Education Technology - theory and practice: Pearltrees for teachers
Year 2012 last post is a guest post from Finnish teacher Tommi Viljakainen. He is a teacher in Elimäki lower and upper secondary school. He teaches English, French and P.E. He is also interested in social media, iPad and the future of education. You can find Tommi also in Twitter under name @tommiviljaA (Finnish) teacher's dive into social media - "I discovered pearls in Pearltrees!"Tips for teachersThis time I thought I could write about Pearltrees from a teacher's perspective.
Pearltrees Raises $6.7M For Its “Collaborative Interest Graph”
Pearltrees, a company offering a novel interface for sharing and finding content, has raised 5 million euros ($6.7 million US) in new funding. The basic unit of the Pearltrees service is the pearl, which is basically a bookmark. Users can assemble these pearls into trees based around a topic.
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Yesterday, Yahoo announced their intention to shut down Delicious. It is a sad piece of news. Delicious has been a great source of inspiration to us and a major contribution to the possibility of a humanly organized web.
Pearltrees releases a new version, without any pearls nor trees
The Paris-based startup founded in 2009 once declared: “We focus on the visual potential of Pearltrees to let people dive deeply into their interests and nearly feel them”. Their product, offering a digital curation tool, was unique because of the visual interface voluntareely original: links and folders symbolized by rounded pearls attached together like the branches of a tree. Today, pearls and trees have disappeared to make room for a brand new and larger organisation tool.
7 Secrets of the Super Organized
A few years ago, my life was a mess. So was my house, my desk, my mind. Then I learned, one by one, a few habits that got me completely organized. Am I perfect?
Pearltrees: Slick Social Bookmarking and Curation Tool Now on iPad
WHAT: A web-based and iPad application to organize and curate your social life online. Users collect, or bookmark, web pages, tweets, Google+ posts and more, and arrange them in pearls or pearltrees. A pearl holds anything interesting you find on the web with a URL. A pearltree is a collection of webpages that functions like a folder. On the iPad, you simply organize your pearls by touching and dragging.
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With Pearltrees you were already organizing what you like on the web? Now it gets even faster, but also customizable and more practical! So, what’s new ?
Pearltrees 2.0 Launches with a Brand New User Interface
Today Pearltrees officially separated itself from its unique visual interface made of pearls and pearltrees, finally succumbing to the trend of Pinterest-like user experience. It might be more practical for the majority of users to sort and collect content with the new Pearltrees 2.0, however, some people might regret the innovative former interface that allowed to discover related content rapidly by browsing an “ocean” of Pearls. Users still have the possibility to go back to the “pearly” version accessible from the menu in the settings section. Now the Pearltree has been replaced by the “Collection” which is basically a “folder” (or a board) containing various types of content of a topic, for instance, you can collect web pages, images, and notes, just like you can do with Evernote and Pinterest.
Rumsey Historical Map Collection
The David Rumsey Map Collection was started over 25 years ago and contains more than 150,000 maps. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century maps of North and South America, although it also has maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. The collection includes atlases, wall maps, globes, school geographies, pocket maps, books of exploration, maritime charts, and a variety of cartographic materials including pocket, wall, children's, and manuscript maps. Items range in date from about 1700 to 1950s. Digitization of the collection began in 1996 and there are now over 55,000 items online, with new additions added regularly.
Pearltrees makes Web curation a joy with its 'magical' new iPad app
Not many tech CEOs would have the guts to describe their products as “magical” and as delivering “pure happiness”, but that’s exactly how Pearltrees‘ Patrice Lamothe describes the startup’s iPad app released today. You know what? He may just be right. Pearltrees is a service that takes a visual approach to Web curation. Launched late last year with its browser-based version, it allows you to create networks of ‘pearls’ on screen. Each pearl is a link to a piece of content and you can connect them together in whatever way you choose into a ‘pearltree’.
Content Curation for Teachers
Have you ever felt that there is simply too much interesting, educational content on the web? Fortunately, there are also some great, free products that help learners curate all of the many things they can read, watch, hear etc. on the web. The beauty of taking control of your content by saving and organizing links is that you can quickly find, revisit or share content with others. By curating the web, one can essentially build up a library of data in the cloud for free. I know personally as a history teacher, I spend a lot of time surfing the web when I prepare lessons.
Pearltrees: Visual Collaborative Content Curation for Android
Pearltrees is a powerful application that allows people to browse and organize web content visually. This “crowed sourced library”, started on the desktop web in 2009, became mobile in 2011 with the launch of the iPad application soon followed by the iPhone version in 2012. Pearltrees counts now over 2 million monthly active users who have collected 50 million pearls, the iPad and iPhone apps are consistently rated 5 stars and have been downloaded more than a million times. Today, Android users will be able to access Pearltrees from the Google Play store, the application is free and there are currently three discounted Premium versions that offer privacy settings with 1 GB storage for $1.99 per month, with high priority support and 3 GB storage for $3.99 per month.The high-end version, currently priced at $9.99, in addition to the privacy control and high priority support, offers 10 GB storage, customization features, backup and encryption.
What an Effective Teacher's Classroom Looks Like
Another school year is approaching and many novice teachers are preparing to enter their own classrooms for the first time. To help them on their way, MiddleWeb is publishing a series of brief articles offering good advice and food for thought. What We See in Effective and Ineffective Classrooms by Annette Breaux and Todd Whitaker
Pearltrees Brings Your Interest Graph' to the iPad
One of the more buzzword-y buzzwords in Silicon Valley right now is the "interest graph," which is supposed to connect people and the topics that they're interested in. Lots of startups promise to tap into the interest graph, but Pearltrees CEO Patrice Lamothe says a new app from his startup is "maybe the first time you actually see an interest graph." The new feature, which Lamothe variously describes as "visual discovery" (his pitch to the tech press) and "related interests" (what it's actually called in the app), is included in the just-launched iPad application from the previously Web-only company.