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Some time ago I came across this video here. Scientist Johnny Lee used the Nintendo Wii remote control to create his own virtual white board. Now I’ll be honest when he did this I thought I have got to try this. So being the gracious scientist he is he open sourced the code for connecting the wii to a computer. This has since taken off on the web and turned into a fairly active project. You can check out that project here. I found the mac version of the software and promptly downloaded it. All that was left was to build my IR pen to send the signals to the remote. So that adventure started today. Below are the pictures of what I’ve got so far. It is working and I can use it like a white board. I did a little demonstration for some colleagues and had some fun along the way. I haven’t finished the case for it yet to pretty up the packaging but you get the idea. What’s neat about the project is that with less than $100 and even far less than that will a few parts readily available you could have a fully functioning white board for a computer. Forget paying $2000+ for one I would rather build it on my own anyways. By the way the cold heat soldering iron is by far the greatest invention ever. It’s truly amazing. I know there are some die hards out there that will think I’m crazy but I don’t care. If you’re interested in where I got my information from there’s a nicely compiled place here.

Recently Google updated some features in its documents software. In case you haven’t been introduced Google has made free to anyone the ability to write documents, create powerpoint like presentations and even build excel like spreadsheets online. Recently they added some new features to their excel spreadsheet software that I’m very excited about. Go check them out.

1. You can now use the Trendalyzer software purchased from Gapminder to graph time data. This is a very nice flash animation that lets you show how data changes over time. It’s really one of those things that you have to see it to understand how cool it is. There are some great videos over at ted.com where a guy uses them to talk about developing countries.
2. The ability to create forms that people can fill out online. The data from those forms is stored in the Google spreadsheet. We’ve already begun to use it to organize our data and to build forms for people to use in registering for events. With the added reporting and sorting features out jobs just became a whole lot easier. No longer are we having to hand code such forms for instructors.

A while back I wrote about the use of FreeNAS as the software we used for our network attached storage system where I work. This was where we shared files and did backups of our documents. I liked its ease of use but over time I’ve noticed some quirks about it that I didn’t quite like. I won’t got into too much detail but using it with Windows machines sometimes meant having to do weird things to make the files read/write for everyone besides the owner. Other than that and some other minor issues when I was using Windows Vista it worked like a charm. Now we are taking some time to redo our setup and we’re going to be trying Openfiler. I’m going to be using a raid 1 hardware setup with two 500 gig drives and we’ll see what kind of performance we get out of it. After looking it over it looks like a little more configuration but a lot more granular control. I’ll post in the future how it goes.

I wrote about this last year before changing web hosting companies and just now got around to bringing this post over to my new blog. For sometime now I’ve been using Google’s co-op tool to create customized searches. When I was tasked with creating a repository of tutorials for our e-learning software I needed a way to make it quickly search-able of both the website and our expanding wiki site. So I turned to Google, like I do for so many things, to see what they had to offer. What I found was a wonderful way to make customized searches. Google coop lets you specify exactly which items are safe for the search engine to use. I control which sites it crawls and in what format it gives the results to the students. So far I couldn’t have been more pleased. As I began to play with this more I realized what a great tool this could be for educators of all content areas. Now instructors can choose to create customized searches that are appropriate for the students to use. So if you’re a history teacher looking to create a portal for students to search the web with this is your answer. If you’re a Literature teacher that’s asking the students to write about poetry here’s your chance to create a custom Poetry search. This search can be integrated into wikis, blogs, or any old web page you might want to create.

So I stumbled upon a great little tool today called ZoomIt. ZoomIt allows the user to zoom in and annotate on a specific portion of the computer screen. I wrote recently about how I’ve been using Jing to record videos and images from my screen for help desk questions from instructors. Jing allows you to annotate a picture but provides no ability to annotate a video. This being it’s only real setback ZoomIt gives me greater control over what I’m recording and focusing on as well as the ability to annotate live. I’ve included some video below of me using it. I’ve just started playing with it today so I’m still working it out but you get the idea at least. What’s nice too is that with the tablet computers we use and support this works well with the pen touch interface. Did I mention it’s only 44K?

Video Link

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