Social Media posting – infographic to download plus useful links

In keeping with some of the discussions this week I was very interested in the post What do I post where? by Sylvia Rosenthal Tolesano (@Langwitches).

It was a great visual representation that I think would help explain social media to a number of the staff at our school.

Sylvia is a leading teacher in the digital educational world and over the past few years have found the posts and articles she writes for her own and other blogs inspirational. She is also a great collaborator and has made this poster available as a download for others to use.

• How to Create Your Own Online Course: 100 Tools, Guides, and Resources | Best Universities  A long list of reviews and references to sites, best practices and tools  for creating content. Also offers tips for students and teachers as they relate to online teaching and learning.
• Copyscape Plagiarism Checker – Duplicate Content Detection Software The free version of this content checker works by seeking out duplicate pages, so it won’t help you much before publishing, but it can help if you need a quick take on what you have already published. Premium versions include copy searches and duplicate alerts.

• Vaughan Memorial Library : Tutorials : Plagiarism The site shows students what plagiarism is and how to avoid accidentally plagiarizing someone’s work.

• Plagiarism Checker – Free Online Software For Plagiarism Detection The website allows you to check copy by either pasting it or uploading a .txt file, then compares it sentence by sentence with Google, Yahoo or MSN search. It works quickly and correctly spotted our duplicate partner article–as well as several unauthorized reprints–but lower on the results page were many articles matching any of the words, not the specific phrases. Since it breaks down the article into sentences for you, it’s much faster than using a search engine on your own. Available in English only.

• Plagiarism Checker Free Online – Plagiarisma This content checker is our top pick for language support and versatility. Sign up for free with your Facebook account and you can paste in text, check a url or upload files in 190 languages. Aside from checking the web, Plagiarisma can also delve into Google Scholar for articles, patents, legal opinions and journals as well as Google Books.

• Sqpad – Easily save and search for notes

• The Intersection of Digital Literacy and Social Media — Campus Technology

  “As educators look for new ways to teach digital literacy or the use of digital technology to find, organize, comprehend, evaluate, and create information, some are turning to social media to help advance the concept in the college classroom. BUT…..colleges leveraging social media to improve digital literacy must focus on students’ current use of social media and then find ways to interface those activities with the curriculum.”

• Solvemall.com – crosswords online A good collection of online crossword puzzles to help improve your English.There are many different levels from beginner with pictures to more advanced.

• There is No Set of Skills for Transliteracy « Libraries and Transliteracy

• Information Literacy: Building Blocks of Research: Overview A good overview by Debbie Abilock

• PresentationTube Recorder PresentationTube Recorder uses a simple and straight forward technique to capture your own PowerPoint presentations from the comfort of your home or office, and without the need to have Internet connection while recording. PresentationTube provides a FREE version and FULL version of PresentationTube Recorder.

• Unused Words – Discover a new word every day Although it is called ‘Unused words’, many of the words are still in use. The site also gives some interesting information about the history and origin of the words as well.

• Beautiful-Libraries.com Home

• https://s3.amazonaws.com/infographics/Social+Media+Education.png Infographic – Pros and cons of social media in education

• What NOT to include in your social media policy A few salient points to remember

• Half an Hour: New Forms of Assessment: measuring what you contribute rather than what you collect  ”This list of three types of assessment is intended only to stimulate thought….These three things – helping others, being cooperative, contributing to the public good – are obviously not easy to assess. To be sure, it’s far easier to ask students simple questions and grade the number of correct responses. But asking students simple questions, far from measuring putative ‘content knowledge’, is really an exercise in counting without any real interest in what is being counted.”

• Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger | Ars Technica

• The Building Blocks of a Sound Social Media Policy « Radian6 – Social media monitoring tools, social media engagement software and social CRM and marketing from the industry leader in social analytics.

• The rise of e-reading | Pew Internet Libraries ”Summary of findings”

• Association of Research Libraries (ARL) :: Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries  ”The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) presents the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries, a clear and easy-to-use statement of fair and reasonable approaches to fair use developed by and for librarians who support academic inquiry and higher education. “

• New site offers help with shift to digital education | eSchool News ”Epic-ed (US)  aims to empower digital transitions at all stages of development, including school leaders who are thinking about moving to ubiquitous computing environments, those who wish to implement ed-tech pilot projects, and those who are ready for full-scale implementation.”

• OverlapMaps – Instantly compare any two places on Earth! Overlap Maps is a free service that can be used to quickly compare the size of countries, states, provinces, and some bodies of water. To create a visual comparison of two countries select one country from the “overlap this” menu and select one country from the “onto this” menu. The comparisons you make are displayed on a map. You can make comparisons from different categories.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Imagecodr – Attributing your CC Flickr images

My colleague Tania Sheko sent me a useful link this week. It was for a tool called ImageCodr. At the moment it only works with Flickr images but it is a great start.

I have been in Year 7 classes over the past few weeks. I have been showing them some of the ways they can better use some of the different search engines available to them. We have also been discussing plagiarism and when and how to quote. They have also been working on creating bibliographies that list all their information sources accurately. This has led onto questions about using images. The students, as well as staff, find it difficult to find and correctly use and attribute images (and music/sound). Many have never heard of Creative Commons although most know about copyright. They are all very interested in the CC sites and most like the idea of doing things that make them better digital citizens. One of the problems that many students have after they have located their images on the internet is understanding how to attribute correctly the images that they use.

