Mint.com
The best free way to manage your money
Sunday, March 21, 2010
BP11_2010033_Link to my comment on Josh's Blog
VoiceThread can do so much:
record voice, comment via phone or leave drawing or text marks on image.
However, you can view my static comment on VoiceThread blog by following the link to
Image courtesy of Voicethread; http://www.voicethread.com
Saturday, March 20, 2010
BP10_2010033_Link to my comment on Q's Blog
or
go and visit Q's Xtranormal movie and my comment to his blog by following the link to
Image courtesy of Xtranormal.com
BP9_2010033_Web2.0Tool3_Mint.com
Another exciting week, another exciting tool. This time the best 100 Web 2.0 tools link took me to my private life of budgeting and finance. I came across Mint.com and was shocked how much this tool can actually do for you. Mint.com came from creators of Quicken and if you do your finances, mint is a must. First of all, it is free to join. Second of all, they never list your full name or any personal information, so your identity is secure. The site uses the same encryption as any US bank. Besides being safe and secure the site offers very easy budgeting with helpful graphs where you can see your spending. It also shows you timely alerts that can be read via mobile access (e-mail, text and even iPhone application). What more, you not only can see what is going on in your financial world, mint.com helps you improve your finances by finding savings for you that lead to reducing your debt. This is done by advertisement alerts that are personalized to your settings. If Mint.com finds a better deal for you, it will let you see it, it is up to you to switch or stay with your current provider. It will calculate and show you the savings over 1, 2 and 3 years so you can see and compare. Mint.com helps you manage your budget but also understand investing, provides credit cards advice and saves you money. It helps you manage paying off your debt, student loans, save for retirement, or spend less on eating out. It will even help you buy a car. Mint.com paired up with Turbo tax to make sure you are ready for tax season. The account takes care of your savings, credit cards, checking, Cd's, brokerage, auto insurance, 401K rollover and IRA. If you ask me this is all money management I can think of. They do it all. And to top it off, besides personal banking and budget managing the site hosts a blog dedicated to current financial issues. It is a top pick of Money magazine and editor’s Choice Award of PC Magazine. What are you waiting for?
Images courtesy of Mint.com; http://www.mint.com
Monday, March 15, 2010
BP8_2010032_One Minute Message #1
Ready to have fun with math?
Play the One Minute Commercial to find out the details
and see if this tool can enhance your child's learning.
CarrotSticks logo courtesy of www.CarrotSticks.com
Saturday, March 13, 2010
BP7_2010032_Link to my comment on Karmiko's Blog
I thought I remembered my Username and Password....
Well, no worries. Karmiko says, with Vidoop
everything is securely stored under images!
Go to Karmiko's Blog to learn more and to see my comment.
Image courtesy of Full Sail Online
http://online.fullsail.com/index.cfm
BP6_2010032_Link to my comment on Jeanine's Blog
o no! The folders are empty!
Everything is on Google Docs!
