A Line 52 bus stop in Paris, very close to the Opera Garnier (http://bit.ly/7xRu1s), is equipped with a cutting-edge flatscreen with touchscreen capabilities. The screen displays a wide variety of information about the area and public transportation services.
The device includes an interactive map for buses and subways as well as other mapped-in information including links to historical places with photos and articles as well as business with descriptions and photos–primarily restaurants and cafes.
You access the items mentioned above through a menu similar to the Windows Taskbar. The display is colorful and bright, and mainly in the evening it becomes very inviting.
The screens are impressive and very helpful for tourists and locals.
If you are in Paris, don’t miss the chance to play around with one of them (unfortunately, the only one I know is the one by the Opera). Will keep updating this post as I find more.
I had been using Etherpad –http://www.etherpad.com–for a while, but had never experimented its potential as a collaborative tool in the classroom.
Etherpad is one of the best online-based word processors out there not only because it is free (and now open source since Google acquired it) but also because it enables users to create a public pad without having to sign up for an account. Etherpad has many other wonderful features such as easy sharing, author colors and timeslider with different formats to save to.
Perhaps the most important feature for me is to be able to use an online-based word processor that I do not have to sign up for nor sign in. Google Documents is great, but I need to sign in in order to access their word processor. With Etherpad, I am only a click away from starting to type my document.
As soon as users create their public pad, Etherpad gives them a URL that users can email or IM to their collaborators.
Users have their texts highlighted with different colors and their names show up on the sidebar, also provided with a chat tool.
The Timeslider tool enables users to slide through the history of the document. They can do this manually or by hitting play, and watching the history of the collaboration develop. Etherpad offers several formats to save your document including HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word, or Plain Text.
Today, my first-year journalism students took full advantage of this great tool. They wrote articles individually that they later shared with the rest of the class as they joined the public pad that I projected on the screen to the entire class.
The students would correct their documents themselves and also their classmates’. The group-correction process is already a very rich one, and Etherpad only enhances it by the color-identity feature–students and teacher can make corrections and the student can easily identify the corrector by the color.
Students could eventually save the document so that they can review the corrections.
We ended the class with two presentations. Presenters used Etherpad to write their keywords. The rest of the class wrote notes and questions for the presenters using the Etherpad public document.
Etherpad is a free and no-signup-necessary application that offers plenty of possibilities including collaborative writing via sharing URL, highlighted text with a different color per user, a slick Timeslider tool to navigate through the document history, and plenty of formats to save your document.
Etherpad does not take you to the Heavens, but to heights with a great potential to be explored.
Pixlr is an online photo editor with a vast potential. Certainly not for those with printing needs, but for those designing for the web Pixlr may become a better option than Photoshop. Pixlr is not only free, but also web-based (no need to install anything on your computer nor to keep up with updates), and you do not even need to create an account to work with it. In addition, there is a bonus, an extension you can install on your browser called Pixlr Grabber.
Many web-based photo editors require you to register. With Pixlr, you can start editing your images with a browser and an internet connection.
Pixlr has three applications, Pixlr Editor, Express and Grabber. Editor is almost like Photoshop, Express is to perform quick edits, and Grabber is a very handy extension you install in your browser to have ready acces to online images. With Grabber, you have three capturing options, entire page, a selection, or the visible area of a page.
Pixlr Editor looks very similar to Photoshop and has almost all the same basic functions and toolbar. Pixlr also has Layers, History, and Navigation windows. The text tool is also very powerful with a considerable library of fonts.
To start working, you can open an image from your computer or directly from a URL (you can also create a new image from scratch). When you finished editing, you can save the result to your computer just as if you were working with Photoshop or any other application installed on your computer.
So, if you create web content, you should certainly give Pixlr a try. You do not need to open an extra application, just open a new tab, type pixlr.com and start working.
