Intel Mashmaker is a tool that you download and "mashup" sites together. It is supposed to allow average everyday people to be able to mashup google sites, flickr, almost anything with what programmers call an api.
This is a fascinating blog post about how Alfred Thompson used PopFly to create a mashup activity for a classroom demo for teachers. He also took this document from word into Live writer to make a blog post.
It is important to look at many ways to do things. I found this information very insightful and cool.
Microsoft Popfly lets you make mashups and build web pages without knowing code. I am to the point I don't teach the detailed web site creation coding I used to. I teach RSS, embedding, creating wikis, uploading media of all kinds, but I just don't know how important coding is any more at the basic level.
I want to spend some time tinkering with this.
An interesting video I came across about the main issues concerning fair use, copyright, and video mashups. Highlights from my transcription below:
We're seeing this blossoming of amateur cultures, video remixes and creativity, and a lot of these works are circulating on the Internet.
Copyright law is all about balance........
Website with tons of math and physics resources shared through a community. This site will give you the best physics and math multimedia on the web in one place. The partners are MIT OpenCourseware and Stony Brook University. This is another way to mashup content and how material is becoming more open
A fun mashup of Google Street View and Google Maps. Allows you to hop around the globe by randomly teleporting to a continent. Useful for reviewing how to find coordinates of a location.
A mashup with Google Maps, the site asks you to find countries. Look closely, the country it wants you to find is listed under the field where you put your name. It gives you a group of ten at a time,
Mashup your data into stories
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Tell your stories in a new way
Photo albums are old school! Pick your sources, start and end date and your story is good to go. If necessary you can tweak it for a better flow.
[George Siemens] June 12th, 2007
"...It's the change underlying these tools that I'm trying to emphasize. Forget blogs…think open dialogue. Forget wikis…think collaboration. Forget podcasts…think democracy of voice. Forget RSS/aggregation…think personal networks. Forget any of the tools…and think instead of the fundamental restructuring of how knowledge is created, disseminated, shared, and validated.
But to create real change, we need to move our conversation beyond simply the tools and our jargon. Parents understand the importance of preparing their children for tomorrow's world. They might not understand RSS, mashups, and blogs. Society understands the importance of a skilled workforce, of critical and creative thinkers. They may not understand wikis, podcasts, or user-created video or collaboratively written software. Unfortunately, where our aim should be about change, our sights are set on tools. And we wonder why we're not hitting the mark we desire. Perhaps our vision for change is still unsettled. What would success look like if we achieved it? What would classrooms look like? How would learning occur? We require a vision for change. It's reflected occasionally in classroom 2.0 or enterprise 2.0 projects. But the tool, not change centric, theme still arises. We may think we are talking about change, but our audience hears hype and complex jargon.
What is your vision for change?"
Fantastic tool for generating creative writing prompts. Click on the door to be invited to view a random location in Google street view. Teachers might want to preview locations ahead of time before using with younger classes.
"...the latest National Atlas includes electronic maps and services that are delivered online. We are using information presentation, access, and delivery technologies that didn't exist 30 years ago to bring you a dynamic and interactive atlas. But we have held fast to our tradition of producing the finest maps in the world. We think nationalatlas.gov™ is more useful than any bound collection of paper maps."
Work with multiple map layers