I Stumbled Upon FindSounds

This post actually pulls in two new tools I have found recently. The first is a browser plug-in called Stumble Upon. This plug-in works with both Firefox and IE. StumbleUpon helps me discover and share great websites. As I click Stumble! in my toolbar, I get websites matched to my personal preferences. I set up my preferences to focus more on the topics I am dealing with educationally and with my job as Instructional Designer. I've found sites I probably would never get to with a generic Google search.

One of those sites is FindSounds. One of the projects I'm working on is an i3D Visual Learning Object for a collaboration between a community college biology instructor and a high school biology teacher. We are working on creating a visualization of an animal and plant cell. One idea to help students remember each component of the cell was to attach a sound that would be representative (sort of like Fantasia for the cell). For example, the user would hear a strong bass drum sound when he/she rolled over or clicked on the nucleus. FindSounds finds sounds on the web. There is a partial list of examples searches or I can type in a word and search that way. I can't wait to play.