Last year, I shared information concerning a trial that made national news concerning MySpace, a parent, and a girl who unfortunately committed suicide. The trial is now in the news, and may be of interest.

This story should remind us all of the importance of Internet safety.

Between now and January, I plan on purchasing a new camera for use at home for my own personal photography. I currently own a Canon-brand camera, and they have whet my attention with two new models, the 50-D and the 5D, Mark II. While the first is available now, the second is not yet available in stores.

I just came across a new website, called DXO Mark that attempts to rate cameras based on three main factors: dynamic range, color depth, and its capability with low light. Previously a favorite website, Digital Photography Review has done excellent, multi-part reviews that look at these same factors, alongside ergonomics, opinion, and actual photographic tests you can view.

This new site, however, is interesting because it’s using numbers and produces a raw “DXO” score. The Canon 50D, what I’d call a mid-range camera among DSLR cameras, didn’t score nearly as well as others on DXO. For similar money to the yet-to-be-reviewed 5D II, the Nikon D700 looks very nice.

Thus far, DXO is only highlighting your more expensive cameras. I have found for cameras we typically buy for school situations, ergonomics is the number one factor among teachers. “I want something that’s easy to use, but also something easy for the kids to hold.” Many teachers also find smaller, point-and-shoot models difficult to control with their smaller buttons. Another concern related to ergonomics is size, as the “smaller ones are easier to disappear, we feel.”

I’m not sure there’s any truth to that, but I hear teachers: we want bigger cameras. While easy to use is nice, those with more manual controls are better for teaching kids the basics of photography. This balance between automation, manual control, size, and durability are the factors that have influenced our purchasing decisions for school.

Notice I haven’t once mentioned megapixels! This is the metric that all camera manufacturers are obsessed by as a single measure of quality. I’m hoping this new DXO idea takes on to replace the number of pixels each sensor can produce.

Tonight I signed up for “yet another” new Web 2.0-based tool, Twistory, which maps your tweets from Twitter onto your favorite calendar.

Presumably, you could also subscribe to other folks’ tweets, too.

I find Twitter to be used in a variety of ways by the folks I follow. When I talk to people about this tool, they often ask what it is. They don’t get it, really.

I always reference it to iChat, the AIM-client we use at work on all of our Macs.

You know how you can change your status message in iChat? You know how teachers are changing them to reflect their mood, some event, or the fact it’s Friday?? Twitter is like that, by itself.

Often, I get in return, “Who wants that?”

We use Twitter among our team to report what we’re up to throughout the day. Some folks still use Twitter in this way, and I think it strongly mimics the way it was intended to be used. After all, the website asks you in the form: “What are you doing?”

I change locations (schools) throughout the day. I report that. I report what big projects I’m working on. I occasionally report interesting links to things I have written or found online. What I try not to do is use it as a microblog, a style of blog that’s made up of really short posts.

And that’s why this new tool looks interesting to me. If I managed a small team of folks, having a record of what they’re working on in a calendar-like format would be interesting to me. It’s not what you plan to do throughout the day, week, or month; it’s what you actually ended up doing.

Whether or not that’s necessary should be up to you; I simply find it interesting at this point.

Personally, I think creating podcasts can be a lot of fun. I always imagine it would be a lot of fun for students too.

In a recent Edutopia article, they talk about some of the benefits of podcasting, not to mention, how to get started. We already have great examples of student podcasts here in Goochland, but if you’ve been yet to be convinced that student-created podcasting is a good idea for your students, be sure to give this one a read!

Google today partnered with Life magazine to provide a searchable index of photographs owned by Life from the late 1700s through the 1980s.

This example, by Ted Thai, is of Steve Jobs with the Apple ][.

Since the images (at least the more recent ones) are protected by copyright, it’s questionable what you can do with these. For instance, you can purchase the photos, at least the higher-resolution copies.

Bigger versions of the images (like this one at 827×1280) are watermarked with a “Life” logo. I think it’s interesting that more copy isn’t provided to explain how these photos might be used.

Creative Commons would be nice, but since the images don’t come with an embedding mechanism like the one at Flickr, stay safe by assuming you cannot use these images for anything beyond “personal use.”