The Vancouver Sun
19 Nov 2008
... on Friday, Nov. 19, 1858, and cast its tepid light on a sodden, gloomy landscape that would be familiar to any of today’s winter residents of the Fraser Valley floodplain. A soaking rain pounded out of a dense overcast that obscured the mountains. It...read more...
Tech Tags: The Vancouver Sun newspaper British Columbia 150 Years
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While on the subject of history, the following might be of interest to your social studies colleagues:
The 2009 Vancouver Regional Historica Fair is May 1 and 2, 2009, and will be held at the Vancouver Museum and the Vancouver Maritime Museum. The Historica Fair is co-cordinated by staff from the Vancouver Museum and the Vancouver Maritime Museum, and your school is invited to participate in the program.
Now would be the time to send an email note outlining your anticipated level of involvement in the program, information needed for a funding application and for planning purposes. Jamie Purves, Public Programs Officer, invites your inquiries and "notes" about anticipated
projects. Mail to: education@vancouvermaritimemuseum.com. He will also set up an information session at your school if you want.
Check out The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard and resources to use with it, sponsored by the Tides Foundation and the Funders Workgroup for Sustainable Production and Consumption.
NEW Search Engine
I dropped in on Aaron Mueller this morning as he presented his new eLibrary to his VLN colleagues. This new search engine is fantastic! From the Searchme press release:
[Searchme] uses visual search and category refinement ... [and is designed] to help you find what you’re looking for, faster, with a lot less spam. It’s a new way to search that takes advantage of the size and bandwidth of today’s Internet and the increasingly visual way that we all interact online.
The idea for Searchme came when it was suggested ... to founders Randy Adams and John Holland that they create a search engine that sorted results into categories. The Searchme visual interface came about when Randy, a father of seven, helped his four-year-old son search for children’s web sites that he’d seen on TV. It struck Adams that if a search engine could show big pictures of the pages it found before users clicked through to a site, it’d be much easier to quickly find what they were looking for.
We’re just getting started on our first steps toward creating a smart new way to search today’s Web.How It Works
Searchme sorts your search results into relevant topics, then lets ou scroll through and preview the web pages associated with your query, before you click through. As you start typing, category icons appear that relate to your search. For example, if you type “bonds”, it suggests “savings” or “stocks” or “baseball”. Choose a category, and you’ll see pictures of the web pages that match your search. You can quickly review these pages to find the best one, then go right to that site .... Simply put, Searchme lets you see what you’re searching for, before you click through.
Hints for using this search engine: after a fairly quick overview, I would advise you to maximize your research results to fill the page and look for the magnifier tool to see whether the miniature page contains the information you want. Use the movable bar under your results pages to flip (as though through a book) across your results to identify what you might want to see more of.
I think our students at all age levels will absolutely love this. Lots of adults at "the penthouse" here at the mother-ship were fascinated today.
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