Wylio: another way to get free embeddable images

There are quite a lot of ways to search for images on the internet. I am always on the lookout for something that makes it as easy as possible for me and/or my students to obtain good CC images to illustrate my sites (wikis, blogs, etc). I have been using ImageCodr to find CC images for my wiki and blogs (and it works very well) but I have only been able to use Flickr images.

Wylio offers a very easy way to quickly search through the huge number of free images from different sources and then allows you to generate a code so that you can insert those images directly into a blog post.

 It is very simple to use and therefore useful to use with students.

 

• enter a keyword
• browse through the thumbnails Wylio finds
• find an image you like
• click on it to re-size it according to your requirements as well as set the alignment
• click on ‘Get the code’ to obtain the HTML code that can then be used to insert the image in your blog post. The code also includes an attribution to the original photographer 

You do not need to download anything to you own computer. There is (of course) a premium version that is not free but the simple version I have used is enough for me.  Below is an image I found to illustrate some information on Kindle e-readers
photo © 2010 Mike Licht | more info (via: Wylio)

Useful sites (weekly)

• 50 Best Blogs for Education Leaders | Online Universities A post from On-line universities blog 

• The End of Education as We Know It The End of Education as We Know It is a good post about inspiring educators to incorporate technology in their classrooms.

• OneRiot.com – Realtime Search for the Realtime Web OneRiot is a search engine tht pulls search results from Twitter, Dig and other social sharing services. The results are based on what issues are currently the most shared and discussed not based on “historical” data. You can choose to search the web or “video”. It also has a very “pared down” look to the site.

• Week 1: How Do We Form Communities (and why does it matter in English class)? – English Companion Ning 

• HBO: The Pacific: Homepage  

• 10 More Cool Things You Can Do With YouTube Videos Some of the most popular tools out there to go along with YouTube and the interest things you can do with them.

• World War II – History.com Interactive Maps, Timelines & Games 

• BBC – History – World Wars: Dogfight Over the Trenches Virtual Tour 

• BBC – History – World Wars: Dug-out Interior Virtual Tour 

• Learning English – Home A lot of attractive little podcasts and generally cheerful language stuff! Good for 30 min language tasks or revision.

• SmugMug Photo & Video Sharing. You look better here. 

• Skype in Schools – Adjust Your Sails! Why not use skype in schools? This blog entry outlines the reasons school districts might ban Skype and the rationale for Allowing it as a tool for classroom use. It goes into the legal issues surrounding this tool. 

• SimpleK12 » Blog Archive » I blog, you blog, let’s ALL blog! – Reasons YOU should have a classroom blog! ”I see a huge value in incorporating them in your classrooms. I would bet that if you mentioned the idea of a blog in your classroom to your students, they would be HYPED. Why? It’s quite simple really – they like the idea of having something “published” that they’ve personally written and that their classmates/teachers/parents can read. I’ve come up with a list (they are my favorite) of how you can engage your students with a classroom blog” 

• 29 Premium-Like Free But Extremely Tremendous Portfolio WordPress Themes @ SmashingApps 

• Airborn, Skybreaker & Starclimber by Kenneth Oppel This a fantastic author website. Very interactive and adds tothe stories in his airborn series.

• YouSendIt: Online File Sharing and collaboration with FTP Replacement – Send Large Files and Email Attachments with Managed File Transfer Solution ”YouSendIt is an online file sharing software that provides secure file transfer and allows you to easily send large files and large email attachments online, with outlook plugin and other productivity software”

• Home | www.bigbluebutton.org BigBlueButton is an active open source project that focuses on usability, modularity, and clean design — both for the user and the developer. The project is hosted at Google Code BigBlueButton is built by combining over fourteen open source components. The following diagram gives an overview of its capabilities

• YouTube Blog: The Future Will Be Captioned: Improving Accessibility on YouTube Google will begin to offer auto-captioning for all English-language videos on YouTube. You can automatically transcribe and then caption and index videos using the sound track. 

