Web Applications Assignment

The following are the 4 professional and 2 personal web applications that I chose to review.

My 4 Professional Choices:
1. http://www.easybib.com/
2. http://disposablewebpage.com/
3. http://www.flowchart.com/
4. http://www.nvu.com/

My 2 Personal Choices:
1. http://www.google.com/calendar/render —sharing, weather
2. http://picasa.google.com/web/mac_tools.html

My 4 Professional Choices
When finding my professional web applications I chose to focus on sources that I could envision using with Elementary classes or small groups. Generally, my criteria consisted of being easy to use and navigate for Elementary students to use. I believe my first two choices really shine in this regard. Easybib.com and Disposablewebpage.com seem very directed and concrete in the steps needed to format a bibliography source or make a temporary web page. I can envision 3-6 grade Elementary students easily navigating this site with initial assistance and independently in subsequent attempts. Since it functions as an interactive web page there are no issues of installing or running software directly on your computer. The user interface for both programs seems very direct and intuitive with high lighted open text boxes and “click here for…” messages linked to further information. Both programs performed as stated, I could see how to easily format and cut past bibliography resources from Easybib.com and I also created a sample disposable web page at: http://disposablewebpage.com/turn?page=XObKEwrlC5

I could see using Easybib.com with Elementary students who are doing a basic report with a few resources or who are simply learning about APA and MLA styles for documenting sources appropriately. Traditional thought would pose that a teacher first give the order or formula for the bibliography style and let the students manually find the information and plug in the information. This program still necessitates that the students find and plug in the information in the appropriate field, however it basically takes care of formatting the various components. I do not view the automatic formatting as a negative trait as many activities could be done with students to decipher how Easybib.com formatted various sources. For example students could be required to use Easybib.com to cut and paste their sources into their report while also labeling each component such as author’s name, title, publisher, page numbers, volume, and etc… I believe I will use and recommend this resource to other teachers in the future, because of how it so easily formats a variety of sources into MLA and APA formats. I would suspect that no person has the format for every source memorized, and this site emphasizes the important fact that knowing where to look to find information can often be easier than knowing all necessary facets of the required information.

I could also envision using Disposablewebpage.com in requiring Elementary students to publish a final report or creative writing piece. This would seem to be an easy and painless way to publish a student’s writing on a broader scale that would allow friends and family members from across the world to validate an Elementary student. The novelty of publishing a temporary web page may provide the essential motivation for a student to bring out his/her best writing and encourage greater parent support/involvement. I believe I will use and recommend this as a resource to other teachers in the future because it provides an easy to use, fast, and painless way to create temporary web pages.

http://www.flowchart.com/ was much harder and advanced to use in comparison to the previous two web pages mentioned, however I can envision using this with upper Elementary students with guidance, however it does offer some logistical challenges in that one must register with a valid email address before being allowed to access the flowchart’s features. I suppose a teacher might be able to bypass this logistic if flowchart.com would all student users to log in using the teacher’s user name and password. This site was not chosen for it’s ease of access, but for it’s potential to help upper elementary students to outline and categorize their thoughts and writings into understandable flow charts.

I did not feel that the interface was intuitive enough for most upper Elementary students to navigate independently. However, with direct guidance and teacher modeling I believe that an upper Elementary student could successfully make an independent flowchart on a topic of his/her choosing. After logging into the site one is offered choices on what type or style of flowchart is desired. Once these choices are made one can begin to play with rearranging the graphics and text of many of the models to choose from. However, I did find that manipulating and changing the graphic boxes and text within the models proved to be a bit tedious and frustrating. Often the mount of text I experimented with overflowed out of the small graphic shapes that were meant to contain it. It could take a lot of effort for Elementary students to think of succinct text titles that accurately describe their ideas while also fitting into the flow chart graphic boxes. I do not believe this site would be the easiest to lead a group of upper Elementary students, however with considerable practice I believe it or a similar site could prove to be very helpful in demonstrating a student’s critical thinking and analysis skills. The program does perform as stated, but not without much time and tinkering. I don’t envision using this site with many students or recommending it to colleagues until I either gain more confidence with it or find another similar site that is more easily navigated. However, I do see great potential with this site in being able to help students visually demonstrate their thought/analyzation process in a flow chart form.

