I missed this post a few days ago, but since school hasn’t started for everyone, especially many college students, I thought it was worth calling attention to.

There are a number of ways to improve a student’s life with tech explained here, and if you don’t mind Lifehacker constantly referring back to its own previous posts to illustrate their points, it’s a potentially helpful read.

Tools discussed (some examples detailed here) include note capturing (Qipit); software for taking your own notes (Microsoft Office’s OneNote); how to get cheaper textbooks; iPhone apps for students; Google Calendar; deals on Microsoft’s Office Ultimate for U.S. registered students; and the usefulness of USB sticks for portable computing.  Photo by Looking Glass.  Creative Commons license.

The Princeton Review surveys colleges to determine the “best” and once again partnered with PC Magazine, who provided the subset of tech questions, to determine the top 20 wired institutions.

They found “a vastly different landscape from what it was in 2006,” the last year surveyed.  Only eight colleges carried over to the list in 2008 and several who were not in the previous lineup appeared.

In terms of academics, I was amazed that three of the top 20 schools offer no online lectures at all (including Pomona, Bowdoin College, and Loyola College in Maryland).  A majority of schools are offering at least a few lectures online, but in some cases there are live webcasts or anytime downloads.  Kansas State University (2) leads the way with 76 to 99 percent of its lectures available online—the only school in the top 20 to make that claim.  Of course, “online lectures” is not really my idea of elearning, but perhaps the survey wasn’t designed to tap into the breadth and depth of online learning opportunities.

Thank goodness every single school in the top 20 says it offers training to its faculty to enhance what they offer students online.

Other measures of “wiredness” include student resources, infrastructure, and tech support.

I found the list itself very interesting, with results I wouldn’t have predicted.  Take a look at the complete article to learn about the survey’s methodology.

Firefox 3.0 to be released June 17
Mozilla developer center says that after more than 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, the much anticipated next version of Firefox will be ready for download on June 17.  This new version is purported to be faster and include a number of useful new features.

They are hoping for a Guinness world record-breaking download day.

Learn basic web design skills with video tutorials
Is an instructional video worth 10,000 words? 

Mashable highlights some video tutorials that show you right on your computer screen how to do just about anything you want.  Create your first website or your own WordPress theme.

Free Web conferencing tools useful for librarians
iLibrarian has collected a group of six Web conferencing applications that enable a presenter to host a Webinar or meeting with live video and audio, text chat, whiteboards, shared files, and even desktop sharing.

Web conferencing systems have been expensive and certainly beyond the every day uses that librarians might enjoy such as remote library instruction, hosting Webinars, and online meetings with library or community groups.

The tools include:

• VRooms
• Yugma 
• Wiziq
• Dimdim
• PalBee
• Vyew 

Free Web app tutorial sites
Web Worker Daily recommends four free tutorial sites especially for web developers.  Topics covered include photoshop, DreamWeaver, Adobe Premiere and Illustration, Excel, CSS, and more.

The sites include:

• TechTutor.TV
• FreelanceSwitch
• InPictures
• BMC PhotoArt 

Napster offers 6 million DRM-free MP3s
Napster has started offering its complete catalog of more than 6 million tracks in the MP3 format. 

Napster’s Web-based store, where you can purchase and download the tracks, is compatible with every operating system, and the MP3s can be played on any MP3 player, portable video player, or music cell phone.

The online and To Go subscription services for $12.95 or $14.95 per month, respectively, will continue and the music associated with a subscription will remain in the protected WMA format with the time-out capability.

Robin Good’s site gives us another useful group of visual communication tools and services — these to create presentations online, animate images and save them as GIFs, to take screenshots of any website automatically and more.

“The idea is to bring you any and all visual and video communication tools that can help you communicate more effectively online.”

