Applications to help your day

I have recently blogged about teachers spending time extracting videos from Youtube and other sources so that they can 'safely' be used in a classroom to support a curriculum context. I have use 'unplug' - a FireFox plugin to do this and this has been successful and not too time consuming.

Today, reading through my feeds, I have come across iDesktop.tv in a post on Nik Peachey's Quickshout blog. It does the job quickly and simply ... no need to register or subscribe, just type in what you want and have a look to see if it is there. If so click on the 'save as flv button' and it will download to your desktop. What could be easier? I tried a number of searches ( Sir Ken Robinson, Oh Laura, cup stacking ...) and although the search was perhaps a little slow, it certainly came up with the videos I was looking for.

For those presenters of you this is another of those things that you can quickly see a curriculm application for. It is an autocue or teleprompter. Called The Online Teleprompter it is so simple to use it is hardly worth explaining. The instruction for use are: Write or cut and paste your script to the form below. Press the button to start the prompter.
If text needs editing, just close the prompter window and restart with the new script. Thats it ! This again from the trawls of Nic Peachey ... I wonder what he will find next?