The fourth program I chose to review is a web authoring program called Nvu (http://www.nvu.com/). Unlike the other web based programs I reviewed, this program must be downloaded and installed and is currently available for Linux, Windows, and Macintosh platforms. My reasons for choosing Nvu were primarily based on my personal and professional interests in gaining knowledge on how to create web pages. My primary interest in using Nvu would be in creating personalized web pages for specific lessons I plan to teach, however advanced upper Elementary students may benefit from a basic use of Nvu. Nvu is a “What You See is What you Get” or WYSIG web authoring program that aims to greatly simplify the process of web creation. That said, I still believe it would take considerable time to gain the experience needed to create and post a well created web page. This could be used with student to introduce them to the concepts of web authoring, however I would envision a polished web site would take considerable time and much motivation for the average Elementary student to complete. An accompanying logistical issue would also be to determine how/where to post created web pages to the Internet. Nvu simply helps create the html files necessary for a web page, but does nothing to provide an Internet host, although it “Publish” button which prompts you to provide the necessary independent hosting information needed to upload the pages to your host provider.

I found Nvu to be generally be intuitive and similar to formatting and working with Microsoft Word. While I have yet to test Nvu’s limits I found it to generally meet any potential professional or personal interest I may have to create a web page. I would like to continue to become familiar with Nvu and gain confidence with using this program so that I might become a resource to others seeking web page authoring assistance. The fact that Nvu is an open source and easy to use web authoring program that is available for Linux, Windows, and Macintosh makes it a tempting alternative to commercial web authoring tools.

My 2 Personal Choices
My two personal web application choices included enhancing my Google calendar page with weather, Olympic Trails TV schedules, phases of the moon, and Tour de France schedules. I also downloaded a photo sharing application plug-in from Picasa.

I selected these two applications because I wanted to find some web applications that would be useful, meaningful, and easy to use. Since I am all ready familiar with and use Google for many web searches, Gmail, and RSS reader…I decided to expand my Google usage further by developing my Google calendar. Once logged into my Google calendar page I found it very easy to search for and apply new calendar options into my personal calendar that may interest me. The Google calendar interface is very intuitive, I can add or search for new events simply by clicking on “Add” and typing in a query or selecting from many suggested choices. The Calendar does perform as stated and makes it convenient to make your calendar public to others or add other public calendars to yours. It also does a great job at offering a huge variety of suggested calendars that you might want to add to your calendar. I was disappointed however that more information could not be given with some of the Google calendar entries. For example, when I applied the “2008 Olympic TV Trail Schedule” I was expecting to find information leading me to what TV channel I might find the programming on, but I could not find this information there. Likewise when I added the “”Tour de France” schedule I would have liked to see links to resources that tell more about each days stage or what is expected for future days and routes.

In short though, I am happy with the simple performance of Google calendar and it’s ability to share and aggregate a variety of calendars. I would like to become more comfort in using Google calendars and slowly wean myself from using my current standard which is Macintosh’s iCalendar. I believe the primary feature benefit of Google calendar is the ability to share my calendar with others and add their calendar information to mine. I will continue to use Google calendars to supplement my iCalendar and I will try to gain more experience in sharing my calendar with other friends.

My second personal choice web application was to install a photo sharing application for Macintosh called Picasa which can be found at: http://picasa.google.com/web/mac_tools.html . I decided to try Picasa because I have heard good reports from many of my friends who have already started using it successfully. Being a Mac user I was happy to find that they offer a Mac compatible version so now I really had no excuse for not dabbling with this photo sharing software. Once I downloaded and installed the Picasa for Mac plug in I found that it easily and very discreetly integrated with iPhoto, in which I currently have all my pictures stored and managed on my computer. In a matter of a few clicks I found I could easily upload pictures directly from my iPhoto program into Picasa. This seamless and discreet integration increased my opinion of Picasa from the start. Had I known more about Picasa about 12 months ago I may have forgone paying for a .Mac account which affords some of the same seamless uploading from iPhoto to an internet site. I will continue to experiment with Picasa primarily because I love it’s seamless integration into iPhoto. A free photo sharing site that enhances a product I already know and am familiar with (iPhoto) is hard to beat. I also see that Picasa offers options to upload to one’s blogspot account. Surely as I increase my familiarity with a these programs these options will only spur me on in higher levels of use.