teach.beaustin.com

. . . and when they were thinking it. This experimental tool from Google Labs provides some fascinating insights into what people are searching for and how that compares to other searches. One of the searches I tried looked at Blackboard, Webct, Moodle, Angelfire and Sakai - all course management tools. See the search result here.

Note the steady increase in Moodle searches. Other fun searches include John Kerry, Al Gore and George Bush (separating each search with a comma).

While I've found the Social Bookmarking tool Delicious very valuable I haven't given many others a chance. Fortunately, Wired has recently conducted a thorough review of the options.

This is particularly helpful given that the local school district currently filters Delicious. I think these types of tools can be incredibly valuable to teachers given the significant need they have to share good instructional ideas.

New versions of the most popular web browsers have recently been released. While it has been 5 years since the IE 6 was introduced, only 11 months have elapsed since Firefox 1.5 was released. How is it that the Firefox team can work so much faster than the Redmond behemoth? Open-source.

Not only is the development process faster, it produces a better product. Since there are so many eyes on the development process, problems are identified and remedied much faster than the closed approach necessary for proprietary software.