As teachers we’re always told to vary our approach. Sometimes you should deliver content orally, sometimes visually and sometime bring the message across on paper. This is intended to accommodate different learning styles of the students.

If you’re trying to search for thing  on the Internet  presenting the material in different ways has been hard. After all, one search engine looks pretty much like another. It may be hard, but, thanks to Google, it’s not impossible. If you click on that Google link in the last sentence, it should open up into a search on our first PM, Sir John A Macdonald. That’s fairly standard stuff so far, right?

The cool thing that I’ve recently discovered was that if you click on the line at the top of the search where it says “Web +Show Options” it not only will let you change what’s highlighted in your search it will let you change how your search is presented. If you go down to “Standard View,” for example, and click on “Wonder Wheel,” you get a really neat visual representation of your search results. You can click on the various spokes of the wheel, and the relevant results show up to the right of the wheel.

And if you like that, you’ve got to try the timeline. That option is a wonderful thing for a history teacher.

Accommodating different learning styles doesn’t always have to be onerous.

I have to teach a course this fall on Microsoft Office. It’s a tough one to make exciting. I have to admit I just don’t know how to add a little pizzazz to Word or Excel. However, someone has done something mighty interesting with the whole concept in a movie called Office 2010: The Movie. The trailer makes this rather bizarre conept seem pretty exciting. I’ll have to show it to my students.

While I can’t say I like the Pirate Party getting a seat in the European Parliament, courts in the U.S. have swung in completely the opposite direction.

A U.S. court recently decided that a woman who illegally shared 24 songs over the Internet would have to pay damages of $80,000 per song for a grand total of $1.92 million. The songs she shared could have been download from the Internet for about 99 cents per title.

While I’m all in favor of punishing people who steal music (or provide it for others to be stolen) Biblical standards for restitution (such as Exodus 22) provide for damages of 4 or 5 times the amount stolen. While that is likely a general guideline and not necessarily and exact amount, 80,000 times the amount stolen seems a bit inflated

There has to be some middle ground between sharing files willy nilly and punitively penalyzing illegal file sharing.

Though kind of partial to Firefox, I really don’t pay a lot of attention to whatever the latest web browser version is. For most things you do it doesn’t really matter.

However, Opera has just released a new version of their browser that they’re calling “Unite” because it pulls a whole lot of services together. While it’s a pretty decent web browser (though it feels different from Firefox) it can also help you set up a simple webserver, chat room and a few other neat features that run entirely off your home (or possibly work) computer.

Though it’s now comparatively easy to get a good chat room, there are times I’ve hunted  for one that was private and safe for my students and I couldn’t find one. Having one running on my home computer would solve that since its existence would be known only to me (and my students), hence there would be no creepy people there that I’d have to worry about.

A webserver running on your computer can also give you a bit of privacy when sharing webpages with photos, student work, etc.

The real great part with this is that it’s all designed for the non-geek. Setup time for me was about five minutes (but I’m a bit geeky so it might be longer for you). It’s really, really simple.

The two downsides to this that I can see are that the URLs for the services are ridiculously clunky. For example, for a webserver your URL might be mycomputer.user.operaunite.com/webserver. It doesn’t exactly role off the tongue. This might be fixed in a later version of the Opera browser.

The second problem is  a little more fundamental. Though most people can download to their computer fairly quickly, in most cases uploading from your computer is comparatively slow. Upload speeds (which is what will matter when someone downloads a webpage from your computer, if you follow) are quite slow in most cases. This may make your webserver, or chat room, etc seem comparatively clunky.

Despite the flaws I think Opera is on to something with this new version of their browser. Good job, guys.

I like to highlight some of the cool stopmotion animations my students create. But, as good as many of them are, there’s always an animation running through my head that I can’t quite seem to show them. It’s wild, cool and totally engaging. If I could ever get it created (or get them to make it) it might look a bit like this.