AudioPal - widget adds audio to your site

Add another layer of communication to your website, blog, or other web 2.0 tool with AudioPal. To order, you need to first call and add your voice by phone. Enter a passcode. Preview (listen). Then type in your e-mail address so you will get AudioPal e-mail with with link for your voice message. Could be useful for school or library websites or blogs. Could be used for an opening greeting or regular messages.

Features include:

• Record and use your OWN voice
• Select from a number of voices (TTS)
• Playback controls
• Update your audio anytime
• Free
  

AudioPal is a companion to SitePal, which lets you add talking avatars.

Widget for Sharing -- "Share This"

Tom Kahn shared a cool tool -- a widget called "Share This" so I experimented with it on a number of my blogs. It allows me (and readers) to share a post with other social networking accounts. I shared an item from my Advocate4Libraries blog with my Facebook account, but could also share (re-post) with my Twitter and other accounts.

How would you use this? Here is an example: Members of the California School Library Association could post a message on their personal or library blog account about the California School Library Association's popular, free, online educational technology tutorials for teachers called "Classroom Learning 2.0" and "Discovering Assistive Technology". For those who have completed or almost completed School Library Learning 2.0, they could add a testimonial about how much they learned and enjoyed the discovery learning format. You get the idea! The more who hear about the CSLA professional development and program tutorials, the more visibility for school libraries. Remember, strong school libraries build strong students and lifelong learners!

Yellow Pages Widget - LIBRARY category

KW Low at AT&T YellowPages.com has launched a cool local directory search tool, a YP widget. It took longer than he planned and this is only version 1.1. Now that the search widget is available, it can be used by anyone who creates a YPC account. The smallest version (160 pixels wide) is ideal for my blogs. If you want, you can set a default location for your state or city. You can have no categories selected, list the top 5 categories, or select your own categories! Love it! See how easy it is to add "libraries" as a category. I've added a heading that urges readers to look up their local library.

Next year, KW plans to make it a pay-program along the lines of Google AdSense, where each search of the YP Directory would be worth a penny or some formula.

Popular Categories at YellowPages.com
RestaurantsMovie TheatersChildcareLibrariesSchools

Desktop Widgets

While catching up on e-mail, I came across a notice about three desktop widgets from eSchoolNews: Top News, Funding News, and Technology News. Each were customizable by color and size (if your institution's filter doesn't block the operation like mine did!)

I looked up the definition of "widget" in Wikipedia and found more than I wanted, so narrowed it down to "desktop widgets" and read that "widgets are interactive virtual tools that provide single-purpose services such as showing the user the latest news, the current weather, the time, a calendar, a dictionary, a map program, a calculator, desktop notes (looks like post-it notes), photo viewers, or even a language translator, among other things." A month or so ago at work, my IT Department pushed a handy YellowPages.com widget to all employees' desktops.

North Plains Public Library Director Aaron Schmidt's March 2008 Multimedia and Internet @ Schools article on "Widgets and Widgetry" covers this topic well and provides tons of examples. He concludes by saying that the widgets discussed in his article can be big timesavers while adding fun and dynamic information. The article recommends Widgipedia and Widgetbox for more widgets.