A couple of software doo-dads for winter 2008 teaching

As sabbatical lite continues, I come across things that might be good software to incorporate into teaching in the winter term. That is slightly up in the air, but I know I am teaching English 516, and it looks like it’s going to be online again. This is good news for me because I thought the online version ultimately turned out great last winter, and it might aid and abed my quasi-sabbatical strategies.

Anyway, both of these software doo-dads come from a tech-rhet discussion. The first is Google Page Creator, which is a so-so web page editor (and it’s so-so since it hide the code, etc.). It’s a tool to at least check out, and it is possible to upload more traditional HTML and CSS documents. Since it hosts up to 100 MB of stuff, it might be a pretty worthwhile alternative to the puny amount of space from EMU. And actually, combine that with Blogger and Google video and/or YouTube and you’ve got a whole Google-verse of web 2.0 goodness!

The other cool thing is an MIT project/product called Scratch, which is described as “a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.” They claim it is something for ages 8 and up, so it might be something I can figure out. But I’ll have to worry about that later– pesky book and research, doncha know.

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