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.

Via Dogtrax’ blog comes news of this rather incredible web publishing tool. If you’ve ever looked for a way to quickly and easily get a document onto the web without all the tedious mucking about with HTML, File2.ws presents a pretty cool solution. They claim to be able to convert just about anything to a webpage so if you’ve got Word docs, spreadsheets or whatever that you want to get up where people can see them, this site may be the world’s simplest way to do it.

The site is supported with ads – which is hardly outrageous – but it does mean you have to be a bit cautious when using this with students. Unlike Google ads, the ones I saw seemed to have no connection with the content of the page. Consequently the nature of the ads may not always be appropriate to school age kids.

I’ve been having the kids in my Applying Information and Communication Technology 2 15 F class (gotta love the short, snappy course name!) build websites as one of the their projects.

They’ve been using Weebly for the exercise. Weebly is a really amazing site that allows you to create your own website using one of their subdomains (something.weebly.com) or lets you attach your own domain name (for free on their part) if you know how to do the technical stuff.

There’s a lot of cool templates and lots of easy things you can pull into you site like YouTube videos and a long series of pictures.

The only thing you give away is a single line at the bottom of every page that says “Create a free website with Weebly.” That’s hardly a high price to pay for something like this.

While the projects, as they get done, are fairly amazing, we are having some frustrations with Weebly. It’s sometimes, and inconsistently, difficult to edit text, or delete parts you’ve added to a page. The inconsistency suggests that the bugs aren’t completely ironed out on Weebly’s end. Adding YouTube videos is a bit cumbersome and hardly intuitive.

I imagine these things will all be ironed out as Weebly grows, and so I’d readily recommend Weebly for classroom activities or personal use.

In the course of teaching history/Social Studies, it seems that nearly every year I have to teach the kids how World War I got started and how the Schlieffen Plan kicked in. It’s a fairly complex sequence of events, and I always seem to lose at least a couple of them even though my diagrams on the board have been getting clearer and clearer each time. Last week I wondered to myself whether it would help the kids if they could play my diagram back for themselves, one step at a time.

I don’t have a smart board that can record all my doodles, so I took pictures of my diagrams as I made them, put them in a powerpoint and uploaded them. I need to work on the contrast on the white board I used (the glare caused problems), but it wasn’t a bad first attempt. The concept is worth trying again. The execution needs a bit of work.