Word Fun

A classmate of mine shared this website with me that she uses to help her with an icebreaker activity. The website is Wordle.net. You can make interesting word designs patterns given a list of words. Here is a sample that I made using a list of prepositions. I'm sure that I will come up with some more creative uses for it as I later.

Xournal for Windows

Xournal is a note taking program that I've been using on Linux for several years and has finally been ported to Windows. This is great for those of us that work in hybrid environments. Thanks Dirk for posting your work and thanks Denis for making Xournal. Here are the directions of what Dirk did to get Xournal working on windows (http://dirkgerrits.com/2009/10/28/xournal-on-windows/). Now you can download the binary and simply extract the zip archive and double click the exe to run. I didn't even have to install it (download Xournal). Xournal is similar to Microsoft Windows Journal or to other alternatives such as Jarnal, Gournal, and NoteLab.

I quickly test the software on Windows Vista and the PDF annotation and export appear to work fine. It even opened the annotations that I made in Linux and stored in my DropBox. This is great since I've been wanting to be able to open my files at school from home and vice-versa.

Free OpenBiblio Setup

At ASchool.us we are doing an experiment to see how much interest there is in the OpenBiblio library software. Sign up now for your free account. We will start by providing accounts to the first 10 people that Sign up. All others will be setup as resources become available.

Example book entry

Your library patrons will be shown Infolinks, Google, and Amazon ads to help fund this experiment if you would like to guarantee the success of this project please consider making a donation.

Our goal for this project is to provide a web based library solution for small schools based on open source software. This will allow us and you to be able to keep expenses down by using open source software. If this project succeeds we will contribute back into the OpenBiblio project both by contributing code and money to further its development. The ads can be removed for a monthly fee to cover the hosting of your content.

Example search results

Why should you use this?
One of the advantages of Open Source software is that it provides users with the opportunity to enhance, control, and maintain the software. We will provide you with access to the data you enter into your library. This allows you to backup and/or transfer your library to a different system, if you find that this solution does not meet your needs or you would like to move to a different service provide the option is available.

What are the advantage of setting it up with ASchool.us? 
With the default installation of OpenBiblio you have to manually enter all of your circulation information. Our install provides a working Library of Congress lookup and extra reports. Both of which are available from the OpenBiblio website but we have them installed for you already.