Learn more about Google Docs
Photo courtesy of flickr.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kasaa/2885151505/
Blog5_1010032_Web2.0Tool_WIZIQ
My current lifestyle and work environment are not very Web 2.0 tool friendly. I read many posts from my classmates and really tried hard to find a tool that would make my work easier. Somehow. I thought about my work, then I thought about school. My AR project came aboard and I thought since I am creating a video tutorial which will be embedded in Powerpoint presentation I might use one of the Web 2.0 tools for sharing PP slides. Once the project is completed I can share the slides with my critical friends from work to help me evaluate and make final finishes without even calling a meeting to share my files. That would be very convenient! I was very excited to come across WIZIQ application. In this application you can upload many documents, from word documents, to spreadsheets to Powerpoint presentations to movies. Almost all formats are included. Not waiting too long I had uploaded my Brain Analogy presentation from MLT class - it was created on my Macbook. Meanwhile, my son was creating a PP presentation on earthquakes for his science class on his PC laptop. After uploading my PP I was quite disappointed. My headlines did not align and my embedded little animation did not even show, leaving my final slide with plain old white space right in the center. After few tries with different extension I still didn't give up and decided it must be the mac vs. windows incompatibility. I uploaded my son's PP and was just as disappointed, his embedded animations did not animate in WIZIQ. But at least he got the image frame (his headlines we not aligned the same as viewed through Powerpoint). I still didn't give up. I uploaded the PP as a movie - another huge disappointment. The movie came with terrible resolution, there was no way of any edits other than sharing and tagging abilities. At this point I decided that WIZIQ is maybe not the best tool. I went on searching for other Web 2.0 tools that share PP presentations. I ended up on slideshare.net. After about 3 hours of the same experiences I have to say that the file sharing tools online are great, only if you're sharing less complicated files with plain text, steady images or flattened pdfs. The sites are fantastic in letting you use the space, upload quite fast and are free and very easy to navigate (I had no problems finding my way around the sites). Unfortunately, if you are dealing with more complicated original files, you're still stuck running around with a flash drive and transfering files. Another option is to call your friends to your computer to view with you. Which in some cases might not be such a bad idea - you can count that as the social interaction and keep such needed balance in your life.Before typing this blog I thought of finding a better, easier tool and concentrating on positive influence of Web 2.0 tools which are a plenty. However, on a second thought the assignment did not specify to positively comment on your findings; it said to use it to create something for your learning environment and describe the findings. And that is exactly what I did. I also thought that if my classmates see my frustration from tonight they might have some other suggestions and solutions for sharing more complicated Powerpoint presentations on the web.
WIZIQ logo, courtesy of WIZIQ.com
Monday, March 8, 2010
BP3_2010031_Web2.0Tool1CarrotSticks
There are few of us in the Educational Media Design program who do not have much to do with education and have to look at some assignment from a different perspective. I am a graphic designer with occasional one-on-one training requests. My department is very limited to Web 2.0 tools. I work in a server based/intranet environment with sensitive information that cannot not be shared with the outside world until approved. Any application or free trial downloads have to be approved by IS. There is not much room to improve my current work environment using Web 2.0 tools
However, my life is more than just my work. I have 2 school age kids. They both attend very technology-oriented school district. The school uses computers in the learning process but I noticed that it mostly helps in Reading and Writing classes. I thought that maybe I should look for Web 2.0 tools that could improve my daughter’s struggle with math. She likes math in general and solves the problems but she always complains that math is boring; either too hard to do or too easy to even bother.
Screen shots, courtesy of CarrotSticks, retrieved from http://www.CarrotSticks.com
Looking at the attached Web 2.0 applications I came across Carrot Sticks. This math teaching application for 1-5th grade students is very fun to use. First and foremost, the application does not allow full names or “free chat” so the children are safe online. You can also sign up as a guest and stay totally anonymous. You start up with designing your own character and then go to start your challenge. You can play alone or accept challenge by any opponent who is currently online.
During my 15 minutes with the game there were average of 7-10 kids online. I challenged few of them and was challenged by two. This application is free for addition problems and costs $5.95/month to use with conjunction of subtraction, multiplication and division. Teachers can have all operations free of charge if using in a classroom environment. Each problem category is divided into 25 levels designed by Stanford School of Education. I used the free addition feature and went form level 1 to 22 to discover the difficulty progress. The levels progressed in difficulty and problems varied in nature so the game was not boring. I made few mistakes as the “lessons” do not allow to “carry over” digits in your head. This is where I lost a few carrots. After gaining appropriate amount of carrots, the character is moved to the next level. The message pops in asking for parents e-mail to send a certificate of completion. I did not sign up to receive the certificate but I think it is a quite rewarding feature. At the end of my testing I went to see my progress report. It consisted of my carrot score, playing time, number of problems solved, and wins, looses and ties form my challenges with opponents. The highest opponent’s score was over 39,000 carrots. Some lower scores were in a range of 20-50.
