These are my notes with links to Mark Wagner’s facilitated session at EduBloggerCon09 titled, “Wish a particular tool existed? Learn how to get it made! We’ll design a tool together.”
Google Docs Mass Uploader (free from Mark Wagner)
– Mark paid $300 to have a coder in India create this tool, and used Rent a Coder to find this person (got bids, etc)
Dr Z is now using for content in his courses: Read, Watch, Listens, Doings (RWLDs)
– looking for a tool that can create new RSS feeds for different items to use in class, media files are transcoded for iPod compatibility, and also interfaces with Facebook as a Facebook app
podchains.net used to do some of this, but it is no longer with us
– blip.tv does do transcoding but doesn’t let you create custom RSS feeds
Vodpod lets you collect videos and make playlists from different sources
Juicy Studio: Readability Test
My wish: database apps online
– Blist is now Socrata
Rubric Machine (created by David Warlick awhile back)
Potion Candy ($14 app)
– like PhotoBooth for your microphone
WordPress + Education = ScholarPress
Math247 screencasting project for Mathcasts
Comments
5 responses to “Wish a particular tool existed? Learn how to get it made! We’ll design a tool together”
There is also a Google Docs plugin for OpenOffice. Pull from/save to Google Docs directly from within your office suite. Works with Zoho and any WebDAV server as well. http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/ooo2gd
Wes,
under your “my wish” you list database apps… You really nerd to check out zoho.com they have zoho creator which allows quick creation for a database driven app, but also zoho database and reports which is a fully relational database within the cloud. This could handle any db app you need…
Scott
Scott: I have seen Zoho’s database app but haven’t played with it. That fact that it’s extensible and you can hire a coder to develop something custom using Zoho as a platform is also a great thing, for folks that aren’t running or don’t want to run a database solution on their own servers.
Do you have or know of any good links to using Zoho database functionality for educators?
Jim, thanks for the link to that firefox extension! It doesn’t look like they have released it for NeoOffice on the Mac, however. Anyone know of a similar extension that is Mac compatible?
Thanks Wes for citing our Mathcasts wiki – projects.
One of our next big projects is to see about making mathcasts accessible/creatable for/by the blind and deaf. We’ll face unique challenges doing these as you can imagine but as Malcolm Gladwell writes so eloquently in Outliers “it’s kind of sad to think of how much wasted potential we have in our country by not giving EVERY child the support they deserve.”
Eventually I can see us having both a library of mathcasts and a Q/A forum accessible to everyone regardless of the language they speak and communicate with including ASL and Braille, Nemeth code, etc.
And why stop at math … this kind of thing would be easy to do for physics, chemistry, etc too.