Sandvox, a new web publishing tool

Sandvox is a new web publishing software tool for Macs (OS 10.4.3) \that's beta now but soon to be released. Alwin Hawkin's brief but enthuasistic review led me to download it, and, yes, it's beautiful! From the site:

Sandvox, for Mac OS X. "Dig in" and download our Beta today.

Sandvox: A powerful, playful new website creation tool, for Mac OS X (version 10.4.3 "Tiger" required). From Karelia Software — the developer of Watson®.

Instant Gratification. Sandvox makes website creation elegant, intuitive and fun. It's the Macintosh way — the way it should be: drag and drop content, watch your site take shape as you create it, and publish. Sandvox makes it easy to keep in touch via the Web with friends, family and customers.

Express Yourself. Sandvox will help you be more creative on the Web. Small business owners, show your customers your latest products and services. Authors, publish your stories. Photographers, share your libraries with the world. Families, keep your friends up to date with more than just a holiday letter.

There's More to Life than iLife. Sure, iWeb looks cool and similar to Sandvox in many ways, but it's just a toy. Can you afford to tie yourself to .mac? Not everybody wants, or needs, a .mac account — especially businesses who need their own domain name. iWeb has very limited choices for designs or pages; Sandvox will be extensible. iWeb provides no opportunity for custom HTML content when your needs demand it; Sandvox fits the bill. If iWeb isn't quite enough for you, then dig into the Sandvox.

Some of the features you can see at the website are drag-and-drop web assembly, pagelets, podcasts, video, and photo integration, and more.

Podcasting in the classroom

Wesley Fryer (via Stephen's Web via Miguel Guhlin who speaks of the urgency in corporating technology in the classroom) has an excellent introductory article on integrating podcasts into the classroom. He concludes,

We need to get serious about educating today’s digital natives for the digital knowledge landscape of the twenty-first century. In many ways, the traditional, “transmission-based” educational model of the past is insufficient for the needs of today’s learners and employers. Classroom podcasts can provide engaging opportunities for students to develop desirable skills as digital storytellers and cutting-edge communicators. The price is right, and the benefits are plentiful. Isn’t it time you and your students started a classroom podcast?

For language learning, podcasts are a good tool for students to practice and revise a presentation.

Tech Tools for Learning

Will Richardson has an article, Tech Tools for Learning, published in Access Learning, which you can download from his recent posting here. His opening paragraph reads:

Over the last few years, our relationship with the Web has been changing dramatically. Simple new technologies like weblogs and podcasts are allowing us to not only create content like text, audio, and video more easily, they are also allowing us to publish and share that content on the Web with very little effort. Instead of a “read only” Web, we’re entering the age of the Read/Write Web, where contributing knowledge is as easy as consuming it. Being able to publish worldwide this easily does raise legal and ethical issues for educators to be aware of, but it also facilitates a whole range of new learning potentials for students and teachers in the classroom. Here is a quick look at some of the technologies that are changing the way educators think about and deliver instruction.

He has quite a bit of information on technology tools for education (RSS, blogs, wikis, podcasting, and streaming video with links) packed into 4 pages. Recommended.

New technologies and software

Via Educational Weblogs, here are some new technologies:

MediaTuner: a rich media RSS aggregator/player that handles text, podcasts, videocasts, etc. (free)
Blog.mac: a weblog editor designed for the Mac ($29.99)
Free vlog tutorial
mefeedia: an aggregator for videos

From Sudeep Bangal at Brilliant Ignorance (via XplanaZine): a list of essential freeware for PCs

Podcasting potential

For a variety of uses for podcasts, read Marc Fisher's "Podcasting Potential" in The Washington Post. Among the more unusual was the one for obituaries:

The need to have newspaper obituaries read to you via your iPod may not have struck you as an imperative for the new media technology, but audio obits nonetheless await your download at http://blogofdeath.com .

Podcasts: mainstrean and underground

Robert McMillan (Washington Post) writes about the paradox of podcasting.

Podcasting has done what no new technology that I'm aware of has ever accomplished: It's gone mainstream and underground at the same time.

Turning blog text into podcasts

A new software, Talkr, transforms blog text into podcasts. Talkr states:

"Our pitch is simple: we will convert your text-only blog into a podcast for free. We will monitor your blog every hour, and convert each new article into an mp3 audio file using the best speech synthesis software on the market. We will host those audio files and provide you with an RSS feed (and bandwidth) to make it easy for your readers to get access to your podcast."

According to Jeff White on Kairosnews,

"I took the couple minutes register, and the next thing I know...I was listening to posts from kairosnews.org being read to me in a quite pleasant voice. I was actually pretty impressed by the intonation skills the synthesizer had."

Podscope.com

Another of Pogue's articles mentioned Podscope.com, who has created "the first search engine that can find podcasts according to the words spoken during them."

iTunes and podcasting

David Pogue in The New York Times writes about Apple's software iTunes podcasting features bringing podcasts into the mainstream by making it easy to make your own podcast plus access to thousands of podcasts online.

Bookmarking software

There seems to be quite a bit of software available for tagging websites and images.

Furl stands for File URLs, and it's a web-based application for keeping track of interesting sites you've come across that you can access from any computer on the internet and also archive pages so you can read them later in your Furl account.

Mark Bernstein brought del.icio.us to my attention. It's a bookmarks manager and more. One neat application is the ability to paste snippets from another site onto yours. See the picture he does this with from the play "Amerika." Graham Stanley (via Will Richardson) has an entry on how to use del.icio.us with podcasts.

A manager for tagging just images is Wists.

Podcasters will be forgotten

On CNET news, billionaire founder of Broadcast.com and owner of the Dallas Mavericks Mark Cuban says podcasters will be forgotten.

Podcasting is right where streaming was about 10 years ago. Before you dive into podcasting as “the next big thing”, you would be wise to do some homework on how the streaming industry evolved.

Try to find any of the many that created original content for PSEUDO.com, TSN, EYADA.com, Broadcast.com and others that I have long forgotten.

There is a good chance that their history is your future.

He's talking about making money at it. Still, podcasting has great potential for ESL/EFL purposes.

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