More and more, in my presentations at various conferences and staff development sessions, I briefly discuss the role of technology for today’s student (digital natives) and how many teachers (digital immigrants) refuse to speak the language. Reluctant teachers have all kinds of excuses. The following video is a great satire:
So just think what our kids’ kids will be using to compare the ridiculousness of not embracing the here and now!
From their own website: “ThingLink helps you create and discover rich images. Be creative! Make your images come alive with music, video, text, images, shops and more! Every image contains a story and ThingLink helps you tell your stories.”
Thinglink is such a fun site that allows students to incorporate lots of content with tags on an image. It’s so easy and quick, the hardest part is remember the website’s name…. thinklink, thingling, thinkling, Thinglink!
We’ve all heard the rumors and humdrum about the Chinese government blocking all kinds of websites with their massive web filter to “protect” their citizens from possibly interacting with anyone or anything that may be critical of their government or infuse those crazy Western ideologies like democracy and basic human rights (OK, I’ll stop the political rant here). But how much of the rumors are true? How aggressive are those web filters? Find out at this site simply by entering the URL of a website. The website will attempt to access the website from computers within China to see if it is blocked or not.
This won’t be all that useful for a great number of people, though it will for some. An ESL teacher that was going to leave to teach English in China asked me about our web resources- asked if they would be available to him once he is in China early next year. For him, this website is of great value. For students in general, this is a great lesson in cultural differences- analyzing which websites are blocked and finding out why!
Let me be upfront here: this blog post will not do justice to everything that CloudMagic can do. Now that we have that out of the way, let me do my best to tell you how awesome this is. This video gives you a good idea about this… thing.
For those of us who live in the digital world, we have our documents, data, and information spread out over many different platforms such as multiple Google Docs accounts, a few Gmail accounts, a Twitter account (or two), and don’t forget Dropbox, Evernote, iCloud, Google Calendars, and more! Finding that information can be (and usually is) challenging. For example, I have two Google Docs accounts (one personal, one professional) and I am constantly moving back and forth between the two. In which account did I save that document? Where did I see that- was it a Twitter post or a Facebook message?
Frankly, none of us has time to go log in to every account on every platform and search for what we need. And that’s why CloudMagic totally rocks.
Here’s how it works:
Sign up for a CloudMagic account (yes, it’s free).
Register/link your accounts- yes, you can register multiple Google accounts, multiple Twitter accounts, etc.
CloudMagic does the rest!
When you need to find something belonging to you, just access CloudMagic using the browser extension, mobile app (iOS or Android), or CloudMagic website. Enter the search term and it’s found instantly. And I do mean instantly- it blows away the time it takes for a normal Google search. It will search all your assets instantly and display results. Click on one of the hits for a preview of your data. Then you can open it instantly in the native application.
Here’s a sample of a search of my stuff when I entered “QR Codes” in the search field:
Give it a try- it will become one of your indispensable tools that you rely on daily!
Icons are everywhere on the internet! But finding a nice site with lots of useful icons without being inundated with advertisements (or worse, spyware) is sometimes a challenge. Icon Archive fills this niche. Any time you need an icon for any reason, check out the collection of over 340,000 free icons here- arranged beautifully!
You can search for icons by keyword or browse by category. And that’s not all! You can also search by color, size, style, and more! Then you have many save options, including PNG, ICO, and ICNS in various sizes!
These icons are great for clip art, badges (especially if you are Edmodo user), presentations, websites and more! What’s not to love here?
As I was working in Diffen, I was singing this song in my head that I remember from Sesame Street when I was a little girl. Yes, that was a long time ago! “One of these things is not like the other”. Of course, that’s not exactly how Diffen works. Diffen makes a comparison of how two things are the same and different.
For example, I compared Plant Cells and Animal Cells, and got these results:
This is list of both differences and similarities, but you can choose to see one or the other.
Here are the top 5 searches in Diffen. I would suspect as the national election draws closer the Republican vs. Democrat one will more higher in popularity!
With the infiltration of mobile devices into our schools, why should we continue purchasing expensive “clickers” or remote response systems to do simple things such as quiz and poll students? This is a question more and more schools are asking. And if you look into this awesome website, you may see that you already have everything you need!
It describes itself in this way: “Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers to engage their classrooms through a series of educational exercises and games via smartphones, laptops, and tablets.”
Essentially, what that means is that a teacher can build an interactive quiz online (pre-made or impromptu). The teacher gives students the room number and students can then answer the questions/polls. There is no login required for students and students can access the quiz on any device, any platform! Oh, did I mention it is FREE!
Watch this demo:
There are all kinds of options and features such as viewing the live results, showing correct answers immediately (or not), email notifications of new submissions, teacher-led, or student-paced, etc.
Try this quiz over the Titanic (available until 5-1-12 only): http://m.socrative.com (room number 15613)
Let’s face it- copyright is confusing, boring to teach and learn, and a downright thorn in our sides! Here to make it a little easier to understand and just slightly more interactive is the digital copyright slider. It’s flash-based so it will not work on iOS devices. Yes, Apple, Flash is still alive and well. Sorry for the digression.
This reminds me of the old Easy-Graders. Admit it- every one of you teachers reading this have one, don’t you. On this one, you move the slider to match the date of first publication of the work then it will show you the copyright status and if permission is needed to use it. What may not be obvious is the ability to click on the asterisks for more information!
One of my very favorite Web 2.0 websites is www.picnik.com. For simple photo editing, it couldn’t be beat! Sadly, Google acquired Picnik a few months ago, and on April 19th it will go away. Many of the features were incorporated into Google+, but for a way to edit pictures quickly especially with students, I needed a replacement.
Fortunately, I found out about iPiccy.com. iPiccy has the same feel as Picnik, and allows for easy cloud-based photo editing.
iPiccy allows you to get pictures from a variety of places. You can upload from your computer, from a URL, from your camera, from Facebook or create a drawing from scratch.
Once you’ve selected your image to work with, there are a nice selection of editing features including cropping, resizing images, sharpen images and rotating. The best part of iPiccy is that it has some advanced features such as curves and levels and a CLONE TOOL!!!!!
One your image is corrected, you can add effects or text to your images. Some of these are the same as Picnik, but many are different.
Filter- Old Photo Image Auto Corrected
The only thing that seems to be missing that Picnik had was stickers. Although those were fun to decorate personal pictures, they were less important when working on curriculum projects.
Overall, although I was in mourning for a couple of weeks about the loss of Picnik, I am pleased to have found iPiccy. I’m still getting used to it, but so far it is working out just fine.
OK, so this is not one of those earth-shattering, ground-breaking finds. But if you teach primary grades or for some other strange reason need a title made from animal letters, you could find this useful.
OK, to be fair, this site does a little more than this. It does provide audio of each animal’s noise and a recording of a young child saying the animal’s name. So I guess you could say it’s cute. But since I’m a secondary teacher at heart, my judgment of “cuteness” may not equal yours. Keep in mind, I was one of those teachers who had one bulletin board in my room- which I cleverly and conveniently hid behind a bookcase.