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

Tabbloid- bridging the gap to Web2.0

I have been occassionally emailing teachers FYI messages about important information on various blogs. I don’t do it regularily because I don’t always have the time to put things together and many individual emails can  be overwhelming or too much for the staff.

So I have been looking at the tool called Tabbloid. I am considering it as a way of introducing some of  the teachers to some of the great educational  blogs. I know that blogs are not new and neither are the RSS feeds but there are many who still do not understand too much about them.

Tabbloid is a simple web application that allows you to submit a set of RSS feeds, along with an email.  Tabbloid  will then email your address a “print-ready” .pdf newsletter/magazine on whatever schedule you prefer. The newsletter/magazine aggregates together all the recent postings from the blogs you have chosen.

You could then send the digest to the staff, or students if that was your aim, in a simple format. They could choose to print it out or read it on their computers. This would hopefully whet their appetite for reading blogs and using RSS feeds themselves. Those who have been hesitant about using RSS and reading blogs may see the relevance and feel comfortable enough to begin use them for themselves

It’s not about the technology

“It’s not about the technology. It’s about the community and shared learning.” — Clif Mims.

I was talking to a fellow teacher today about students going into teacher courses at university. She spoke about a student buying exercise books for each of her different subject, not about the student using wikis, blogs or nings. The student did not seem to have any idea about any Web2.0 aspects in her course. I hope she will find that there is a shift to using web2.0 and social media tools in her course. In the past 12 months I have found an amazing world on-line, that offers me so much for my own professional learning, making me a better teacher and I hope that some of my posts/links have assisted others as well. Students, who are intending to become teachers ,need to be looking at educational uses of the tools that many of them are familiar with. They should be able to come into schools with a lot of ideas and expertise that older teachers, like me, can learn from. It should not be the case that they do not see a place for these web2.0 tools in the classroom, or, if they do, only in a limited way. 

So many courses in the US have information available on-line. They offer there students, and others, a wealth of information. For instance, from  Clif Nim’s blog  I found the amazing video below. From this blog I found a lot of ideas for classroom activities, that lead me to think about other adaptations of the ideas, links to other educational media and the comments that others had added to the posts offered other perspectives.  

Clif Mims is an Assistant Professor at The University of Memphis and an Educational Consultant, Educational Technologist, Instructional Designer at Clif Mims Consulting. “I’m interested in the effective integration of technology with teaching and learning.”

 The video below is a presentation about some research about ant life. This video shows what one of the subterranean ant structures looks like. A post on Clif’s blog talked about how it might be used in the classroom. The emphasis is always not on the the “gee whizz” aspect but how to make use of something interesting, in a learning capacity within a classroom, to show students that learning can, and should, be interesting. Watch the video and then have a look at how it might be used.

Useful Links (weekly)

• Home | Youth Voices A meeting place where students share, distribute and discuss their digital work online.

• Visual Design for Instructional Multimedia Ideas for visual design for instructional multimedia

• Neil Gaiman’s Journal The talented author of Coraline, The Graveyard Book and other great books comments on the things that interest him, and I find it interesting.

• ScreenToaster – Free online screen recorder: create screencasts, tutorials and reviews in a few clicks once you register you can use it anywhere/anytime to make screencasts / tutorials / demos. Record your screen in one click and add subtitles! Share videos on the Internet in Flash Embed them on blogs/webpages or send them by email.

• Europeana – Homepage A searchable collection of images, videos, audio, and documents from a variety of European museums, libraries, universities, and governments. Still in beta format.

• It Died A listing of what internet services and companies are no longer available (or soon will be) for our use

• Main Page – K-3D K-3D is a 3D modeling, animation, and rendering system featuring a robust, object-oriented plugin architecture, designed to scale to the needs of professional artists, and is designed to generate motion-picture-quality animation.