Finding an image that has the licence best suited to their needs, getting the correct code for the image size required, giving the correct attributions with links back to the flickr page and the author’s profile can be difficult enough for teachers let alone students. This is where the ImageCodr tool comes in very handy. When I used it in my wiki the image was embedded with a clear CC logo, with the exact licensing terms for this specific image, as well as the name of the photographer and a link to their Flickr page. The image itself is linked to the image page, and correct alt text is used. You can you can see this when you hover over the image.  The CC logo links to the Creative Commons.org website and the license explanation page are also there.

I showed the students how they can find flickr images.There is FlickrCC and FlickrStorm, Compfight and well as the Flickr searching option. (I have posted about how to use all of these previously). We also used Google to find images with CC licences. 

Note: You have the option of using the ImageCodr to search for images also. 

Once you have found an image in flickr you only need to copy the URL of the image and then insert this into the Get Code page at ImageCodr.

After pasting in the flickr code you hit the Submit Query button and in no time ImageCodr brings up a screen that gives you everything you need to embed the image. You have:

• Information about the Creative Commons Licence attached to the image.
• Options to select the image size you would like to embed and when you have done this.
•  A HTML code, that includes all of the attribution details attached to the image, will then be generated.
• Lastly you can see what the image and the attribution will look like. 

The code can be copied and inserted into the webspace.It did not work for this blog, wordpress.com does not like the code but it worked beautifully when I wanted to added images to the Shakespeare wiki I have been working on. I am sure that there will be an answer to this but I haven’t investigated it yet.

Even if you can’t paste the HTML code into something easily the information is very useful. The CC licences are very simply and clearly stated to  help you understand them. You can then use that information to decide how best you can use it, even if you have to add the image in a more arduous way.

Useful Links (weekly)

• Scientific Calculator

• AIDLT ~ A new voice in ICT Education Site of Australian Institute of Digital Learning and Teaching

• Google Image Swirl A new way to search through Google Images, with a nice interface that let’s you look at images grouped by similarities

• 4Teachers : Educator’s Resources Resources from 4Teachers. Can be used to assist in developing lessons, web pages and calendars to share

• 15 Things All Classrooms Should Have PK-12 – The Educators’ Royal Treatment Tries to come up with a list of everything a classroom should have.

• 25 Great Sources of Blog Ideas & Inspiration | Site Sketch 101 25 good sources of Blog ideas & inspiration

• Parent Advice – Tech Talk: Beyond Internet Safety – Common Sense Media Parent advice and tips on Tech Talk: Beyond Internet Safety Common Sense Media seeks to help parents choose what’s best for their kids

• Stock Photography – Search 5.8 Million Stock Photos, Stock Footage Video Clips, Royalty Free Images, and Illustrations The Fotos earch image search engine saves you time by allowing you to search over 5.5 million images from over 100 stock photography, stock illustration, and video stock footage publishers at one website. Make sure the royalty Free box is checked when doing a search

• e-Learning: What’s Hot and What’s Not? « Performance X Design Overview of current trends in e-learning. According to this post, what’s hot is social media, informal learning, simulations & scenario-based learning, virtual worlds, rapid learning, mobile learning, open source, and performance support.

• Learntrends 2009 Sessions Live Blogging « Online Sapiens Collected links to live blogging posts from LearnTrends Good to have all of them together in one place

• Mr. Higgins’ Blog » Blog Archive » ClustrMaps as Student Motivation A good description from a teacher describing how his students are motivated by the ClustrMap on his class website, including how it inspires them to look up places on Google Earth.

• Blogs Give Students an Audience | Edutopia Interview with an 8th grade teacher about how having an audience for their blog has motivated her students

• Steve Stander :: Blog :: Blogging & Motivation: Psychology of Language Learning Looking at blogging as a way to motivate students to write through the lens of Determination Theory (Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness), examining how to generate and maintain motivation. Also discusses an inquiry-based learning approach with blogging.

• Great Opening Sentences From Science Fiction – Books – io9 A list of interesting opening sentences from sci-fi books 

• Ninjawords – a really fast dictionary Great tool for students to define vocabulary or spelling words or to study multiple meanings of a word. Uses Wiktionary database for definitions instead of the WordNet database. Also has an iPhone app. Case sensitive when looking up words.

• Things That Keep Us Up at Night – 10/1/2009 – School Library Journal Thought-provoking article on current technology & trends and their impact on libraries & information literacy.

• A Way to Teach | The Text is a Terrible Thing to Waste 

• Angela Maiers Educational Services: Great Readers Have Strategies

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Typealyzer: checking my blog writing style

One of the forum discussions on our PLP Ning is entitled: What does your blog writing style say about your personality?

I did the test using Typealyzer. This tool analyses the writing style in your blog. I don’t know if the content is analysed or the tags but it is entertaining and faster than answering all the questions on the Myers-Briggs survey.

Free social networking icon set for Bloggers

Just for a change of pace, here is a set of free, non-standard icons, for non-commercial use by bloggers, designed by those at Templates.com.

This is a lovely (and free) icon set of the most popular social websites. They are placed “in a bottle” for bloggers and consist of 10 icons:

•  del.icio.us, DesignFloat.com, Digg.com, Facebook.com, Ma.gnolia.com, Reddit.com, RSS, StumbleUpon.com, Technorati.com, Twitter.com
• Each icon is produced in the following sizes: 80х80, 64х64, 32х32.

You can learn more about the creation process of this Icon set on the Templates.com blog.