Sunday, October 3, 2004

Volcanos and Furl

With the current activity at Mount St. Helens you might want to pass these web sites on to your classroom teachers. Any teacher who covers volcanos during the year might want to consider using this “teachable moment” to cover the topic.



Volcano World (UND)
http://volcano.und.edu/

Volcano World (BrainSpace)
http://www.volcanoworld.org/

Mount St. Helens Volcano Cam
http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/volcanocams/msh/

There is a new web site that people are using to bookmark their favorite web sites. This site is “Furl” and can be found athttp://www.furl.net/

You can see what web sites have been bookmarked most recently, as well as those that are most popular and are being bookmark most often. This is how I ran across the Volcano Cam web site mentioned above.

You can also search the bookmarks people have stored on Furl for any topic of interest. For example, search on the word “volcano” to find other sites that might have been bookmarked by someone.
When you find a web site that has been bookmarked, you can also find other sites bookmarked by the same people. In case your interests are the same, you will find other web sites that you might want to check out.

If you want to use Furl yourself to bookmark web sites, you need to register to get your own login and password, but there is not cost. Then simple click on the Furl link and drag it up to the menu bar in your browser. The next time you are at a web site that you want to bookmark (furl) simply click on the “furl it” option in your browser menu bar and a window will pop up (if you aren’t blocking pop ups) with the name of the site and the URL already filled in for you.

Try it out. It is a great time saver. I has keeping my favorites/bookmarks on three different computers, and on one of them I was using three different browsers each with their own favorites list. Now I am putting everything on my furl list.

The most recently furled web sites
http://www.furl.net/furled.jsp

The most comonly furled web sites in the last week
http://www.furl.net/furledPopular.jsp

My furled web sites can be found at
http://www.furl.net/members/craig_nansen

And you can check certain sub-categories by filtering. For example,
sites for teachers furled by myself.