This weekend was big for finding technology, especially for school. All of these are free, which is great!
The first one, Spotify, is more for at home since it requires an installation, but I’m trying to figure out what the catch is. Spotify lets you listen to music like Pandora does. The big difference is that you can choose any music track to jump to AND create a playlist to play the music in the order you want to. My complaint with Pandora is that when I create a station for an artist, many times it takes five or six songs until I get to that actual artist. I’m one of the early adopters for the US version of the service. Once it’s open to the public, check it out.
Figment is a writing community where you can post your own works-in-progress and get updates from authors that you follow. They have disabled anonymous comments in an effort to build a place free from spamming and flamewars.
The last thing I found really got me excited because I know exactly which project I can have students use it for. PenCamp allows students to create a simple webpage with a password but does not require a username. The students title their page, choose a password that prevents others from erasing their work, and then share their URL with teachers to grade. Since there are no comments at all, it should avoid some of the hangups with posting online – as long as student names are not used in the title of the page. The URLs are super easy: example.pencamp.com. No slashes, no random numbers, no craziness (unless you put it there).
I put myself on the waiting list for Spotify a few days ago. I’m intrigued by it.
I’m liking it, although Pandora beats it in auto-recommendations. Spotify requires more human interaction. I know Jimmy Fallon did a skit involving a lot of songs and then that day sent out a Spotify playlist so people could hear the originals. That’s where I see the big potential.