Was uploading some photos to my PicasaWeb album and noticed that someone had managed to find my photos and had left a comment! Yay me!

It didn’t bother me much that the comment was in what seemed to be Spanish, or that for all I knew it could have been spam. But I did what any curious geek would do: I ran it through a translator.

ES UNA HERMOOOOSURA ..
DE PERRITO =)
PUPPY,
EL DEL ANUNCIO DE PAPEL PARA LIMPIARSE EL CULO

becomes:

IT IS A HERMOOOOSURA. OF SMALL DOG =) PUPPY, THE ONE OF THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF PAPER TO CLEAN THE ASS

Of course, this is NOT a satisfactory translation. It’s almost offensive at first glance - like they could be saying he should be used to wipe someone’s butt. Or something.

But I persevered. I tried Babelfish with much the same result.

Hermoooosura didn’t translate, and I guessed it might be spelt strangely - like with to many o’s for instance. But Google wouldn’t translate ‘hermosura’ either. A quick search brought up this page and this discussion though, which says it means ‘incredible beauty’. So I believe ‘hermoooosura’ is better translated as ’sooooo beautiful’ - like a young girl might say about a tiny white dog.

Realising that she was probably being nice, I kept trying to understand the translation. Further poking around in translations sites helped me realise that ‘anuncio’ while translated as ‘announcement’ can also be translated ‘advertisement’ or ‘ad’. I then quickly realised ‘paper to clean the ass’ (papel para limpiarse el culo) is actually TOILET PAPER! And it all falls into place. This is my rough translation:

It is soooo beautiful and small =)
It looks like the puppy off the toilet paper ad.

What a lovely thing for a complete stranger to say! And how fantastic that someone I’ve never met - who doesn’t speak my language - can leave me a message, and I actually have a chance to understand her. To actually communicate across languages!

I have since learned that ‘perrito‘ can be translated ‘doggie’ which is even cuter! and ‘limpiarse‘ conjures images of flossing! How marvellous is language?!

This intro is aimed at people who can use the Internet, and are comfortable using the last version of Microsoft’s Internet browser: Internet Explorer 6 (also known as IE6).

You may know, a browser is any program that allows you to view - or browse - web pages. Because Internet Explorer is the most widely used browser, some of you probably know it only as “the Internet”. It looks like this:

and you usually start it with this icon:

In with IE7

Recently, Microsoft released an updated version of their Internet Explorer browser called Internet Explorer 7 (or IE7). It fixed a lot of problems that IE6 had, and looks a lot prettier. More than the superficial changes though, it adopted a lot of excellent little features that make Internet surfing safer and easier. It’s these changes that I’m going to explore in this article, so you can learn what makes IE7 different and get used to using it in your school or at home.

What’s different?

The first thing you notice when you start it up is that the tool bar with all the menu options is gone

(actually you may notice the spiffy new icon first).

All the same commands are still here, just hidden. To access most of the old menu items, you now click ‘Tools’ on the second bar.

Most of the common functions you may have used in IE6 are placed in this spot. For instance, you can go quickly to your homepage , access your saved RSS feeds (more on this in another article), or use the one-click-print option . However, if you miss the menu bar you can bring it back by clicking ‘Tools’ then ‘Menu Bar’ (or simply pressing the ‘Alt’ key on your keyboard brings it back temporarily).

Some schools may have the tool bar turned off completely (disabling tool menus can stop tampering with settings), so check with your school’s computer technician if you don’t have this option.

Simplified

IE7 has a simplified set of icons for doing the most common tasks. The buttons are the same as those in IE6, but they have been made smaller and prettier, and in some cases moved. The forward and back buttons still take you forward and back, but now the common drop-down button next to them gives you a list of your most recently visited pages, and highlights your current position amongst them.

Next to this is the Address bar, that works in exactly the same way as it did previously - you type in a website address, you go to that website. The “Go” button from IE6 has become the “Refresh/Go” button. Now if you are at a page that is already open in the browser, the button will display as “Refresh” allowing you to re-load the page. If however you have just typed in a new page, the button changes to a ‘Go’ arrow , and if you click on it, it will take you to the page you just entered.

