Web Sites - A Few That May be New to You

   The May, 2013 issue of PC World has an article entitled "101 Great Web Sites You've Never Heard Of."  I went through sites that seemed promising for their utility and came up with eleven I'd like to share.  Some may be prove useful for the classroom, and others may be of personal interest. 

http://www.bookish.com/home - A recommendation search engine for readers.  Recommendations can be accessed by entering known titles, and likely recommendations appear.  

http://www.shorpy.com/ - This site archives vintage photos, thousands of them.  Back-stories are related along with additional information supplied by readers.

http://blankonblank.org/ - Interviews that journalists have done are re-mastered and re-worked to provide an enriched listening and viewing experience.  There are many great interviews archived on this site.

http://www.fastcoexist.com/  - All sorts of new, interesting ideas are presented with a bright, vivid user interface.  Additional tabs on the site are pages for design, creation and cutting edge computer code lab work.  

http://maps.google.com/intl/en/help/maps/streetview/gallery/ - Google’s street view gallery offers a catalogue of street views. Not all the views are of streets however; pictures of the Grand Canyon and the world’s highest peaks are included.

http://laphamsquarterly.org/ - Scholarly, eclectic and engaging; this quarterly publication is curated by Lewis Lapham, long associated with Harper’s.

http://www.mnh.si.edu/vtp/1-desktop/ - Take a virtual visit of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.  You can visit exhibits, room by room. The clarity is stunning.

 

http://stackexchange.com/sites - Have a question? This aggregator site brings together over 100 Q & Sites to allow you to get help with any question you may want answered.

http://www.languageisavirus.com/ - A great site for creative writers.  There are all sorts of prompts, games and exercises.

http://ctrlq.org/screenshots/ - This site takes screenshots of web pages and offers a downloadable file ready to save to your desktop.  It’s a very convenient way to save a full web page image.

http://www.printwhatyoulike.com/ - This site can work hand-in-hand with the one above.  It allows you to modify a web site image so you can print any parts of a web site you’d like.  A little experimentation lets you see the power of this site.

http://publicdomainreview.org/ - Every day, plenty of media content enters into the public domain. These materials can be freely used by educators, and there is plenty here to choose from. It’s a quirky and interesting site, and potentially curricularly valuable.

Technology Skills: What will be needed by GSB graduates?

   I've been giving some thought as to what technology skills GSB seniors should have as they make the transition to college.  As I began to create a list, I realized it's surprisingly difficult. The difficulty, of course, rises from the the rapidity of technological change coupled with my inability to accurately predict the future.
   If, for instance, I was creating this list in 2009, I would not have included an ability to manage a cloud storage account.  Four short years later, it seems to me that this is a very important skill to have.  In fact, it was only in the year 2009 that I first heard the term "cloud" used in a technology context.  
   In no particular order, here's my working list as of today:

   1. Create and edit digital audio content
   2. Create and manage a blog
   3. Create an infographic
   4. Create a film that you have edited
   5. Create a screen capture tutorial
   6. Create a screencast
   7. Use polling software to create a survey and analyze results
   8. Use file sharing tools to share documents with remote users
   9. Create a multimedia presentation
   10. Create a web site
   11. Create and manage a cloud storage account


   What's left out? Those skills that I believe are easy fairly simple for most students and those that are largely for the tech aficionados.  The simple skills include using a touchscreen tablet, maintaining an email account, completing a Word document, etc. Skills that may be a bit too challenging for an expectation of commonplace usage include code writing and working with software to create interactive visualizations.

Care to weigh in? In terms of technology skills, what do you believe will serve our students well as they look ahead to life after GSB?  Feel free to post a comment below.