Great Tools for Research

Today's post is all about research. I have one general tool and one specific to advertising.

First the general tool. I just learned about this today, but I can't wait to show it to kids! Navify is a search tool that pulls articles from Wikipedia, related photos from Flikr and related videos from YouTube. I tested it with a search on Pearl Harbor, just to see what would come up. Sure enough, a good article about Pearl Harbor today, and its history, all kinds of photos (current and historic) and a slew of videos, including film of the bombing, a clip of Roosevelt's "This Day Shall Live in Infamy" speech, and a clip of John Belushi rallying the troops with his "Did we give up when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor." Good stuff.

The advertising link is to Coloribus. Coloribus is an online archive of advertising from all over the world. Again, good stuff!

Web Pages Made Easy

Web2 is a handy tool for quickly converting files into web pages. It's free (although your new web page will have some advertising)) and you do not need to sign up. You simply upload your file, click the conversion button and voila! You have an unique URL that you can share with anyone. It's a basic tool, and you have little control over the design of the page but this would be a very handy thing for students who are just looking to get some content onto the web.

An End to Advertising (mostly)

Tidy Read is a nifty add on for IE, Safari or Firefox that cleans advertising off of webpages and then pops the content up in a nice, clean window. The cool thing is that when the content pops up, the font is nice and BIG, so that it's really easy for, um, experienced eyes to read! It doesn't block all ads on some sites, but it sure makes a lot of sites easier to read.

This add-on could be a nice tool to use in schools where we try not to link to sites that do have advertising.