What was tripping me up was what user to use on the sharing screen. I ended up setting the user to Everyone. This seems dangerous, but I have a WEP on my network so neighbors can’t get on and modify our files, so it was all good.

Thanks Proud Geek.

What these two sites don’t do, is they don’t try out the program at all or see if it works. I chose to take the new font I made earlier and try to make it a little better. The original font has several unaligned characters and different sized character. I wanted to make them uniform and lined up nicely. Here is the font as it stood after I created it:

So, the capitals looked okay, but it looks like the lowercase g, m, q, r, & w need to be corrected. In Font Creator you are able to take each character and edit the position of the points or the character as a whole. For the lower case characters I wanted to make them all, substantially, the same height. This is how it looked when I edited the s.

On the left is the original s and on the right is the modified s.

This is how it looks after I adjusted the lower case letters. I set the x-Height 888 (Actually I didn’t set it at that on purpose. Somehow it got set there and afterwards I figured out how to do it on purpose.) and I lined up the bottom with the baseline and the top with x-height so they all had roughly the same size. In the cases where my handwriting didn’t quite conform with the size, I let it run over so it would be more authentic.

After adjusting the lower case letters, this is where I was at:

This was a big improvement, but the f looks a little small, so I wanted to make it thicker. I used the transform wizard (left picture below) to change the scale of the letter f to make the horizontal scale 15% bigger. I also waned to make the space before and after each letter the same. For that I used the AutoMetric Wizard (right picture below).

I then decided I wanted all of the capitals to match up in terms of size like I had done with the lowercase letters. I wasn’t sure how big to make the letters. The program will calculate the average height of all the letters at the beginning, which is where the size of 888 came from for lowercase letters. I then loaded up Times New Roman and found that on average the height of the capitals was 1.48 times bigger than the lowercase. I decided to use the same ratio for my font, so I decided to make the upper case letters 1314 tall.

Here is the new font.

So, in the end, the Front Creator program is very powerful and if you need to edit or create fonts it seems like a great program. I don’t know know if $79 is worth the price or not, but it does a solid job of editing fonts. I feel like my font still looks like my handwriting, but now is more uniform and consistent.

To create a simple link you head over to the ShareTabs site and paste the links into the text box as shown below.

From here you simply share the link either as the one you entered (if available) or via the shorter link they provide.

I do not know how long those links stay active, and I can’t find any decent help for the site, but it seems like those links might last forever, so that could be a nice feature. When you click on one of those links, like http://sharetabs.com/?twittered you get this:

twittered – ShareTabs – The easy way to share your links as tabs via kwout

All in all ShareTabs is very useful site if you need to save links. Sometimes it might not save a ton of time, but the longevity factor could be a nice plus. As this post and this post relate, this could be a great tool in classroom where instead of creating a list of links on a page, this one link can provide a visual list of sites. I haven’t used ShareTabs too much yet, but it is definately a site I keep in the back of my mind when the need arises.

Isaac Newton – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia via kwout

This application is extremely easy to use to embed graphics into your website or save to your computer. The process begins by placing a button into your Browser Toolbar which you click to initiate the program. (See video below.)

I wrote this post over several days and one problem I have found with the service is that if kwout.com itself goes down (or is blocked where you are, like at my school) the image map will not display. It seems that it stores the image file on the Kwout server. The links still work in the div that you create when you embed, but no one can see the picture while on the blocked server. This re-raises my common concern about web 2.0 tools in that if Kwout ever goes away because it ceases to exist, my blog entries that I have used Kwout for will be decimated.

You can however save the file to your web server and then insert the hyperlink into the code for the div and then you use that image with the image map.

The Cubs picture below is an example of a picture that is stored on my web server. I changed the code as shown below.

