Hi Chris,
I just wanted to touch base with you about your Teach with Tech podcast. I have been listening for a few months and I appreciate how you discuss new technologies and contextualize them in K-12 and higher ed applications.
Just a quick comment on your Opera segment from last month. I have been an Opera user for a few years (yes, I paid for it a long time ago, before Opera 9, because I thought it was that good). Besides all the great tips that you gave (I didn’t even realize the one about the trashcan), you might also want to think about telling your faculty and students that there are some handy mouse features that you can use on a PC or Mac (if you have a 2 button mouse).
- Want more info about a word or phrase on a page that you are viewing? Highlight it, then right click and select one of the many search features.
- Want to email someone, but you aren’t using Opera as your email client? Right click on the email address, copy it, and paste it in your email client.
- Want to navigate web pages faster? Use mouse gestures.
- Got a URL that you have copied or a word that you want to copy from somewhere and search using Opera? Right click in the address box or search box and choose “paste and go†to effectively paste and hit enter at the same time.
There are more mouse tools that I am sure are out there that I don’t even know, but these — along with the tips you offered — make my browsing life much easier.
Finally, I did want to say that I am becoming a regular wiki user. You can see how we used wikis in a similar manner to the teacher you described who asks students to keep class notes by looking at the collaborative agendas from our series of summer workshops. Also, a colleague and I are developing a presentation that we will give in October using a wiki.
For a future episode, I hope that you might consider talking about how teachers are integrating tools of the read/write web into the research process. Gone are the days of 3×5 cards, and now we have webquests, RSS for news feeds, Google Notebook, Citation Machine, Writely, and other tools for keeping track of research online as you write. I would like to hear the ways in which teachers are doing this kind of new research with students.
Keep up the great work on the Teach with Tech podcast!
Troy