I was trying to find a good online presentation maker, and came across 280slides.com. It allows you to create a presentation that looks and acts very similar to PowerPoint, and best of all… it’s online, easy and free!
Hold your breath… I’m going to violate one of my own rules that I laid out at the beginning of this blogging adventure. In the beginning, I said that I wouldn’t post things that must be purchased, downloaded, or installed as a browser plug-in. This posting violates two-thirds of the rules. Yeah, it’s free. But it’s both- a download and browser plug-in! At least it does work with PCs (Firefox, IE, Chrome) and Macs (Safari).
Simply put, this cool little plug-in/add-on turns your desktop into a cool photo and video browser. it allows you to look at a collection of images/videos either on your computer or at various websites (such as Flickr, YouTube, Google, Bing, etc.) in the form of a very cool scrolling wall of images like this (this is a wall full of images from Costa Rica via Flickr):
I embedded a wall here for you- which is another cool thing you can do with it! But it’s easier than that to use. If you are on one of the supported websites, you’ll notice a little CoolIris icon in the lower left of an image on the page. If you click on that image, it will open CoolIris and show you the wall full of photos from the site you are currently browsing.
Don’t take my word for it, try it yourself! It sure makes hunting for images a lot more fun!
This site is a God-send to teachers who want students to blog but want to protect them from giving out private information to the world. It’s also great for all you micro-managers and control freaks! The dangers of blogging are obvious, so I’m not even going to go into all that. But this free site (with phenomenal customer support) allows you to set up blogs for your students then lock down the blogs as much as you want. Check out these privacy settings:
What can students put into their blogs? Just about anything!
HTML? That’s right! Students can embed HTML created from Continue reading
Have you ever needed a quick set of facts, but didn’t want to search through a million different websites to pull the facts together? That’s where Google Squared comes in. Google Squared (sponsored by Google of course) is a “smarter search” for facts. For example, if I needed facts about the different rain forests of the world, I could do a regular search which would probably give me what I need, but I’d have to compile the results from a few websites, or I could do a Google Squared search.
Finally! A great source for free, that’s right, free clip art! The Microsoft Clip Art gallery is OK at best- and that only suffices for your Office documents. But if you, like most educators, are in need of other clip art that you are free to use without worrying about violating copyright, then this site is for you! The site currently features over 30,000 pieces of searchable and browsable clip art graphics. Every one of these graphics are in the public domain, having been put there by the authors/designers. Here are a few examples (images that remind me of summer):
.png "soccer")
Each of the graphics can be downloaded in either the SVG format or the PNG format. For those of you unfamiliar with SVG, it stands for scalable vector graphics. If you don’t know the difference between a vector and a bitmapped/raster graphic, you should click here to find out more about these. Essentially, vector graphics can be scaled to any size without any loss of quality since they are drawn on your screen according to mathematical algorithms.
So there you have it- another great free resource for your projects.
Are you going to be in Denver this week? Hey, we are too! Stop by and see us at the Visions Technology booth. We will be in booth 1220 and/or 1123 most of Monday and Tuesday. We are presenting a few sessions in the booth theater as well as a few regular ISTE sessions. I don’t know the schedule yet, but I’ll revise this post as soon as I do.
Come see us!
-Susan & Jim
As we’ve mentioned before, Flickr is our friend! Not just because you can find almost any picture you need there- but because it also plays well with other websites. This cool website allows you to make a banner spelled out with Flickr pictures. Take a look at this example:
The cool thing about this is that you don’t even need to save the resulting image- you can just embed the provided code to display it on your site (I chose to screen capture it here)! The letters are randomly drawn from a pool, but if you don’t like one of the letters, simply click on it and it will be replaced by a different image. In this way, you can come up with thousands of combinations for the same word. See, here it is again:
Pretty cool, huh? Now, I just want to know who these people are that feel compelled to go around taking pictures of letters everywhere and posting them to Flickr. Seems to me like that would be a strange group of people- but I’m thankful they do it! Enjoy!
I know I’ve written about a Photoshop substitute in the past, but I recently came across a Web 2.0 tool that I like even better than what I found before- Pixlr.com. For big photo editing jobs, Pixlr does a really good job filling in for Photoshop. It looks and acts similar to Photoshop Elements, and is really easy to use. The best part of Pixlr is that is is 3 tools in one…
Susan and I are both avid readers- and our interests vary greatly. Finding a new good book to read is like finding a treasure- and a double bonus if it’s in stock at Half Price Books! Shelfari is a place where you can showcase the books you have read, are reading, or planning to read! You can start your own book group and see what your friends are reading, make recommendations, write reviews, and all kinds of things. Take a look at my bookshelf…
Does that interface look familiar? Seems like the Apple bookstore isn’t so original in its design after all.
So as an educator, think of these implications:
Oh, did I mention it’s free?
This has some real possibilities! It’s a simple concept- I use the online drawing tablet to draw something (can also include text). When I click Share, the drawing is saved to the site’s server and a unique URL is generated. I can then pass that URL on to another to add to my drawing or improve upon it (which in turn can be saved and another unique URL generated). Here’s an example I’ve drawn (remember, I am an educator- not an artist! There is a reason why God made Photoshop).
Start with my drawing, add to it and label the parts of the Water Cycle then post your link in the comments area! See my drawing (the same one as above) here: http://draw.to/DnkN1v. Add to it and re-post your new link!