They include:

• Picasion: Upload images and create personalized animated GIFs with them online
• Reflect-o-matic: Provide the URL of an image and create a reflection using 3 simple sliders
• ShrinkTheWeb: Online service takes screenshots of any web-page for free
• Daily Color Scheme:  Offers a downloadable daily color scheme that you can import and reuse in your design softwares (shown) 
• ColorToy 2.0: Generate a color scheme starting from an input color
• Imagery: Image search engine lets you browse results on a single page
• FontCubes: Archive of Web 2.0 typing fonts that you can download and use for any purpose

50 open source resources for online writers
I found an interesting group of open source applications for those of us who write online at iLibrarian.  Compiled by the folks at Job Profiles, the apps are organized by category and include:

• Word Processors
• Reference
• Organization
• Helpful Tools
• Web Tools

A look through the list showed me a few that I use with some regularity.  Notepad++ is an often used favorite, and I find myself regularly keying Launchy which I wrote about recently.  PDFCreator, one of the popular free PDF resources, and the ever useful FileZilla FTP are among those making an appearance.  Check them out.

Learning Webinar from WebJunction 
As someone who has long linked librarianship and education/training in my career, I was happy to see that WebJunction, an online community for library staff, is sponsoring a one hour “webinar” on June 10th, called Cultivating a Culture of Learning in the Library.  The elearning opportunity is free and closed captioned.

“In this webinar you will learn why you need to get your staff out of the classroom and instead focus on creating a culture of learning in your library,” they state.

Some of the points that will be explored…

• The differences between training and learning
• The benefits to libraries for creating a culture of learning
• The key elements of a learning organization
• Tips for creating a culture of learning in any size library

[via Librarian in Black] 

Free tools for visual communication and publishing
Here’s a interesting group of eight free, mostly online, tools from Robin Good to help you edit images, do a screencast, generate buttons, and upload videos to a number of services with one click.
 
Developing an improved online environment for educating computer users 
People who want to learn more about computer technology and solve problems they encounter on their systems currently have a wealth of forums to turn to such as mailing lists and newsgroups, official and unofficial documentation and more collaborative media, says Andy Oram at O’Reilly Radar.

He suggests that a community education environment should include:

• Easy access for adding questions and editing both questions and answers
• A suitable division of material into different types
• Extensive linking that not only helps people find information, but shows them a variety of pathways through related documents
• Support for combining questions, dividing questions into subquestions, and extracting material to make stand-alone pages
• Recognition of authorship
• An API that can be incorporated into tools of the users’ choice
• Push technology for people who want it
• Source control
• Integration with bug reports and feature requests
• Print-on-demand

 Everyday Mysteries is a great site for education, research and just plain fun, says askSam.  Did you ever wonder if you could fry an egg on the sidewalk if it’s hot enough?  Want to know how GPS works?  Check out questions –and answers – at the Library of Congresss Everyday Mysteries site.

Everyday Mysteries will help you get the answers to many of life’s most interesting questions through scientific inquiry.  It will also introduce you to the Library of Congress’ rich collections in science and technology.

All of the questions presented on the Web site were asked by researchers and answered by librarians from the Library’s Science Reference Services.  Search for an answer, browse by categories or ask a question.

Now you can add your own comments or subtitles in any language with Overstream, a video subtitle web app that has been around for a year. (See the happy birthday video for an example of how added captions look.) 

You can add subtitles to online videos, create captioned videos, video postcards, and video letters.  Sign up for a free account to use the Overstream Editor, store them on their server, and send the link to your friends.

YouTube, Google Video, MySpace Video and Dailymotion are supported now and more are planned.  A personal RSS Overstream Publication Feed link is available on each user’s Profile Page.  Subscribe to it to receive all the public overstreams created by the particular user.

Lifehacker says it’s a nice replacement for the similar but defunct Mojiti.  There are tutorials and a FAQ here. 

Wiki for free e- and e-audio books, educational information
Librarian Chick has a wiki containing a list of free resources for anyone in a learning mode, and especially students and educators.

Search for free audio books, ebooks, and text books here and visit the Learning Center here.  [via The Distant Librarian]

Pageflakes in education
Pageflakes, a popular start page, has a Teacher Edition which can be used as a practical tool for interaction between teachers and students. 

You can use the Teacher template to put together your own page(s) by adding and deleting “Flakes” that you select from a gallery of choices (see some below).  The page is private until you choose to share it with students and/or colleagues.

Functions include calendars, to-do lists, photo and video links, grade trackers, educational bookmarks and many more. [via LibrarianInBlack]