Tidertechie

It’s New Year’s resolution time and health clubs as well as weight loss program memberships have skyrocketed!  This year more businesses than ever before are offering healthy lifestyle incentives such as gym memberships earning  you a $100 bonus, luxury vacations, and more.  Does your job offer such incentives?

With two-thirds of Americans overweight or obese, we are truly in a crisis situation which costs US companies an estimated $13 billion per year.  Technology can be used to help improve almost anything from time management to professional development.  How about for developing a healthy lifestyle?

There are numerous FREE websites and apps to start you on the journey of a healthy lifestyle.  Let’s take a look of one such website, Sparkpeople.

SparkPeople is loaded with every resource you could need to develop healthy habits.  If you are wanting to lose weight or even just trying to eat healthier there is a step-by-step program to do just that.  They even have another site, SparkRecipes, filled with great alternatives to your typical recipes.  Here is a brief overview of what they have to offer for FREE:

Tools
Tracking tools for food and fitness
Goal setting tools
Reports
Planner

Healthy Life Styles
Nutrition
Fitness (including plans and videos)
Motivation
Wellness
SparkDiet

Your Health
Health A – Z
Condition Centers
Health News

Community
Message Boards
SparkTeams
SparkPages (blogs)

Yes, there is even an app for SparkPeople!  You can input food and exercise (as well as other facts) on the go or just view your results in a variety of reports.

Here are a few more sites you might want to check out; some of which made it to the top 20 most popular health websites:
Prevention, Real Age, Weight Watchers,

iPhone App

Couch to 5K ~  This app takes you step-by-step off the couch and to running 5K, seriously!

A special thanks to @magic101 (Jackie Sharp) and @melching5 (Melanie Ching) for their app and site suggestions for this week’s Techie Tuesday!

Have you ever wished you could attend a particular conference or workshop only to be short time and money? There are numerous conferences with backchannels to allow you to attend on your own schedule via Ning, Twitter, Wiki, video, or website.

This week is part of the K12 Online Conference 2009. The theme, Bridging the Divide, might be termed perfect as they invite participation around the world.  As with most large conferences this one started with a pre-conference keynote.  This is followed with two week’s of over fifty presentations.  The K12 Online Conference is much more than a backchannel for an existing conference.  It is an entire conference held online.

You can attend the K12 Online Conference via live events online.  What if you missed one of the scheduled events?  That is the great part!  You can watch the video or read through their ning-blog-wiki.

The K12 Online conference will also continue to host live events twice monthly during 2010 through K-12 Online Echo webcasts on EdTechTalk.  Go to their site now and check it out! http://k12onlineconference.org/

What other educational online events do you enjoy?

While digging through some old files, I came across an old PowerPoint, ABC Teacher Resource Websites.  Of course it was fun going through the old resources, but it also got me to thinking about all the numerous websites currently available.

I sent out a few tweets, dug through my Diigo files, and the result is a current A – Z of Awesome Resources!  @melching5 also sent an awesome link to numerous resources!

Would you like to add to the links?  Visit my wiki page to continue building this list of resources!

Why would someone choose to add a ClusterMap to their website or blog instead of the ol’ standby of a visitor counter.  You know the ones that look similar to your cars odometer.

There are several reasons I chose Clustermaps instead of a typical counter.  First, I LOVE visuals and what better way to “see” your visitors than via world map.   The map is great for not only seeing visitor locations but also their location is relation to yours.

Clustrmap also doesn’t count every single visit to your site.  That, for me,  is for Google Statistics.  Clustrmaps instead counts unique visitors.  Sure someone might visit your site from two computers and be counted twice, but that is better than if a person visits once a week for a year and is counted 52 times:)

Here are some additional benefits:

• Easy to install on a website, blog, etc.
• Has an additional live Clustrmap to allow you and/or your students to see who is currently looking at the blog.
• Archives yearly, so you don’t have one big red dot:)

Oh no!  You loose the map?  No it isn’t lost just archived. There is a link above you map for archives.  Clustrmaps also sends you an email about the soon change.  But you can have your own archive too such as saving the image to add to post just like this one.  As this year starts to close, so does our 2009 Clustrmap.

Here is our archive for 2009:

Take a look at these awesome visitors!!

Inspiration Software has been around for several years, but have you been inspired to check it out?  For this week’s Techie Tuesday we will look at Inspiration and how it can be used in the classroom.

According to their company website, Inspiration is an essential tool to visualize, think, organize, and learn.  What makes this software special?  With the explosion of web 2.0 sites, there are numerous free online graphic organizers such as bubbl.us and Mindmeister.

If you simply want to create semantic maps/webs, one of the free online organizers would probable fit your need.  If you want more, keep reading for highlights on Inspiration Software.

One nice component of Inspiration is how you can create a graphic organizer and with one click it can be changed into a formal outline.  Students can create a web with shapes and/or clip art filled with information.  Then it is transformed into an outline using the hierarchy of the web.  These graphic organizers include concept maps, webs, and idea maps.  The outline can be built upon using other components such as a dictionary.

Other key components include the following:

• Video and sound integration
• Templates
• Curriculum Packets

To get a varieties of class integration possibilities, I asked my fellow teachers for ways to integrate Inspiration in their classroom.  Of course bribing them with a free copy of Inspiration always helps them respond quickly:)  Here is a list of ideas to integrate Inspiration into your classroom:

• Draft and Revise writing assignments
• Research
• Visually explain math concepts and problems
• Planning (project, web site,etc)
• Semantic web of a Country
• Transform the semantic web to an outline
• Use the audio part for students to review
• Concept mapping
• Brainstorming
• Story maps
• Character analysis
• Book reports
• Creating storyboards for PowerPoint presentations
• Defining new terms
• Assist teachers in planning lessons or units
• Plot Summaries
• Historical Cause and Effect
• Cycles (recycle, weather, etc.)
• Developing a course or workshop
• Lab Procedures
• Show relationships
• In foreign language classes create an organizer that shows the English word on one side and the foreign language word equivalent on the other side with pictures as hints.
• When studying a poem, in the center concept list the name of the poem and the connecting lines contain phrases from the poem. The sub-concept explains the words in the phrase and the literary technique used such as personification.
• Faculty/district – responsibilities of committees

So are your Inspired?  What other software or sites for graphic organization are your favorite?