Useful Links

  by  Ken Whytock 

• Storyboarder – Android Apps on Google Play Free Android app for creating storyboards. The app allows you to pull pictures from your Android phone’s picture gallery, add captions to them, and arrange them into a storyboard. When you’ve completed your storyboard you can save it as a PDF and email it or save it to Dropbox.

• WordDraw.com – Free Newsletter Templates for Microsoft Word This tool offers free professional looking templates for newsletters, flyers, labels, and resumes. The sites newsletter templates are categorized for education, business, family, holidays, and by month. The templates must be downloaded and are compatible for all versions of Microsoft Word. These templates can also be utilized for a class newspaper, projects or even reports.

• How To Create A Custom Search Engine For Your Students

• Creates amazing videos from your photos | PicoVico.Com Turn simple photographs into videos using this site. Once you sign up (it’s free) you begin by choosing a video template and then adding your pictures from Facebook, Flickr, or your computer. You can set the order of your pictures, add captions to them and add text slides if you wish. Next you add music, either from their library or add your own from your computer. Your last step is to add a video title and any additional text and you’re done. Completed videos can be uploaded to You Tube or Facebook and can even be embedded into a website or blog. The site does have a 30 picture maximum but that is long enough for most people.

• Make Fake Movie Posters Tool for creating a movie poster that would be useful for a school project. can be done using this simple website. Students simply upload an image, add a few details for the text and then share their completed poster with the teacher.

• PosterMyWall | The Best online Custom Poster and Photo Collage Maker. Free Downloads! Yet another terrific site for creating poster projects for the classroom. The site is easy to use and navigate. Just select a template and change or add content as you desire. Every aspect of a poster template can be changed and you can add more pictures or text if you need. Once done there are a variety of ways in which the final poster can be shared including email.

• Tackk — Content Creation + Sharing This tools allows you to create online posters that can be shared via email, social media or be embedded onto a webpage or blog. As soon as you arrive on the website you can start creating your poster by editing their ready made template. You can easily add a title, body text, pictures, videos, and even songs. You can add content from You Tube, Instagram, Vimeo, Sound Cloud, Hulu, and Spotify. Creating an online poster with Tackk is so easy to do.

• 12 Changes Coming To The Future Of Learning – Edudemic Good infographic for starting discussion between teachers.

• 23 creative sketchbook examples to inspire high school Painting / Fine Art students This article contains a collection of beautiful sketchbook pages to help students studying a range of high school Art qualifications, including GCSE, A Level and IB Visual Art. The collection includes sketchbooks completed by students as well as artist sketchbooks. Pages have been selected to demonstrate different sketchbook presentation techniques as well as to indicate the variety of layout styles possible. Descriptions underneath each image provide tips and guidance, outlining the successful aspects of each page.

• Pinstamatic – Get More From Pinterest Pinstamatic is a creative and easy way to create pinable content. While you can already create quotes with Share As Image and edit photos pretty extensively with PicMonkey, Pinstamatic lets you pin sticky notes, screenshots of webpages, album covers from Spotify, images of Twitter profiles, locations with commentary, and even calendar dates. This simple tool makes it easy to create content for Pinterest without having a photo to use first.

• Free Online Slideshow maker Slideful is a simple online-based slideshow creation interface. Slideful is easy to use so it is good for a younger users or a group that is not very tech-savvy.

• Creative Commons Kiwi – YouTube “By Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand with support from InternetNZ. To find out more about Creative Commons in New Zealand visit us at creativecommons.org.nz”

• Blendspace | Copyright And Creative Commons

• Search DuckDuckGo DuckDuckGo is a search engine that provides instant answers. Search anonymously. It does not track you and has more instant answers and less spam/clutter.It also has a user friendly interface and an easily navigable layout.

• fefoo search app fefoo is not a search engine, its an application that helps you search better. It uses the traditional search engines to search. You search on categories and your search is more refined from the time you start searching. In case you don’t use categories it works like a normal search engine. fefoo helps to streamline searches with less clicks and your search is more precise.

• blekko | search Blekko organizes content in semantic schema and pulls search results from a wide variety of online. sources.

• ODP – Open Directory Project Dmoz is one of the most comprehensive human-reviewed directory of the web. The content on this search engine is categorized into different categories from Arts to Sport. Offers Basic and Advanced saerch options.There is also a special category for Kids and Teens.

• Ixquick Search Engine A search engine that allows you to many popular search engines simultaneously and anonymously. Combined, these engines cover more of the Internet than any one search engine alone.

