Speech Input Using Chrome

Thanks to Amit Agarwal, I discovered that you can easily add a speech option to any input boxes that you have on your website inlcuding your search box.

Unfortunately, it only works with Google Chrome at the moment! But, as Amit explains it can also be used with a textarea. Here you can add longer sentences. If you are building up a paragraph, then the text must be copied to another location as the text area is cleared each time the microphone is activated. Could work well with short answer questions for those who struggle with typing text. A free and easily implemented option.

Works fine with Blogger, Wordpress and Moodle. Now, if only there was an easy way to add this option to Google Docs forms :)

Why not try it out below:




Click the microphone icon and speak


Remember, you must be using Chrome!

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Enjoying Apture Highlights

Apture Highlights is a browser extension that lets you experience the power of Google search, and the richness of YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and Wikipedia without leaving the webpage you are on.

You simply highlight a phrase on any webpage to reveal search results without ever leaving the page.

I agree with Apture when they say it is "fast, powerful, and fun". Oh, and so easy to use as well. Brilliant!!

Apture Highlights Extension Welcome Video from Tristan Harris on Vimeo.

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Secret Google Tips for Researchers

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation produced a series of four videos giving tips on using google for research purposes.

The videos are about 10min long, very easy to follow and do provide some useful basic google search tips, despite being produced over 4 years ago! Also, there does not seem to be a fifth video even though it is billed as a 5 part series!!

Thanks to A.A. Karim for highlighting the series.

Build your own custom video playlist at embedr.com

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Find Educational Videos on EduTube

EduTube is an educational video search platform, which organizes the best educational video content on the Internet.

All content on EduTube is moderated and only "relevant, educational content is permitted". Indeed, EduTube focuses on high quality, popular videos - those which get several hundred to several thousand or more views a day on the hosting website.

The videos may be searched according to category, educational level, video type, duration, language, relevant tags and copyright. Results of the search may be sorted according to title, views/day, date added and EduTube Index.

You can also keep up to date with new additions through the EduTube RSS feed.

EduTube looks like a very useful resource!

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Technorati Tags: edutube, youtube

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Visual Search Engines

KartOO is a metasearch engine, which presents its results in the form of an interactive map. You must type in your keyword/s in order to start the search.

About 15 results are shown on each map. You can refine your search by selecting items from the suggested topics (shown on the map and listed beside it) or by typing in further keywords.

Quintura presents a visual tag cloud that you can navigate and easily refine in order to find information. The resulting links are shown on the right hand side of the screen.

The tag cloud continually changes as you move your mouse over each tag in the list.

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Technorati Tags: kartoo, quintura, search engine, tag cloud, visual

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Online Goodies (6) - Technorati

Technorati is a search engine for social media.

According to Jeff Koo at Technorati: "Technorati is the recognized authority on what's happening on the World Live Web, right now. The Live Web is the dynamic and always-updating portion of the Web. We search, surface, and organize blogs and the other forms of independent, user-generated content (photos, videos, voting, etc.) increasingly referred to as 'citizen media.' "

The Favorites and Watchlist sections are useful features. In Favorites you can keep a track of all the blogs that you want to read. The Watchlist allows you to set up searches, for interesting social media, using tags and URLs.

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Technorati Tags: citizen media, social media

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