So just think what our kids’ kids will be using to compare the ridiculousness of not embracing the here and now!

What is ThingLink?

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!

The first step after selecting a topic is to find an image. Images can be uploaded from your computer, imported from Facebook or Flickr, or directly from the internet with a URL.

Click on the Create Button and then select where to find your image. After you have selected an image you have to name your project, and decide to make your project private or if you would like to allow others to edit your project.

Click on the pencil icon on the upper left to add links to your image. You can add almost anything that you find on the internet…

Here’s my Thinglink about the Solar System

Check out the YouTube video (link in the lower left)! Love that song!

I have previously raved about Socrative, the website that turns any device into a “clicker” (student response system). I still love and recommend this site!

In an email blast this past week, the company announced a couple new features it has now implemented (if you “activate” them on your account- read on). The first feature is great- the ability to add an image to a question! While you can’t add images for the answer choices, this does allow you to add a single image to your question:

OK, so it’s not earth-shattering, but it does open up some possibilities. Just think- you can now add a diagram, chart, or graph and ask questions about that image. This has some possibilities! And if you did want an image for each answer choice in a question? Use something like iPiccy to create a single image containing the answer choices as such:

The other feature that Socrative has added is the ability to grade free-text short answers. You do this by entering in all possible answer choices and spelling variations. These open-ended answers can then be evaluated and included in the grading!

To activate these features, you must first fill out the quick survey to complete your teacher profile at their website! Enjoy!

BTW- the answers to the above questions: Ronald Reagan did not win the state of Minnesota (Walter Mondale’s home state). And Joan Jett, answer C, sang “I Love Rock and Roll.” Can you name the others pictured? Answers here.

It seems we are always in great need of images to use in our digital products. We have covered several other sites providing free images previously. Imagebase is another site that you may want to consider adding to your toolbox of available media that is free to use.

Browse these categories:

Can also search by keywords.

The images are available to view and download in high-resolution!

And what does free mean? This site actually spells it out:

These images are free to use for anything you want, non-profit, commercial, print, web, screen, film, or anything else.  You don’t have to credit my name or this site.  We’d love if it you did give us credit or link back to the site, but it is not required.  Basically, you can treat the images as if they were in the public domain. If you want a link to paste:  Photo Credit, David Niblack, Imagebase.net. A few exceptions:

- Please do not combine the photos with illicit or for any kind of pornographic purposes.
- Please don’t resell the images as they are.  If you make alterations to them or combine them with other photos, then they can be resold.

And as always, while you’re there- help keep free sites like this up and running by clicking on an ad or two out of appreciation! I know how much work (and resources) it takes to maintain a website!

This cool little web app creates a visualization of your original poetry (or any other text you enter) by fetching Flickr images that match each word and displaying them in a collage with the text floating over each image.

You simply enter the text and click the “Show Story” button. Give it a few seconds and your collage will be built before your eyes. If you don’t like it, click the button again to re-spin your visualization. Here’s a small sample of my original work (I make no claim regarding the quality of the poetry itself):

Once the collage is built, you can click on any individual image to open its Flickr page. Other than that, you can’t do much with it. You can save it as a web page if you want to keep it- and I suppose you could print it to a printer or make a PDF of it.

Now that I think about it, it would be a quick way to search for a collection of images for projects (such as book trailers, slideshows, presentations, etc.).

NOTE: I could never get this to display correctly in the Chrome browser (my default). I used Firefox (on a PC) for the above image. If your web filter blocks Flickr images, this will not work!

There may be times when you need to post some text somewhere online but don’t want to mess with editing a website, making a new blog post, or logging in to edit your wiki, etc. For example, someone recently asked me (via Twitter) about my presentation schedule for an upcoming conference. The problem- Twitter only allows me 140 characters and I needed to share quite a bit more than that. And I didn’t want to log in and make a post on my blog and give out the URL- what a hassle!

A while back, I would’ve used www.textbin.com to enter some text and just paste the link to my note. Unfortunately, that website is now in the Web 2.0 graveyard. So why not www.heypasteit.com?