• quikmaps.com :: maps for the masses A very easy to use tool that gives you the ability to “draw” lines on your map between various markers. You can also write a general description on your map. Next you are given an embed code as well as a unique url address. You don’t have to register to use it. “Doodle on Google”

• Oddee.com – A Blog on Oddities: the odd, bizarre and strange things of our world! A blog that finds all things weird and wonderful .

• vloud vloud is a free audio tool for you to upload quiet mp3s, and get louder ones back

• Photojojo » The Perpetual Photo Wall Calendar A simple idea that would be a great student project, from finding/creating the images to puting them together into something they can use.

• Double-Tongued Dictionary Double-Tongued Dictionary: A growing lexicon of fringe English, focusing on slang, jargon, new words, and more. A good resource if studying urban language but the site does contain advertisements that woud not be suitable for most schools.

• http://mediaeducationlab.com/pdf/CodeofBestPracticesinFairUse.pdf Code of best practices in fairuse for media literacy education. Hoping to clear up the confusion over the “fair use” of digital materials in teaching and learning, a panel of university professors has developed a “Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education.” “The document clarifies how fair use applies to the most common situations where media-literacy educators make use of copyrighted materials in their work, and it offers guidance for instructors so they can make more informed judgments about using these materials.”

• CJOnline / The Topeka Capital-Journal – Anti-bullying plans and policies for area schools

• How to: Build a Social Media Cheat Sheet for Any Topic – ReadWriteWeb Step-by-step instructions, with screen shots, for the process we use when we want to get smart about a new field in a hurry, by using the top blogs in that field.

• Lesson Writer LessonWriter creates lesson plans and instructional materials for teaching English language skills from any reading passage. LessonWriter analyzes text for vocabulary, grammar and usage, pronunciation, and word roots and stems.

• Shakespeare Searched. ”This search engine designed to provide quick access to passages from Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. Search results by topic, work, and character to make it easy to find exactly what you’re looking for. From something as simple as identifying the speaker of a particular quote to discovering underlying thematic elements across works, Shakespeare Searched has you covered. This website is not a replacement for a copy of the text. It provides no analysis or footnotes. It is meant to supplement a traditional reading of a work.”

• Behold | Search High Quality Flickr Images A very easy way to find photographs on Flickr

• SoundJay.com – Free Sound Effects Free sound effects web site. You are allowed to use the sounds on our website free of charge and royalty free in your projects but you are NOT allowed to post the sounds on any web site for others to download, link directly to individual sound files, or sell the sounds to anyone else

• How To Behave on Twitter : Scalable Intimacy Some reasonable guidelines for using Twitter.

• 52 Teachers, 52 Lessons Project

• Master Storytellers | Video channel on TED.com Nowhere has the timeless power of narrative been more apparent than at TED: here, storytellers both professional and provisional use the personal tale to entertain, educate and inspire to action.

• opensourceresources » home 

• Yuan.CC Maps Offers a way to let you mashup a variety of sources to geotag photos.

• Responsible Text Messaging Tips | Common Sense Media Some interesting information about teens and text messaging. May be a useful resource to share with parents as it offers advice and tips

• Flyr – Flickr Geotagged Photo Search You can use this little search engine to find geotagged photos. There are great applications for geotagging in schools

• CATHOLIC GOOGLE – Catholic Search Engine powered by Google - A Catholic Search Engine powered by Google

• Tame The Web » Blog Archive » Ten Trends & Technologies for 2009 Michael Stephen’s “Welcome to the 2009″ version of TTW’s annual look at the trends and technologies that I believe will impact what we do in libraries and information centers.

• Photography Assignment Generator (beta) D’arcy Norman’s contribution to the 2009/365 Flickr group. “This is a simple automated utility to generate random photographic assignments from a list of nouns, adjectives and colours.It could also be used for writing prompts.

• News | Open Source Schools

• Main Page – Teampedia This wiki is designed for a wide audience including: team leaders, trainers, teachers, managers, camp directors, counselors, and youth groups.

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