Finally, we have the ‘Stop’ button , which has changed from the stop sign button that used to be on the left-hand side of the address bar to a red ‘x’ on the right.

New search bar

Next to the address bar is the ‘Search bar’.

You can type a search term into the bar, and whatever search-engine is listed will perform your search for you. In this picture I have made Google my default search-engine, but it might be Microsoft’s ‘Live’ search for you or Yahoo. You can change the search engine by clicking the drop-down button beside the magnifying glass and clicking the search-engine you wish to use.

If you don’t have many options here you can choose ‘Find more providers’ from this menu and it will take you to a web page where you can set up more search providers.

The search bar is a very handy shortcut if you find yourself regularly searching Google or any other site. See your school’s technician if you want your favourite search engine listed here.

Faster Favorites

On the next line we have two buttons that handle your ‘Favorites’ (sorry about the American spelling).

Favorites (or bookmarks as they’re more commonly known) are links that you want to remember, so you can visit them in future without remembering the address. The first button opens your favorites in a little pop-out window and selecting a link from here closes the pop-out and takes you to the site. This is ideal if you want a quick way to access sites you visit regularly. If you need to browse your favorites more thoroughly though, you can click the ‘Pin’ button and the favorites pop-out will become a bar that stays at the side of your browser window.

If you’ve used them in IE6, adding and managing favourites is exactly the same in IE7 with one major difference - adding a favourite is as easy as clicking the second button (a star with a plus sign) and choosing ‘Add to Favorites’. You can also access the history of sites you’ve visited from the Favorites panel, and your saved RSS feeds (more on that in another article).

All new Tab Bar!

My favourite (I spell it right when I can!) part of the new Internet Explorer is the new ‘Tab Bar’

Next to the ‘Favorite’ buttons is a long shiny lozenge that can change the way you use the Internet . Similar to the task bar at the bottom of your screen, the tab bar opens up a new tab for each website you visit. However, instead of opening up multiple windows that you have to keep track of, every site you visit can be stored in a tab along this bar. It might sound like the ‘tabs’ have simply moved from below the window to above it, but trust me on this - having tabs in your browser is very useful.

You can click the ‘New Tab’ button and not surprisingly a new tab will open - type in a new address and viola, two websites for the price of one. You might open your email (or EdPortal) in one tab, and Google in another so you can keep checking for messages every half hour without having to keep a window open cluttering up your task bar. You can open up lots of tabs along the tab bar, and as you go they’ll start to shrink in size to fit more on.

When there are too many to fit, IE7 will give you a little button at the sides that you can scroll to show more tabs .

One thing that I’ve been asked numerous times since installing IE7 at my school is how to close one website without closing all the tabs. In IE6, clicking the ‘x’ in the top right of the window would close the current site only, but now with tabs open the ‘x’ closes everything! To close only the site you want, you need to click the ‘x’ on the individual tab.

Quick Tabs

The simplest way to find a tab that you’ve opened is to use the ‘Quick Tabs’ feature. If you click the ‘Quick Tabs’ button (or press Ctrl and Q), IE7 opens up all your tabs at once as little pictures so you can see the sites you have open at a glance.

You can click on a picture and the site will open for you, or even click the ‘x’ button in the top right of the picture to close that site. Doesn’t that make it easier to find and manage the sites you’ve opened?

Advanced Tab Use

I find the best use for tabs is when doing searches or research. Let’s say I search Google for ‘Dogs’ and it brings up a page full of results that all look interesting. In IE6 I used to click a result and the page would load, and if I wanted to look at another result I’d have to click the ‘Back’ button to return to Google. In IE7, I can right-click the page I’m interested in and select ‘Open in New Tab’,

leaving my original Google search open to return to later. It’s also possible to set up IE7 so that when you open a result in a tab, it doesn’t immediately focus on the new tab but stays on the page you were on. If you do this, you can open up multiple pages to load in the background while you continue to look at the page you were on.

You’re not limited to searches either. You can open links from any page into new tabs and keep reading. Imagine reading a Wikipedia article and opening everything you’re interested in in another tab - you might actually finish reading the original article!

Tabs can be so useful that I would suggest taking a little time to get used to them. The best trick I know? If your mouse has a scroll wheel, you can click the scroll wheel (middle-click) on a link to automatically open it in a new tab.

