A Review of Educational Resources

Looking at my first post on this blog (Sunday, March 15th 2009), I noticed that I had a link to my Edublog's site that was still operational. My very first entry there was in September of 2007 and my last on December 24th 2008, almost exactly 9 years ago. I ceased using the Edublog site for blogging because it only offered 20Mb of storage. I'm not sure what it offers now. The blog is powered by WORDPRESS so it looks good.

I did have the Edublogs' app on my phone for a time but I've since deleted as it's really only useful if one has a class of students. Nonetheless, it's interesting to look back at past posts and read about my battles getting Ubuntu to work properly on my laptop. I'm reminded that I do have a WORDPRESS site at seanreeves.wordpress.com. It's titled Staying Healthy but I haven't made much use of it. My first entry was:

• Getting Fit (August 5th 2010) followed by 
• Zen Buddhist Meditation Technique Wins Survey (August 8th 2010)
• Ramadan and Muhammad (September 5th 2010)
• Desy and Sabina jalan jalan (September 19th 2011) and lastly 
• Weight Comparison: 2010 versus 2017 (May 19th 2017)

On the subject of students, I still have my free Moodle Cloud site active at http://seanreeves.moodlecloud.com but have made no use of it recently. I also have MAMP installed on my laptop but again haven't used it in quite a while. Having thought of MAMP however, I've taken the opportunity to download the latest version of the software: MAMP 4.2.1 (a 331Mb download from here although it's still not operational at the time of writing). May as well keep it up to date. I find it hard to let go of these relics of the past. There is of course Google Classroom as well, which I've only dabbled with briefly.

Beginning Again

I've decided to move my technological blog on Edublogs (see addendum at bottom of this post) to Blogger partly for improved centralisation and partly because of the lousy 20Mb of storage space that is allocated (this has now changed, see addendum). For 2009 that is a ridiculously tiny amount of space. I exported the blog as a XML file and tried to import into Blogger but failed. I suspect the problem is at the Edublogs end. For the time being, I've just included a link to my old posts until I can work out a way to move them all across. Goodbye Edublogs. A lot of my activity lately has been with ebooks, ebook formats and ebook readers, of both the software and hardware varieties. 

I'm happy that I've solved a problem that had been bugging me on my Nokia N73. It was difficult to read PDF files using the Adobe Reader program that came with the phone. The text could be viewed but it was awkward to read and in the end I gave up. I had Mobipocket Reader installed on the phone and it possibly might have read the PDF files if it had picked them up during its scan of the memory card but it didn't. Any time I clicked on the PDF file, the dreaded Adobe Reader would open. In the Symbian OS, I wasn't able to disassociate the file from the program. Just another reason to dislike Adobe and the Symbian OS. 

With Mobipocket's Creator, only available for Windows not Linux, I was able to convert my PDF version of Osho's "Book of Wisdom" to PRC format which is now eminently readable using my Mobipocket Reader. There is also a program called "calibre" which works on Windows and Linux that will do the same job. It converts the PDF into a MOBI file which is readable as well but there are glitches in the spacing between words and there are odd hyphenations. I've only tested this on one file so I need to experiment further. However, I'm making use of my mobile phone once again for reading ebooks and getting through them far quicker than when I could only view them on the computer.

ADDENDUM: October 8th 2020

The blog posts on Edublogs are still there and date back to September 30th 2007 when made my first post about Animoto and FileFlash.

As for the meagre 20MB of storage, this was increased to 1GB per blog in 2017. See this Edublog post about the increased storage and other features.