July 2008 Links

One of the unexpected uses that I found for this blog is that I frequently find myself looking up past entries I wrote to find an idea I wrote about or a name or to retrieve a link or to review an activity. Before I started it, I would see a Help box and wondered why anyone would need that. Now I have it on my own blog, use it quite frequently and use them on blogs I regularly visit.

For that reason, I’m starting a new regular feature: A collection of the useful websites I find during the previous month. It’s rare that a week goes by when I don’t hear about an interesting website. Often I don’t have time to check them out fully or sometimes I don’t have use for them presently but I may in the future.  Up to now, I’ve added them to my bookmarks, but that just leads to long lists and I can’t find the ones I want because they’re mixed up with all the other ones. Now, if I have add enough detail, I should be able to search for them and locate them later.

• Photoshop Elements Tutorials – In June, I bit the bullet and bought Photoshop Elements so I could do special projects that iPhoto couldn’t handle. But after I got it, I didn’t know what to do with it. So many options, so little knowledge on what they were for! Thankfully, I knew about this site which has short, easy-to-follow tutorials. Extemely helpful.
• MyPlick – will let you take PowerPoints and Google Presentations, add audio to them and share them on a website.
• BigUniverse – This site allows visitors to read published children’s books. Even more interesting, it also lets them create their own books and publish them.
• SearchMe – has a very unique, visual way to do a search. Wouldn’t recommend you use this with students, but fun and might have its uses.
• BigDump – is a server script which will allow you to import extremely large MySQL databases. Never tried it, not sure I totally understand it, but may need it someday. More directions here.
• CampTune – Our school district very generously gave all its teachers laptops a few years back. The one problem is it bought the lowest model MacBook which only had a 30 MB hard drive, half of which went to a Windows BootCamp partition. With all that space take up, there’s not much room left over to do a lot of podcasts or digital movies before all the hard drive space is taken up. This application claims it will reduce the size of the BootCamp partition. That might come in handy for us someday to give use more space on the Mac side. Wouldn’t use it yet, but someday I might need this one as well.
• Google Calendar CalDAV support – Hooray, you can now snyc Google Calendars with your iCal ones!
• Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer – We have so much trouble with accessing our district’s webmail with Firefox and the only way I know to fix the problem is to throw out Firefox and all its associated files. But when you do this, all the bookmarks are lost. For cases like that, Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer is the perfect solution: It will store all your bookmarks and will sync them across to all your computers. So if you have to reset Firefox, just sync it again and all your bookmarks will be back.

Have you tried any of these sites? If you have some good experiences – or bad ones – with any of these sites, let me know.