You can quickly close tabs too, by middle-clicking them regardless of whether they have a visible ‘x’ on them.

So much more…

There are a lot more things you can do with Internet Explorer 7. Some other new features include an anti-phishing tool to help protect against identity theft, a pop-up blocker to counteract annoying ads, and privacy tools to delete your Internet history and private data quickly. If you want to know more about these features you can visit Microsoft’s IE7 page for more information, or ask your school’s computer technician. There are also other browsers you can use like Firefox and Opera, that have even more useful features. I do find that most teachers and students are familiar with IE6, so the improvements made in IE7 make it a lot more functional without being too big a change.

Why is this important?

Things change. Technology changes fast. You might be comfortable with the same old software you’ve been using, but believe it or not it’s actually holding back the development of a faster and more accessible Internet. Not only that, but Microsoft tend to force these changes, and if your school or home computer hasn’t already upgraded, chances are they will soon whether you like it or not.

If you begin to use a tiny portion of the capabilities of a modern browser such as Internet Explorer 7, I guarantee it will make your time on the Internet more productive and more enjoyable. If you have any questions at all about this topic - please leave a comment, write me an email or contact me through my contact form. I’m sure your own school’s computer technician would also be very willing to chat about anything I’ve written.

Got any other tips you’d like to share? Want to clarify something I’ve written? Please leave a comment.

I recently spoke to a staff member at one of my schools who in all respects is a lovely person, but who shocked me thoroughly when we started talking about ‘the Internet’. The topic somehow came to MySpace in particular, and in general the idea of putting personal stuff out there for all to see. Now this person has a child, and their opinion was that they would never let their child do anything online that might expose them to the dangers of the Internet. This sounds good and proper - but my shock was at what their idea of Internet danger extends to.

“Do you believe that some people use the Internet for banking!?!!”

they exclaimed.
As I was about to explain that actually the ‘net is getting very good at keeping everything you put out there safe I was forced to cut the conversation short to reset yet another password.

Now this person isn’t so old you can forgive their scepticism - and even that’s not fair when you consider that my Grandma has been banking online for at least a couple of years now. More confusingly this person is fresh out of university - so they MUST be using the ‘net at least occasionally.

Before we ended the conversation I tried to impress upon them that with a very young child about to grow up in an increasingly net-connected world, they have a chance (nay, a duty) to learn everything they can about this newfangled technology to better educate their children in its proper use. I’m not sure if I got through.

They grow up so fast

Since then, I’ve thought a lot more about our jobs as educators and technologists (and parents) to make this technology safer for our kids (and by ‘our’, I mean the ones we work with as well as the ones we own¹). I’ve kinda been interested in this area since starting to work with Al Upton who put me on to a couple of educators who think about this stuff. Until I talked to this staff member though, I never really seriously considered how important it all is.

Our kids are using mobile phones earlier, blogging younger, playing video games before they can walk, and MSNing before they can speak, but instead of teaching them, we’re banning them in classrooms and homes and hoping that they’ll get over it instead². We block out everything new that we see (iPods, websites, phones) and never really re-evaluate it. It makes sense to hold back a little, to evaluate how safe these things are - but too often they are pronounced ‘too difficult to make safe’ and banned outright.

The ban-everything problem

The problem with the ban-everything-new approach is this: new toys, new ideas, new things cry out to be used and played with - every child who was dragged to church Christmas morning knows this. Every geek with a new computer/browser/new-mouse-button knows this. Everyone who’s bought a new mower or car knows that regardless of whether you need to or not, your new things call out to be used in some way. And if you cannot use them in the ways they were intended you find other ways to use them instead.

You get bored of your old software on your new computer - so you buy a computer game to make the most of it. You don’t need to drive anywhere fast, so you do burnouts up and down the block. You don’t need the new phone with the camera, and you can’t find anything constructive to do with it, so you take photos of your friends humiliating themselves instead, and then you post them to your ’till-now-unused MySpace page. Why do we ban myspace? Because kids can do hurtful damaging things with it. Why do they do hurtful damaging things with it? Because they haven’t been given an obviously positive thing to do with it, and their friends are doing it, and they want to be a part of it, and it’s in our nature to default to the easiest and laziest things. Our kids want desperately to use this technology. They have access in their own homes and at their friends homes. They sometimes just don’t see how to go beyond the simplest and most juvenile uses for it.