I would recommend this game to be played at school in the 1-5th grade. Higher-grade children could very easily get through first levels and start real practice on harder problems. This game could easily substitute endless practice papers that are more boring and look all the same. The game is very colorful and appealing; it is way more engaging than black and white printouts my daughter has to fill in during math class or homework time. Being able to challenge others to beat them in time adds the motivation angle to the math learning in lower grades.
References
CarrotSticks (2010). Retrieved March 8, 2010 from http://www.carrotsticks.com/
Sunday, March 7, 2010
BP4_2010031_RSS Feeds
My job is very internal and does not require networking as much as other jobs do. After researching for what would and could be beneficial to my current job I came to conclusion that following feeds would be good to check regularly for my own benefit.
CNN news - following news at least; I don't have time to watch TV so checking out what is going on in the world would give my design background a good base.
eLearning Technology - I found a very interesting blog about Corporate Training. What is new, what is considered by companies; since my AR project eveolves around corporate training and use of media in corporate training, it made sense to include this feed.
howdesign - I used to subscribe the magazine many years ago when I was working heavily with freelance clients and needed to stay on top of what is hot in design world; this is a place for new trends and discoveries.
Educational Technology and Edutopia came as a natural choice of career shift from design to educational design; I am not much familiar with educational aspect of design and these feeds will help to fill in the gaps.
Last but not least the Official Google Blog came as a choice to stay on top of Web 2.0 news from Google. This feed would keep me up to date on new findings, new gadgets and tested aps from Google that I can further use in my iGoogle page.
Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/33097393@N06/3085491268
Saturday, March 6, 2010
BP2_2010031_EduUses4Blogs
When I hear the word blog, I automatically think social gathering. Many blogs are created for people to network with others. People are looking for others with the same interests, believes, hobbies; they are looking to express their ideas and connect with others. When I asked my son, who is 13, what is the blog and what it is used for, he said, he thinks of a blog as a tool to “get information from people who might know more than you”.
The questions formed in this assignment, how blogs can help education or a business, gave me another perspective on the blog. I started my research and found out that it is more common that I first thought to use blog as a learning tool. Searching many sites I came across many uses for blogs for teachers. You can teach writing, critical thinking, lead discussions; all using blogs as a medium. According to Don Crowther’s (2007) 101PublicRelations.com “Blogging is sweeping the Internet. It’s estimated that there are at least 8 million blogs in the US alone, 32.5 million worldwide.” He further states that most blogs are indeed individual, geared more towards personal information, expression of self as daily or weekly journals. However there is an increasing number of blogs used for networking and advertising your own business. His website lists many reasons why almost every business should use a blog. Some examples include: inexpensive and fast to publish, immediate with updated information, used as wide variety of content, great to position your company in the eyes of customers and quick and easy to push content to sites/ blogs of others. He lists blogs most important role as “blogs convert into sales and profits”. He also lists 2 books full of additional information that could be beneficial to any business that is starting out and looking for exposure. With the Internet growing every day, I believe blogs are way beyond the personal information and diaries. I think blogs are a growing way of new advertisement and self-promotion for many businesses.
Crowther, D. (2007). How To Build Your Business Using Blogs. Retrieved March 3, 2010 from, http://101publicrelations.com/bloggingforbusiness.html
Image courtesy of flickr.com retreived from http://flickr.com/photos/declanjewell/517966692.html
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
BP1_2010031_iGoogleScreenShots
Hello,
As I am setting up this account I have to say that I was having a lot of fun setting up gadgets in iGoogle. I am not used to having my computer as the primary reference for follow-ups. I still use the pen and paper method and have a printed copy of the calendar. However the main problem I have with the printed copy is the fact that you cannot stretch the assigned space for that certain date that so much is needed to be noted under. To list in iGoogle or post-it note can hold so much more... Maybe this is the time of change for me. The desktop calendar out, the iGoogle in....
Attached below please find the screen shots from my first assignment of my ETC class - the screen shots from setting up my iGoogle page.
Monika
iGoogle AR/CBL tab:
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