I am migrating to a new hosting service. I've been with DreamHost for several years and have decided to try mediatemple. The process of switching the Domain Name Server (DNS) settings has now begun. This means you will soon be hitting my site on the new server. It also means that my email is in a state of transition from one server to another. I will do my best to avoid losing any emails. But if you have sent me an email and not heard from me by week's end, you may want to send it again in case it got lost in the move.

The migration process has been fairly straight forward, but the email migration is a bit more complicated.

Update: Well, things didn't go quite as smoothly as they appeared to be going. The email server change has especially been problematic. Hopefully those issues are now resolved, I didn't lose any emails (resend if I haven't responded or you got the email returned to you), and you are seeing this page! Technology! :o)

Thought 1: I posted several months ago about some unusual school settings, but mostly, as I travel, I find school is school the world over. Classrooms look pretty much the same. Fortunately we find some very noteworthy exceptions. But below you will see a pano of an abandoned school room in Russia. How many school rooms have you been in that looked very much the same as this?

Thought 2: I love photography. I also really enjoy 360º panoramic photography. I would love to see some 360º panoramas of schools. In fact, why not make a virtual tour of your building using this technology? New students to the school would be able to learn their way around the building before ever walking into the school. (You might want to password protect access to these for security reasons.) You can check out this pano from Mabry Middle School.

For those who are not really familiar with what a 360º pano is, you can explore the two included below. The first comes from an awesome site started by the Martin brothers in 2007, 360cities.net, that is well on its way to becoming a repository of 360º virtual tours of the planet. Social studies teachers, this is good stuff! 360cities is off to an amazing start with over 15,000 panoramic images that are also linked into Google Earth. The site's browser plugin absolutely rocks, especially on really large monitors--think interactive whiteboard here. And now they are hosting panoramas up to 65,536 x 32,768 pixels in size. That's really, really big! Check out their YouTube video to get a sense of what the Martin brothers are doing.

Jeffrey and David are presenting about their work on May 21, 2009, at Where2.0.

Click on the word "Fullscreen" on each pano to have an immersive experience. Remember you can zoom in/out using your keyboard, and you can click and drag in the picture with you mouse to move around in the image. The antithesis of the school room pictured below, in the world according to Tim, classrooms need to be interactive and immersive places that provide saturated engagement in deep, relevant curricular issues that just gobble up every child's attention span.

Inside abandoned school (floor 2). Physics. (Marino) (2009) in Russia

palace garden Karlsaue Kassel Nordhessen in Nordhessen

I absolutely love, and regularly use, my computer keyboard's numeric keypad. I find typing numbers using the numeric keys above the alpha key set cumbersome and inefficient. (And I must also confess to wishing the telephone and the computer numeric keypad had the same layout—preferably defaulting to the keyboard's numeric layout!)

Problem: My laptop keyboard lacks the numeric keypad. I could travel with a USB keypad, but that completely defeats the point of owning a laptop: portability.

Solution: I just discovered my newest bit of application love: the NumberKey application for the iPhone and iPod Touch from BALMUDA design LTD. This application turns the iPhone or Touch into a keypad. And, a really nice "touch," it looks great, as if it belongs next to the laptop. The iPhone or iPod Touch connects to the laptop (via WiFi) through a small free application running on the laptop called "NumberKey Connect," that I have auto launch when I log in to my laptop. NumberKey on the iPhone feels natural and is responsive with no apparent delays between what you type and what you see on the computer screen. The look (skins: for example—make it match your white keyboard) and functionality of the application can be customized. And while the iPhone/iPd Touch's key size is somewhat smaller than a standard numeric keypad, using NumberKey is vastly superior to using the numbered keys on the standard alpha keyboard.

Tim likes!

photo credit: CC by momentimedia @ flickr

For some unknown reason, microphone explorations have been foist upon me of late. I have no idea why! Sort of odd, really...

But, I recently was introduced to SwitchEasy's ThumbTacks micro-microphone. This little microphone (only slightly larger than an actual thumbtack and of a very similar shape) is inexpensive and easy to use. You just plug it into the headphone jack of the iPod Touch 2G or an iPod Nano 4G.

SwitchEasy states that they carefully selected the actual microphone unit to capture quality audio at a reasonable price. And how does a list price of $12.99 (as of this writing) sound for an iPod microphone? I decided I would take one out on a test drive. Below you will find a recording using three microphones: the Shure MPA-3C Music Phone Adapter for iPhone (used on my iPod Touch—not on my iPhone), Macally's iPod Audio Recorder Black (IP-A181), and the SwitchEasy SW-TT-B ThumbTacks Micro-Microphone. You can check out the price of each at the links above. (The ThumbTack is less than half the price.)

The test: in a single recording using the iTalk application (Griffin offers a free version) on my iPod Touch, attach each mic, one at a time, place the iPod Touch in my shirt pocket, say which mic I was using, read a sentence, take the iPod out of my pocket, place it on pause, change mics. I added a sound clip at the beginning, end and between each sentence to make the recording a little more interesting.

I clipped the Shure mic on my shirt on the same horizontal line as the top of my shirt pocket. The Shure mic was still, however, maybe less than an 1 inch closer to my mouth as it was near the shirt buttons and not the shirt pocket.

I was rather surprised by the outcome. But I'll let you hear it for yourself (1 minute, 40 seconds).

I have always preferred the Shure sound quality. It's excellent and in stereo. The sound wave from the Macally is clipped and little can be done to correct clipped digital audio. I suspect that if you only heard the recording from the ThumbTack, you would just turn up the volume a little and be a happy camper. (I also noticed that since this mic is so small, the ThumbTack was a little below the top of my shirt pocket, which would block some of the sound coming at it. I'm fairly confident I would have achieved different results had I held the iPod Touch in my hand in front of my face.

So, for me, in this simple, unscientific test, the Shure has the richest sound quality, but the TumbTack, at less than half the price, isn't a bad choice at all. For some reason, the Macally clipped the digital audio and achieved a poor sound quality as a result.

In the example below, I normalized the audio from the ThumbTack. (This is easily accomplished in GarageBand or in Audacity.) The volume of the sound is therefore significantly boosted, but with the desired audio comes a minor amount of background hiss, which also got boosted by the normalization. One could spend an extra minute and remove much of the hiss. I didn't. (41 seconds)

So my positive take on the ThumbTack: I really like the price. (In fact, I am unaware of a less expensive option of any quality.) The sound quality is more than just satisfactory for school projects; it's actually good. The mic appears durable with no wires to wear out or get tangled. It's simple to plug in and out. The size requires little storage space for a class set.

My negatives on the ThumbTack: It's so small and cute it could easily sprout legs and disappear. Kids would love to have one of these. Is it a choking hazard for really young children?

Bottom line: You can afford a class set of these and achieve good sound results!

Disclaimer: I am not endorsing or recommending any product. I am not being paid to say anything about any of these products. Your results may vary.