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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?

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I would have to say one of my favorite tools that Google has bundled with their Gmail service has been the Google alerts. Google alerts are really nothing more than predefined daily searches of the web. What’s nice is that with Google alerts any topic that’s of interest to me on the web will be neatly condensed into an email and given to me in my inbox every morning. So whether it’s a few authors that I like to keep up with or searches related to my job I can always find new and interesting articles, blog posts, videos and more on the web. What I like is that it takes the short description of an RSS feed and allows me the flexibility to adapt it to whatever my interests are. Below are some pictures of how I use the alerts. I’ve also set up filtering and labeling in Gmail to be able to easily organize and manage the alerts in one place.

Lately, one can hardly go an evening without seeing on the news how some breach in data security occurred. Even my own beloved Alma Matter has had problems losing data in unencrypted devices like flash drives. As a result here at TTU we’ve begun looking at ways of dealing with this problem by implementing more stringent encryption policies. Currently the discussion is still going on but in the near future I imagine that we will be seeing a much greater emphasis not only password protection but data encryption. In the spirit of looking for free and open source alternatives rather than paid ones I began looking at TrueCrypt for personal use and experimentation at work. So far I’ve been very impressed. TrueCrypt offers incredible ease of use and security. Among the many features included are travel drive encryption, whole disk encryption as well as simple encrypted “containers” or folders. From what I’ve read and seen so far the implementation is very user friendly and provides a great deal of flexibility.

There are a lot of implications when you start using encryption. For example what do you do when people use it for illegal purposes like the case of United States v. Boucher. Another related issue is the use of key logging software to capture passwords for encryption software. These issues will continue to be a played out and tested both in the schools, workplace, and courts for some time to come.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Jing then let me introduce you. Jing is a free screen capture utility. What makes it so wonderful to me is that it’s relatively simple to use yet does exactly what you need it to. There’s no frills but then again that’s not what it’s built for. For serious screen captures I’ll stick to Captivate and Camtasia but for tech support and simple screen grabs Jing is my new best friend. Jing places itself neatly at the top of your monitor. When you’re ready to use it just click and drag the area you want to record. You can choose either .png images or .swf videos. When your finished you can choose to save it, upload it to your server, or places it on flickr or screencast.com. It also has a wonderful feature where you can choose to have the file automagically sent to your clipboard so you can paste it into an email or blog. What’s nice is that when I’m doing tech support or helping a faculty member I can very quickly screen capture my solution, upload it to my server, and paste the link in an email all within a few seconds. Not even the big boys can give me response times like that. I’ve played with it a little and put together a short video displaying the Mythbuntu project I’ve been working on. You can check it out at the link below. The video playing in the screen capture won’t be very smooth due to the lower frame rate of the grab but it isn’t too bad.http://www.tntech.edu/ilearn/jing/mythtv.swf