The idea is simple- just type or paste text into the text box on the website, click “Paste Online” and it generates a unique URL for your note. You just share the URL (or just the code) and give it to whomever you want. That’s it! No accounts. No logins. Just paste & share. It’s not fancy, doesn’t have some of the more advanced features that other similar sites have (like http://pastebin.com/). But it’s clean and simple.

If you want to see how it looks on the receiving end, here’s my note I referred to earlier about an upcoming conference schedule: http://www.heypasteit.com/clip/0RHC. Notice you can download the text as a file (.txt).

I can think of all kinds of uses for this. I’m sure you can too- but will you remember it’s there for you when you need it? And will the website still be there or will they have been gobbled up by Google? Only time will tell. Until then, I’m going to use it to my advantage!

This site has no real practical uses other than to annoy your readers, email recipients, or students. But it does make for a great prank!

Simply go to the site, enter your text, click the button to flip it, then copy the resulting text to paste back into an email, blog, website, or wherever you want. See, this blog post looks like this when flipped:

Annoying, right? Just a word of caution- not all blogs, websites, and email clients will accept this upside-down text and will substitute something entirely different (like a font substitution) filled with illegible symbols and characters.

Want to be even more vexatious- turn the font color to white! Just saying…

In the beginning, Google created Google Personalized Homepages- and they saw it was good. Next they improved upon it and created iGoogle- and we saw it as very good. Then they decided to kill iGoogle- which prompted tens of thousands of users to launch “Save iGoogle campaigns” and such (probably to no avail).  Google is putting iGoogle to rest November 1st, 2013. To deliver our personalized news, website changes, and RSS feeds, we switched to Google Reader (as Google themselves suggested). And just last week, Google announced the end of life for Google Reader for July 1, 2013. Grrrrr.

Those of you who liked Google Reader and want to stay with that look and feel, try www.feedly.com. They even have tools there to help you transition from Google Reader. That website has a much more polished look than Reader, but the basic layout and features are similar.

For those of you still mourning the loss of iGoogle or you just like the ability to add and rearrange widgets on a custom screen, try www.protopage.com. This is very similar to iGoogle and you can actually import your iGoogle or Reader OPML files right into your own start page.

Features of Protopage I really like:

• Page is not tied to a Google account so I can share it easily with others (want to see mine? Look at http://www.protopage.com/talljim)
• Can add multiple “tabs” (pages) like iGoogle
• Can share only certain tabs of your portal
• Can add built-in widgets or RSS feeds from various sites
• I love the Web Widget which allows you to paste in embed code from Web 2.0 sites to test & display

It happens all the time- your team, group, or class decides to have some party, get-together, or luncheon requiring everyone to sign up for something. Once upon a time, sign-up sheets were posted outside an office door, cubicle wall, or lounge bulletin board. Then someone had a bright idea: “Let’s email each other what we are signing up for!” And so the email madness begins. You know, it goes something like…

Sally decides to bring fruit salad, and so does Jill. Their emails to the whole group cross in the ether. Tony decides to bring a corn casserole but forgets to email the whole group and just emails the person coordinating. Then Sally sees Jill’s email and retracts her own and decides to bring a Jell-O salad at the same time Jill decides to bring an Apple-Walnut tart. So in the end no one brings fruit salad, three people bring corn casserole, and the plasticware was left off the list!

Sign-up Genius pushes this to the cloud and takes care of it all… and yes, its FREE! So let’s say we are having an end-of-year party at school and we need parents to donate certain things. So here is the sign-up sheet for all to see and use (go ahead, try it- it’ll just send me an email):

www.SignUpGenius.com/go/70A0B44A4AD2CA31-endofyear

No, we aren’t really having a party, though that would be all kinds of fun!

A few great settings that can be selected in the creation process:

• Can require an access code to sign up for items
• Can ask customized questions
• Users can leave their own comments
• Notify me by email when someone signs up
• Send reminders to group members X days before the date they signed up
• Allow a list member to “swap” slots with another member

So for the love of all things good, please pass this on to your room mothers, PTA coordinators, party planners, your Aunt Anne, and anyone else who needs people to sign up for things- it will save a lot of time and hassle (and keep those insane “Reply to All” email messages to a minimum).