I have started taking the Bay Area’s underground BART train to work, and ever since I have been obsessed with finding offline ways to work with my data. Especially RSS feeds, email, and twitter links are a challenge to work with, but I wonder what other online/offline travails people are having?

I tried syncing my Google Reader with Google’s Gears plugin and found that RSS feeds often link out to the originating site for the full story. This led me to research which news sites have full-text enabled RSS feeds, and I only found a few (including the Guardian.co.uk, Gawker websites like Lifehacker and io9, and some WordPress-powered blogs).

I’m starting to get into syncing my Thunderbird and/or Gmail for offline use, but I’m often thwarted when I receive links to outside sites whose content I cannot view. Twitter would be another great service to read on the train, but again, the links are half the fun.

I am discovering that there are a whole host of interesting Adobe Air Apps that specialize in giving you offline access to your online data. I just used Flump to download my Flickr library, Netbook to access Project Gutenberg offline, and Birdie to see my Twitter tweets offline.

Are you also interested in seeing your online data when you are stuck underground? How do you go about connecting with the online world?

Way back in 2004, an old college friend persuaded me to join a little site called MySpace.com. Before the end of the week, six of my students had already found me and “friended” me. That number grew quickly from six to sixty and beyond. Some teachers acted as if I had crossed some invisible line of decency– others thought I was just plain crazy for allowing students to see my pictures and to message me after school hours as I worked on my computer late into the night.

My experience was overwhelmingly positive, and students who were too shy to ask questions in class were quick to use the relative anonymity of MySpace to ask for help. Because of the way MySpace was arranged, I learned quickly not to go on students’ home pages for fear of seeing their pot leaf wallpapers or pictures of weekend parties. Nonetheless, most kids used the site innocently and appreciated that I was willing to make myself available that way.

When Facebook came along, I liked it right away because it didn’t let kids plaster their pages with garish flashing .GIF images and emo music. It required you to use your real name, and it seemed to make it clear that “you’re not in your room. This information is public and so you need to be careful what you put here”. I quickly amassed student friends on it– quicker this time because unlike MySpace, I actually liked and spent time on Facebook.

What has your experience been like?

At our schools, there has always been the expectation that teachers will maintain an informative website so students can access homework, handouts, calendars, and other class information. My first school was using RapidWeaver, a desktop program where teachers designed websites whole and then uploaded them to the school servers. As the school year progressed, the upload times got longer and longer as teachers’ sites got more complex. As a result, busy teachers gradually fall off, leaving their websites as a wasteland of outdated and useless material.

I have discovered that blogs are the ideal way to provide information to your students. Why? Because:

• the most up to date information (like tonight’s homework or today’s assignment) is always at the top
• old posts are saved and can be organized in whatever ways you can imagine
• blogs are free and easy to operate
• teachers who don’t want the extra hassle of “updating a web page” can even post to blogs by email!
• Students can “follow” your blog posts so they never miss an assignment
• Blog feeds can be combined so, for example, assignments from all the school’s teachers can appear on the same page. 
• Your blog feed can even be embedded in your school’s main web page. 
• You can maintain various blogs for separate purposes. I even have a private blog that nobody can see that I use to  take notes on confidential student situations.

The beauty of them is that they are so flexible that you will continue to find new and interesting ways to use them. Blogs are a powerful technology that can be used in a variety of ways to make your classroom management more efficient.

When I click into one student’s blog feed, it looks like this:

I can look at all of her posts in the Netvibes interface, and then I can click over to her blog if I want to leave her comments.

This week, we will be getting familiar with the grading rubric used to grade students’ work, and they will be applying it to one another’s work. They will be using this interface to give each other comments (constructive, I hope!) Wish me luck!

I think of blogging as leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for others to find the very best of the web, with my voice as a guide. The trick, then, is to find a way to quickly and easily save your web travels in a way that’s easy for others to follow. For me, the answer is a couple of great plug-ins to my Firefox browser that let me quickly grab, comment, and post from right inside the browser window. Let’s look at a couple….

Post to your blog without ever leaving Firefox

ScribeFire, an extension of Firefox ®, can pop up right in front of the pages you’re browsing, allowing you to drag photos, video, and text right into a blog post, then comment and post. I love it because I can post to multiple blogs from this one window and it quickly and easily handles all the formatting for me.

Part of the Google Toolbar extension (for Firefox and IE) is a great little button called “Send this” which allows you to send anything you find in your web travels to your Blogger blog (or to your friends via email or text message).

Again, this makes it incredibly easy to make sure that those great
sites don’t get away, and that your audience can see them in an easy-to-read format.

Just add the bookmarklet on the following page to your browser bookmark toolbar, and click it when you’re watching your favorite vids to show a “Download as MP4″ button. The MP4 you download will be higher quality than the .FLV video YouTube normally displays, and it’s more likely to work with your video editing and playing software. AWESOME!

Download YouTube Videos as MP4 Files

Spell checking phrases in TextEdit. Direct download to .mov file if above clickiness doesn’t work.

Getting Things Done with Thunderbird

Updated: Please see the bottom of the article

Well, I have been at my new job for 3 weeks now and my GTD implementation seems to be holding up quite well – at least in terms of my email anyway!

As I have mentioned before the company I work for uses Thunderbird
as its main email system (although Outlook Express and Entourage are
available for those that prefer them). To begin with it was a bit odd
having to tell half the office how to spell my surname – a
centrally stored address book is certainly a big advantage that
Microsoft Outlook has over other systems. However I’m finding the
functionality of Thunderbird brilliant in my GTD habits.