The Official Site of The Chicago Cubs | cubs.com: Homepage via kwout

<div class="kwout" style="text-align: center;">
<img src="http://kwout.com/cutout/s/p4/te/hrw_bor.jpg"
alt="http://chicago.cubs.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=chc"
 title="The Official Site of The Chicago Cubs | cubs.com: Homepage"
width="360" height="249" style="
border: none;" usemap="#map_sp4tehrw" />

<div class="kwout" style="text-align: center;">
<img src="http://blog.peterkupfer.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/hrw_bor.jpg"
 alt="http://chicago.cubs.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=chc"
 title="The Official Site of The Chicago Cubs | cubs.com: Homepage" width="360"
height="249" style="border: none;" usemap="#map_sp4tehrw" />

As I said, Kwout is extremely simple to use. You navigate to the page you would like to quote and the click the Kwout button. The program then takes a snapshot of the page. You can then crop the piece of the page you like. Kwout then gives you the option to share the picture with many different places as shown below.

The drop down menu includes Flickr, Tumblr, Blogger, FriendFeed, Vox, Evernote, and others. Once you decide where to share the clip, you are done.

[swf]/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/Using_Kwout.swf, 800, 486[/swf]

On a side note, I would like to define web 2.0. Web 2.0 technologies are technologies that utilize two-way information. For example, a blog is a web 2.0 technology. I can make a post about a topic, and someone else can post back. I wiki is a web 2.0 tool. We can all work together to create a document. It is not a new kind of internet, but a new way of thinking about the internet as explained by wikipedia:

The term first became notable after the O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but rather to changes in the ways software developers and end-users utilize the Web. According to Tim O’Reilly:

Web 1.0 was either me posting information or me reading information. (One way communication.) Web 3.0 looks like it will be people’s attempt to make money off of web 2.0 technologies (like Facebook and Twitter.)

The first three session I went to were all about web applications and free websites to use in your classroom. Overall I found the information to be overwhelming. There are so many awesome tools out there that I don’t even know how I would have time to test them all out and remember to use them. A problem I often have is that I find a really cool program, but then forget about it later when it would perhaps be helpful.

One was called the Free Software Circus. This presentation first highlighted some new sites I hadn’t heard of and the several free and open source programs (FOSS) I had heard of. The man giving the presenation, Dr. Philip Lacey, said something very interesting that I will use again. He said that it takes at least 25 instances for a teacher to become comfortable enough with a program to realistically teach with it. Here is a link to the circus, it really does have a nice list of products/site.

SoftwareCircus ?(Phil Lacey’s Ed Tech Arena)? via kwout

The other session I went too focused on this idea too. The presenter there gave us approx 7 sites to view all of which were free web tools. One exampe is the program I used above, kwout, to cut that image off of another website and paste it to my blog. The imagine is a link and it is also hotmapped with other links if they are in the picture.

The conference was good and I am glad I went. I think I may try to present next year on something involving Moodle, but I am not sure yet.  The conference really has got me thinking about how we need to change the way we educate to take into account the technolgies we have available. I was just telling my students today that they live in a golden age of information where the collective knowledge of the world is at their fingertips and they need to take advantage of it. As educators, I am pretty sure we are not taking advantage of it, and we need to figure out how to change what we do adapt to the world before it passes us by.

Evolving from Ape to Man to Computer User

I don’t know how true of a commentary this is, but it makes you think a little bit. I think clearly the fact that we have invented something like a computer is a huge achievement in human knowledge, but sometimes you have to wonder if what we have gained in power is worth what we have lost in other areas.

I also was playing with http://scribd.com. This site is designed to let you post items that you write and display them on what they call iPaper. This is a format that will help protect your content from theft and let you embed it in a web-site as shown below.

Yourfont Review

This site was very easy to use and it accepts OpenOffice.org which I appreciate as an avid user of open source software. I don’t know that I completely have a use for this, but I could write and publish class notes on Scribd. which would allow me to get feedback on them and share than easily with students. I still always have a slight fear of putting too much storage online because sites may vanish tomorrow, but I am creating it online, just uploading it, so this would be a safe altenative.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/internetprivacy/2006-08-08-kids-online-survey_x.htm?csp=34