• 10 Digital Citizenship Hashtags To Join The Conversation A useful list of Hashtags to follow for information and resources on the topic

• A Glimpse into the Future of Learning: An Infographic | KnowledgeWorks | College and Career Readiness “The infographic tells the big story of KnowledgeWorks’ third forecast on the future of learning, Recombinant Education: Regenerating the Future of Learning.  Comprised of twelve key insights with accompanying graphics, it points the way toward a diverse learning ecosystem in which learning adapts to each child instead of each child trying to adapt to school. “

• 44 Prompts Merging Reflective Thinking With Bloom’s Taxonomy

Useful Links

• The Paradigm Shift: 4 Goals Of 21st Century Learning In this context of trying to make sense of exactly what progressive learning was, in 2009 I sketched out a graphic that visualized 9 Characteristics of 21st Century Learning, and recently created a follow-up framework, The Inside-Out Learning Model.”

• Young People, Ethics, and the New Digital Media | The MIT Press “The authors argue that five key issues are at stake in the new media: identity, privacy, ownership and authorship, credibility, and participation. Drawing on evidence from informant interviews, emerging scholarship on new media, and theoretical insights from psychology, sociology, political science, and cultural studies, the report explores the ways in which youth may be redefining these concepts as they engage with new digital media.”

• Symbols.net This is a search engine with a difference as it only provides access to symbols (signs and flags). Those who designed it have done quite a good job. The search options include the usual search box, an alphabetical list and a category approach.

• Free vectors, photos and PSD Downloads | Freepik Freepik is a search engine that helps anyone who is interested in graphics and web designer to locate free photos, illustrations, PSD and vectors for using in websites, banners, presentations, magazines and advertising. There is a good range of images that are quite interesting. You need to check further for the copyright status of individual images, which is a bit annoying, but still good for ideas.

• Niice. A search engine with taste. Niice is a search engine for anyone interested in design. It draws in images from a very small number of sites at the moment, but some of the images it finds are really high quality and unusual. Neither the search engine nor the page that you land on explains the copyright situation for each image but it does offer a lot if you are looking for inspiration.

Using Google search options

I am preparing some lessons on research for the new year 7 students. Knowledge about how make internet searches more efficient  is something that students from all year levels could refresh from time to time.

We always seem to begin with Google as it is the one everyone seems to know best. Most students  use Google almost exclusively but wikipedia and Youtube are also high up on their lists. We all can see how Google has changed since it was first developed. Some things are very obvious and others less so. It is very easy to get into a rut and not notice some changes. It is always interesting to see how much the year 7 students know. Many have a very basic level of knowledge but are very confident they know how to search. Many teachers seem to assume that students are proficient at searching the web but many

I usually ask them some basic questions that gradually show how well they can narrow down searches. It is interesting how many hands go down as I ask my various questions. After this initial introduction they always want to learn how to do the things I ask about.

I also ask the students put the icon for the  Google “advanced search” on their favourites tool bar as we go through the lesson. The fields shown there are useful for reminding the students about how they can narrow down their searches.

The options that Google has on its simple search page has not been noticed by very many students let alone used by them. The tab “search tools ” can be really useful for them and they don’t have to be on the advanced search page.

It  offers some very useful options to help refine searches.

You can choose:

• “The Web”- drops down the option of Australian sites or the whole web,
• “Any time” – once clicked,  allows you to search from information from an hour ago to a year ago or to customize your date range.
• “All results”  – is the list that I think offers some of the best options to refine searches. The option which has especially interested some teachers who work in student support (for students who find classroom work more difficult than most) is the reading level option. I talk about using it depending on whether or not you are new to a subject or already have some understanding.

If you choose this option, it breaks down the level of difficulty on one of these will into 3 types: basic, intermediate and advanced. Clicking on any one of these will give you the sites that Google has designated fit that description.

In an advanced search  these can be combined in many more a variety of ways rather than having to choose just one or another.

I can see the “search tools” option in Google being used quite a bit this year although I must not fail to mention InstaGrok, which is a visual search engine that offers the option to choose the level of difficulty as well as a number of other great features. I wrote a post about Instagrok last year  but since then can be used in Explorer

Useful links (Weekly)

  by  heyjudegallery 

• instaGrok | A new way to learn This is a type of search engine that finds educational content and retrieves it in multiple formats, including web pages, images, videos and even forums. It filters out non-educational content and profanity, uses crowd sourcing to rate the quality of each search result, displays search results according to grade level difficulty, provides source notes, visualizes concepts in an interactive concept map, updates the concept map as you refine your topic

• Pittsburgh – The Role of the Library in a Digital World « Workshop, Training and Presentation Resources Slideshow presented at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh June 4th, 2012

• slidestaxx – create amazing social media slideshows Slidestaxx is a presentation tool that allows its users to create social media slideshows. You can gather media from different sources and put them together in the one slideshow then use slideestaxx to embed it into a blog, website or wiki

• Zentation.com – Webinar software Zentation is a video presentation tool . It combines both videos and slides into presentationsto make a more engaging piece of multimedia. It has free and paid options.

