DIY: Inexpensive Wiimote-based Smart boards

My son's school has been lucky enough to be able to afford Smartboards for each of its classrooms so that teachers can use them in a number of amazing ways. Students can interact with web pages, flash games, and software using "electronic chalk". Material, both digital and physical, is easily presented to the entire class. The boards open up a wide range of activities never before possible in the classroom, limited only by the imagination.

That said, smartboards can be exceedingly expensive. Second only to the capabilities of smart boards themselves is the inventiveness of hackers, DIY'ers and Makers who set out to use the relatively inexpensive Wiimote game controller to create an less expensive, home brew version of the Smartboard. Even better, building the system can be made part of the educational process for everyone involved .

This article from MAKE: Blog ( Make your own Wii smartboard) details how to create and use this inexpensive system in your own school or group. The video below offers a quick view of the amazing things you can accomplish with such a system.

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Halloween: Print Your Own Halloween Mask [Friday Fun]

More Halloween fun courtesy of LifeHacker.com...

Print Your Own Halloween Mask [Friday Fun]

Forget a store-bought mask for Halloween: Put that photo printer to good use and make a custom mask of your dog, your boss or your favorite celebrity. Microsoft offers instructions on how to print out a handheld mask glued to a piece of balsa wood (or tied around your head with ribbon) with the right photograph. We shameless nerds can download some Star Wars character mask templates for free in the, ahem, kids section of the site. (Totally printing out Chewbacca this weekend and cutting out the eye holes.)

Make your own Halloween mask [Microsoft Home]
Star Wars Character Printable Masks [via BuzzFeed]

(Via Lifehacker.)

Technorati Tags: craft, crafts, DIY, halloween, make

Cool Tool: Open Clip Art Library

Kreg over at Valid Syntax, a podcast reviewing open source projects and software shared this link in his latest show -- the Open Clip Art Libary.

From their web site...

Drawing Together: This project aims to create an archive of user contributed clip art that can be freely used. All graphics submitted to the project should be placed into the Public Domain according to the statement by the Creative Commons. If you'd like to help out, please join the mailing list, and review the archives.

So head on over, sign up, see what's available and maybe even share some of your own work.

Link: Open Clip Art Library

Technorati Tags: make, DIY, podcast, podcasting, creativity, presentations, presenting, powerpoint, high-tech, free, sketch, art, drawing, web

Make your own maps at Google

Today, Google has released a new feature, MyMaps, that allows you to annotate any Google Map using icons, text, shapes and links. This screen shot shows a sample I made about the Internte Seminars at the Library.



Click to be taken to Google Maps for the real map

Technorati Tags: make, DIY, technology, software, computers, high-tech, cool, free, maps, map

Live at the Library This Week - VideoJug Cooking Videos

Update: I will be demoing this site as part of this week's Internet Seminar at the Sherman Oaks Branch of the LA Public Library. I'll also show online classes available from MIT.

Meetings are held the 2nd and 4th Thursday of the month at 6:30 PM.

I was playing around with the StumbleUpon Firefox extension, which randomly selects web sites in categories you prefer. This is one of several that caught my eye.

The videos are well done and the recipes are quite good and varied. If you are looking for a little something different in your web browsing and video viewing, VideoJug is a great place to start.

Cooking Recipes with video demonstrations

(Via StumbleUpon.)

Technorati Tags: hobby, make, howto, how-to, video, food, cooking

Tool: Shrink Pcitures - Re-size pictures online

A neat, little web-based tool that allows you to resize pictures and download the resized image. I can imagine using this on a machine, not my own, which might not have Photoshop or other graphics tool. It also has a quick "Avatar" tool for making graphics for web forums and social networking sites, which require certain sizes in order to work.

Technorati Tags: make, technology, computers, free, photo, photography, web, tool, service

Cool Tool: Geni.com - Online Family Tree Maker

If you are not already into heavy-duty family genealogy with dedicated programs GEDCOM files and an account on Ancestry.com, you might find Geni a quick way to start documenting your family tree.

It is simple and easy-to-use and includes an easy way to bring other family members into the discussion via email. I know from my own research that documenting everyone in the family usually falls to one interested party, so a little collaboration would be helpful.

Geni is a bit limited, as you can't yet import or export the GEDCOM files mentioned above. These are a standard data format used by almost all serious genealogy folks. Still, it is fun to play with and could become yet another great online service to replace the traditional PC-based applications we are all used to using today.



Technorati Tags: build, make, howto, how-to, technology, cool, free, kids, children, genealogy