroll in the beta.

Convert PDF to Word (DOC) Online