• PreZentit – Crea, comparte y muestra tus presentaciones en lineaThis tool allows its users to create alone or with others, share and show online presentations. The presentations can be private or public with each one having its own web address. It is a tool that could be used with students. Beta at present

• Ahead. | View | PRICING | Ahead. This tool is another presentation tool for educators. It works in such a way that it instantly transforms your layouts into a zooming presentation. Has both free and “pro” options.

• Plagiarism Checker – the most accurate and absolutely FREE! Try now!  Plagtracker is an online service which will scan a block of text (eg. an essay or paper) and compare it to internet pages and a database of academic papers. It is also free. plagiarism tools education

• Home – 80 Days That Changed Our Lives – ABC Archives ABC website which has historical moments in time, as recorded by the ABC, with audio and video. The site explores 80 key events in history that shaped our world. There are a wealth of video and audio resources related to each event, along with personal reflections from ABC staff.

• Welcome – Text Classics The Text Classics series is designed to unearth some of the lost marvels of our literature, and to allow readers to rediscover wonderful books they have never forgotten. These books are milestones in the Australian experience.

• TED-Ed | Lessons Worth Sharing Offers some of TED’s great videos in an educational platform with interactive lessons on various subjects.

• Home | MIT + K12 Making Video to Make a difference Educational science videos produced by MIT students including experiments that can be used in classsrooms

• Aviary – Tools Aviary is now Flickr’s default photo editor. (Click on Actions when you are looking at a Flickr photo.) “It is a suite of powerful creative applications that you can use right in your web browser. We’re on a mission to make creation accessible to artists of all genres, from graphic design to audio editing.” Its image editor Phoenix, is a super-simple tool now designed to work with Google Drive.

• PicMonkey – Photo Editing Made of Win In addition to basic edits, you can add: overlays; text; cool effects; textures; a lovely array of frames; touch ups like blemish fix, wrinkle remover, weight loss, lip tint and more.

• QR Codes | Common Craft Another great video from Common Craft. The video explains how QR codes are changing the way we access information in the real world through scanning a new kind of code with a camera phone.

• SimilarSiteSearch.com – The Best Place To Find Similar Websites SimilarSiteSearch.com helps you find similar, related, or alternative websites. Their goal is to generate the most relevant results for users.

• edtech VISION – edtech VISION Advice on how to make simple but effective book trailers with minimum technology

• New York City Dept. of Education Releases Social Media Guidelines for Teachers | LJ INFOdocket New York City has issued its first social media guidelines for public school teachers. The guidelines, which stop short of an outright ban, urge teachers to reject friend requests or other contact with students on their personal accounts.

• What Making an E-Book Costs, Publisher Responds | Digital Book World

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

Useful sites (weekly)

 
  by  Ron Houtman 

• The KYVL for Kids Research Portal – How to do research Home Base A great site with visual representations of the steps on of the research process along with great research organizers.   

• Collaborative annotation of images online | SpeakingImage This is an interesting image tool. Upload images and annotate. You can other embed media inside the annotations. Annotations pop up as you click or hover over the objects you add. You can embed the annotated image into webpage or blog. This could be a useful tool for teachers and students. Lots of scope for creativity with layers etc. You can share to a group and set editing permissions for public or restricted people/groups for collaboration purposes.  

• The official book website of Spud by John van de Ruit. 

• 11 Tips To Make Your YouTube Videos Go Viral | Video Camera School – Learn Video Marketing, Video SEO, Video Search Engine Optimization (VSEO), and Video Publishing   Ivan Walsh : “One small change to your video can have a huge impact downstream. So, don’t be afraid to experiment and see what work best. For example, changing the text of your video or the title may increase the click-thrus significantly. Look at how other power users submit videos to DIGG. Check out the writing style they use and also how they seed the videos on Twitter.”   

• Search Engines A basic guide this offers several search engines that can be used for writing papers and comparing information on websites.  

• E-Books, DRM and Universal Formats -Read an ebook week March 6-12 Digital strategist and writer Sara Rosso had an opportunity to do a one-on-one interview with Cory Doctorow. Here is and excerpt of that interview – E-books, DRM and Universal Formats.  

• Teach Yourself to Teach with Tech: The first 10 | TeachingEnglish | British Council | BBC

• ClassTools.net: Create interactive flash tools / games for education Classtools is a tool for educators to make their own educational games, which can be shared via email or embedded in a web page. There are 15 easy-to-use templates, which make game creation easy. There’s also a selection of premade games, which teachers may use with their students 

• Lending e-books: Either a borrower or a lender be | The Economist  @theeconomist: Borrowing and lending: Two websites are offering new models on how to share e-books  

• Online book reviews are fantastic – trust me | Christina Martin | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk 

• Digitally native or wise? « Another dot in the blogosphere?  

• teachingwithted / FrontPage A wiki created by Jackie Gerstein that shares videos along with lesson ideas connected to each one  

• Microsoft online safety research  

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