Internet Moments

Local.Alkemis.com is a website that offers lots of local information, including access to traffic cameras in cities all around North America and even a few cities around the world.  Alkemis.com has several projects underway with this mapping system that combines Google Maps, live traffic cams as well as Yahoo Traffic, Weather, Local News, Fandango Movies, even local subway maps where possible.  An amazing experiment in combining multiple forms of data into an integrated and functional website.  Keep checking back as they develop more and more information for cities like:  New York, Washington, Las Vegas, Toronto, Los Angeles, Dallas, Boston, London, and Dublin.  Here’s a link to all the cities they cover.

Wisdom Quotes, is an online resource for thousands of famous quotes.  Assembled by Jone Johnson Lewis, this web page has plenty of famous sayings organized by category but you can also search the site for a specific author or quote.  Here are the quotes about computers.  You can also subscribe to receive the occasional email update with some quotes.

If you need a good quote for a PowerPoint slide show try this site for free slides that you can easily copy and paste.

As mentioned in the previous post, Wikipedia is an amazing online resource that suffers from lots of criticism, especially from the academic community.  A recent development to address this problem has been Schools-Wikipedia.org which is a free online encyclopedia that is made up of approximately 5,500 Wikipedia articles which have been “carefully chosen, tidied up, and checked for vandalism and suitability.” 

The 2008/9 Schools Wikipedia Selection was compiled by volunteers from SOS Children’s Villages – the world’s lasrgest orphan charity which is based in the U.K..  Their edited version of the English version of Wikipedia is available online and as a free download that can be saved to a DVD.

Besides being carefully edited, schools-wikipedia.org is also a little more difficult to search.  Because it is designed to be a free download it doesn’t come with a search engine.  Students have to explore it using either the Title Word Index or the Subject Index.  But teachers who grew up using a card catalog at the libraryprobably won’t have much pity for students who find this to be difficult.