How to Recover Deleted Files with Free Software

Ack! The computer ate my term paper! We’ve all been there at
some point. You delete an important file, somehow it skips your Recycle
Bin altogether, and for all practical purposes, it’s disappeared into
the ether. But before you hit the big red panic button, there’s a very
good chance that your file is still alive and kicking somewhere on your
hard drive—you just need to know how to find it. With the right
tools, finding and recovering that deleted file can be as simple as a
few clicks of your mouse.

Part I: The Overview

Ok, so you’ve lost an important file. Don’t panic. Take a breath, and let’s see if we can find it. Before you go into full-on file recovery mode, make sure you double-check the folder you had saved it in and the Recycle Bin or Trash. Still nothing?

1. Stop What You’re Doing

When your operating system deletes a file, all it really does is mark
the space on your hard drive that your file occupies as free space.
It’s still there, but your computer is now perfectly happy to write new
data on top of it—at which point the file recovery process
becomes a lot more difficult. That means you should do as little
computing as possible until you find the file you’re looking for, since
every time you save a new file—every time your computer writes
information to your hard drive—your chances of recovering the
file go down.

2. Find the Right File Recovery Program

Windows: You’ve a lot of really great freeware options for file recovery if you’re running Windows. Notable apps include Undelete Plus (original post), PC Inspector File Recovery (original post), and Restoration (original post).
Undelete Plus is the most user-friendly option of the bunch, with
advanced filtering options that make it easy to find your needle of a
file among the haystack of deleted garbage, but in my tests I found
both Restoration and PC Inspector File Recovery to be more effective at
recovering files. (Of course, your mileage may vary.) As an added
bonus, the bare bones Restoration is portable, which makes it an
excellent addition to your thumb drive.

UPDATE: Per several readers advice, you may also want to check out Recuva (original post), another freeware Windows file recovery tool.

Mac: If you’re on a Mac and aren’t afraid to lay down a few bucks in the name of data recovery, the $99 Data Rescue II is the go-to application for file recovery with a friendly graphical interface.

All Platforms: If you’re not afraid to crack open a terminal window or command prompt, the free, cross-platform command-line tool PhotoRec (original post)
is a crack shot at recovering photos (as the name implies) as well as
virtually any other file type from your removable media or hard drives.

3. Recover Your Files

Once
you’ve picked a tool, it’s time to scan your hard drive for your lost
file or files. This process varies depending on the app you’re using,
but it’s basically the same for all of them: Just point the program at
the hard drive or folder that was holding your missing file and start
your scan. Once the scan is complete, you’re going to see a big list of
jumbled file names. Often most of these files are nothing more than
system files that your operating system has created in the course of
basic operation, and you won’t need to worry about them. You’re just
looking for the file type and name that matches what you’ve lost.

Once you find what you’re looking for, saving it is a matter of right-clicking the file and choosing where to save it.

Went through steps one through three and still aren’t having any
luck? It might be worth trying again with a different application,
since there can be a lot of variation between apps. If you’re still not
having any luck, part two discusses a few other ways you can try
addressing more specific problems when your data goes missing.

Part 2: More Specific Problems

Above you got a basic overview for recovering deleted files from your
computer. Now we’ll take a closer look at some more specific problems,
methods of data recovery, and tools that may be of help in your quest
for your elusive lost data.

Recover Files from a Wiped or Unbootable Hard Drive

So
you didn’t just accidentally delete a file or two and empty your
Recycle Bin prematurely—instead you’ve got a whole hard drive
worth of missing data. You can still use many of the applications
mentioned above to recover files from these drives as long as you have
or can get the hard drive into a bootable computer. For more details,
check out how to recover files from a wiped hard drive with PhotoRec (original post) or how to recover data from a crashed hard drive with PC Inspector File Recovery (original post).

If you can’t or don’t know how to get your unbootable drive into another computer, a Linux live CD can be perfect for rescuing files. If the Linux route scares you off, give the popular BartPE (original post) a try.

Finally, if none of these options can even read your hard drive, you
still might be able to get it working for just long enough with a few
tricks of the data recovery trade, like putting the busted hard drive in the freezer.

Recover Lost Photos

If
you need to resurrect photos from a damaged flash memory card from your
digital camera, you’ll be happy to know that most of the applications
listed in part one above will do the trick—you just need plug in
your camera or insert the card into your computer’s card reader before
running your data recovery application of choice. That said, you can
find other applications, like Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery (original post), that are focused specifically on image recovery that you may want to add to your data recovery toolbox.

Recover Lost Word Documents

If your lost dissertation was saved as a Word document, you’ve got a
few more interesting options for getting to your lost or deleted
documents—read more about them here and here.

Recover Data from Scratched or Corrupted CDs and DVDs

If
your munged data is sitting on optical media like a CD or DVD, the
recovery process can be slightly different. Freeware application CD Recovery Toolbox (original post)
is made specifically to read the portions of a CD that are readable in
an effort to rescue as much data as possible from a damaged disc. If
that doesn’t work, you may want to give a look at the 30-day trial of
shareware application CDCheck, as recommended by a reader. Then again, if scratches are the issue, you may be able to get away with simply fixing your scratched CD or DVD yourself.

Part 3: Don’t Let This Happen Again

Whatever
the cause of your lost file, the best method of data recovery is a good
preemptive data backup plan. If you’re on Windows, we’ve taken you
step-by-step through how to automatically back up your hard drive
so that this sort of thing never happens again. If you’re running a
Mac, do yourself a favor: Get an external hard drive and flip the
switch on the easy-to-use Time Machine. Linux users should check out backup options like FlyBack, TimeVault, or the time-honored rsync.

Have you ever raised deleted files from the hard drive graveyard?
What software did you use to do it? Tell us your tales of file recovery
victory and woe in the comments.