This feature has a lot of potential for digital story telling. Teachers or students can create interactive stories that evolve with the reader’s every choice.

In fact, the Google Apps team emphasizes this possible use on that same blog post with the sample interactive adventure “The Hunt for the terrible Dr. von Schneider”. To interact with this story, just click this link and then click “Choose this template” on the next page. This will add the form to YOUR spreadsheets. Go to your http://docs.google.com account and open the “Copy of Choose your own adventure form” spreadsheet. Click “Form” and “Go to live form” on the tool bar. Voilà!

It is a short little adventure but it illustrates the concept fairly well.

Based on the Google Apps team’s post, as easy as 1, 2, 3:

1. To create a story, go to Google Docs and create a new form with an enticing choice at the beginning.

2. Check the box next to Go to page based on answer while editing the question. Select the corresponding pages they should be directed to based on their answer.

3. Users can be sent back to the same page after being split apart during the story. Under the Add Item menu, select Page break. Then, select what page you’d like your form respondents to be directed to under the drop down menu in the page break.

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Here are some highlights and resources from the presentation.

Resources and Ideas

• Apple Learning Interchange – http://ali.apple.com
• Learning in Hand – http://learninginhand.com
• iPods in Education Webcast – http://macenterprise.org
• iPods in Education: The Potential for Language Acquisition – http://e2t2.binghamton.edu/pdfs/ iPod_Lang_Acquisition_whitepaper.pdf

Unexpected Uses of the iPods

(http://www.oculture.com/2007/04/10_unexpected_u.html)

1. Train Doctors to Save Lives – American College of Cardiology indicates iPods are used to listen to recorded heart sounds to teach medical students how to better recognize different conditions 2. Bring Criminals to Justice – United States federal district court has started using iPods to hold copies of wiretap transmissions in a large drug-conspiracy case 3. Get Yourself Into Serious Shape – TrailRunner is a free program that helps you plan your route and then loads your iPods with maps, distances, and time goals

4. Tour Around Great Cities – iSubwayMaps lets you download subway maps from 24 major cities across the globe. They range from New York City, Paris, and Berlin to Moscow, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Audio tours of New York and Paris downloard Soundwalk narrated by a celebrity for $12.

5. Calculate the Right Tip – TipKalc helps you figure out the tip and grand total

6. Record Flight data – LoPresti Speed announced plans to use iPods as flight data recorders in light aircrafts (will have the ability to record over 500 hours of flight time data)

7. Throw a Meaner Curveball – Pitcher for the Houston Astros, started using video iPod to review pitching frame by frame to improved overall techniques 8. Learn Foreign Language – University students are using iPods to record lectures, take notes, and even create electronic flash cards 9. Memory Stick – save your Microsoft office files 10. Wikipedia – download one of the largest encyclopedias on your iPod (FREE)

More ideas from other practitioners can be found in the Apple Interchange Learning Community which I highlighted in a previous post.

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According to the blog “Open Source at Google”, the application was released with the intention of driving developers to develop Web applications with Google’s App Engine. The team encourages developers to look into the source code to find out how specific Web application development challenges were overcome. The team of developers at Google hopes CloudCourse to become a sort of poster child for App Engine.

But what can CloudCourse do? According to the developers:

Built entirely on App Engine, CloudCourse allows anyone to create and track learning activities. CloudCourse also offers calendaring, waitlist management and approval features.

CloudCourse is fully integrated with Google Calendar and can be further customized for your organization with the following service provider interfaces (replaceable components):

• Sync service – to sync CloudCourse data with your internal systems
• Room info service – to schedule classes in your locations
• User info service – to look up user profile (employee title, picture, etc)

The technologies used to develop CloudCourse are: App Engine, Django, Python and the Closure Javascript library. According to the team that developed it: should be a breeze to install…

Let me know (in the comments here) what your experience is like if you do try to use ClourCourse.

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I should've pursued my idea of a blog-to-book service a whole ago! . RT @mashable Wikipedia – Order Printed Books http://bit.ly/cUuvFX #

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I should've pursued my idea of a blog-to-book service a whole ago! . RT @mashable Wikipedia – Order Printed Books http://bit.ly/cUuvFX #

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This document explains how to unleash some new features on Google Documents (before they are rolled out to everyone by default).

Here are the set of features that were added and how to activate them (directly quoted from their website):

• Real time collaboration: See updates from other collaborators as they edit the document.
• Higher-quality imports: More consistent imports from your desktop into Google Docs.
• Chat with other collaborators: As you make your edits, you can chat with other document editors about the changes, from within the document.
• Ruler: Google documents have a ruler for setting margins, indentations, and tab stops.

If you’d like to try out these features and start creating documents using the new version of Google documents, just follow these steps:

1. Click the Settings link in the top-right of your Docs list.
2. Click the Editing tab.
3. Select the option labeled “Create new text documents using the latest version of the document editor.”

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