But kids can be taught. That’s why we have schools isn’t it? Because they’re still learning and open to guidance (mostly)… Why do we find it difficult to encourage them to use tools productively instead of destructively? These tools are there, the kids will use them. We must keep up.

In the Air

I’ll leave my rant with a link to a story of a family that I think is amazing. Matthew is a very intelligent boy with a blog. He’s nine years old, and his goal is to interview 100 ordinary people. From his mum:

Despite having an above average IQ, everyday learning is difficult to The Boy. Out of all his challenges, I view the output and sequencing problems as the biggest obstacle. What would it be like to have so much knowledge, but not be able to organize it and express it clearly? Or to read well above grade level, but be unable to retain anything you just read?
…
The Boy has huge difficulties … with the most frustrating being the reading…not able to retain information from what he has read. Most times it feels like trying to put out a wildfire with thimbles full of water….you keep dumping and dumping, but it has no effect.

I’ve read this kid’s writing and I’m impressed that he continues to post even with such difficulty. But what impresses me most is that his mother has encouraged him to use the ‘net as a way to express himself. Unlike my staff member friend from earlier, this mum joins her kid at the computer and helps him understand what he’s doing from a more mature standpoint. She does her share of vetting, but not so Matt is left out in the dark, but guides and encourages her child to explore his world using the tools available.

Isn’t that our job as adults?

1. We don’t actually own children. ↩
2. Kids don’t need to get over it. This very concerned adult thought that their younger relative needed to get over their computer games, and was put in their place by a 13 year old boy.↩

Here’s an easy to use little app for both staff and students. It’s called Jump Knowledge (jkn for short) and it allows you to grab a copy of any webpage you’re reading and write whatever you want all over it (called annotating).

That’s not the cool part - once you’ve left your mark you can share the page with anyone else in a variety of ways: via email, your own blog, print it out, or bookmark it to come back to later. You can come back even after the original has changed because Jump Knowledge keeps a copy of it on its own servers, meaning you’ll never lose the extra info you’ve added.

You don’t need an account, but if you do create one, jkn keeps a list of every page you’ve written over so you can keep track from one handy location.

You can check out the simple page I’ve annotated and shared at http://jkn.com/View?j=805037.873488227171 (ugly URL, but nevermind). Jump Knowledge is the simplest tool of this sort that I’ve found so far as it doesn’t require you to sign up or install extra software, and it makes the page available to anyone anywhere on the web (although you can set your pages to private).

Next time you want to share something you’ve read, instead of just emailing or posting a plain link consider using Jump Knowledge to write your own thoughts or highlight the important parts.

Jump Knowledge (via Lifehacker.com)

But I’m not going to feel guilty about this one. I recently made a vow to myself to do something creative daily, and one of the options I gave myself was to blog. Maybe it wont be here, but I should be blogging more regularly. About the same time, Al and a couple of other bloggers he linked to have been inspiring me to have a bit of a say about education. I hesitated because my perspective is not unique - there are hundreds of other IT people in the South Australian education system. I also hesitated because I fear that there is not much I can say that hasn’t been said already by people who can write betterer.

But Al’s pushed it and forced my hand, now despite your protests I will not stay silent. Forgive me.

Come back here occasionally to hear my thoughts on education from the perspective of a non-teaching tech guy. I work in two schools where technology in education is highly valued, but often not fully appreciated.

I can understand WHY teachers find it difficult to see the benefit of the latest technologies - teachers are bombarded from every direction with the promises of easier teaching, more engaging programs, wonderful new paradigms that will forever alter… you’ve heard it all before.

If you are a student you’ll have heard your teacher tell you about amazing new things that you and your friends have been doing for years already. But students are making this stuff up themselves. They’re using technology in ways that the creators never even imagined. It’s up to teachers and the tech people they work with to find ways to use the technology to engage students, rather than trying to remove it forcibly from their lives.

I don’t presume to know what the technology of tomorrow will look like or how it will be used (although I know what I want it to look like, and how I think it should be used), but I want to be there to see how it evolves.