www.compfight.com

OK, Flickr is one of our favorite sites simply because the number of images that are available, tagged, described, and shared. We highly recommend Flickr’s Creative Commons section for educators and students. If you don’t know about Creative Commons or have just had a case of amnesia, be sure to check out our previous post about finding copyright friendly images.

One of the down sides of Flickr is that it’s not the easiest interface to navigate and search for images. Enter today’s web application- Compfight. Seriously, I’m not sold on the name (was that compfight or compflight, Susan?). It’s supposed to have something to do with finding “comps” (comparable images) for your project or whatever. Anyway, just enter a search term and select whether or not you want to look only in the Creative Commons of Flickr and whether or not you want the safe search turned on. Here’s my search for dolphin:

For most of the thumbnail images you can simply hover your mouse over the image and it will give you the size of the available image (in pixels). Click on a thumbnail to open the Flickr page where the original can be downloaded.

It’s easy, it’s free, it’s fun!

www.meegenius.com

I came across this really cool site recently. It allows you to select a storybook and either have it read to you, read it yourself, or best of all- customize it!

That was my favorite feature. After you select a book, you can select the personalize button and it will ask for the name of the main characters.

It was fun to have my kids names in the book. When it is personalized, you can record your voice to read the book.

This site is free (at least right now), but you must be over 13 to register for an account. However, you don’t have to register to use the site, even to personalize books. Without registration you can’t save your books, but you can read them when you make them. This looks like a fun site for kids of all ages!

www.plurk.com

Plurk is like Twitter with a timeline.

But before you go off and say you already use Twitter or have no use for Twitter, hear me out. Plurk is the perfect place to build your PLN. Oh, yes, another acronym in education. But this is far beyond the realm of education! PLN stands for Personal Learning Network. In short, it’s a group of professional colleagues around the world that have similar interests and expertise. My PLN is invaluable! This is where I go when I need the wisdom of experience and experts that are in the trenches and on the cutting edge.

140 character posts with links, images, and videos can change the way you learn- because none of us are as smart as all of us! There’s more to it, of course- different ways to make posts, karma points for activity in your network, fans & friends, and all kinds of badges. Here’s a look at my dashboard…

True, I’ve never met most of them, but don’t let that fact make you think less of my Plurk friends. They’re great!

So how do you build your network? Easy- you make friends with someone already in the network, then they ask others to add you to their ring of friends, etc. If you are an educator and use technology, let me know and I’ll add you as a Plurk friend and ask others to do the same! You won’t regret it!

OK, so most of you already know about this- and many of us have used this for years. But I just realized I have never mentioned it in our blog or link directory- what great injustice! So what is it? It’s easier to show you than to try to explain. So take a quick look here or take a look at it over at the Glogster website:

It’s sort of a multimedia online poster of sorts. Remember the Daily Prophet newspaper in the Harry Potter movies? Yeah, it’s kinda like that! You can put together a poster with text, images, stamps, backgrounds, videos, and more.

As you can tell, this is a poster about a cool book series called The Shadow Children. As an aside- it’s a great book series and fun to read! Can you imagine the possibilities with any curriculum? Consider these…

Instead of labeling a pre-printed worksheet on the water cycle, create a water cycle glog!
Instead of writing a book report, create a glog with a book trailer!
Instead of writing a report on a historical figure, create a glog with images, videos, and quotes!

What category of web apps do you put this in? I’m not sure, so I include it in “Website Generators,” though it’s much more than that.

And one more thing… there are lots of glogs out there that may be inappropriate for students. Enter Glogster.edu- a safe and private platform for students to create their media-rich blogs! It’s also a great site to find examples of what others are doing. If you already have a Glogster account, you can migrate it to edu.glogster by sending an email to edu@glogster.com.

www.otherinbox.com

Using Web 2.0 tools often requires registering for an account at each site. Doing this with students gets to be pretty tricky since most sites require a unique email address to be used. Not many of our younger students have email addresses! There are several ways around this- and our favorite method is piggy-backing (See Susan’s post-  about doing this with Gmail). Otherinbox has become a lifesaver! Here’s how it works…

1. Teacher creates an account at Otherinbox (yes, it’s free). So let’s say the teacher’s username at Otherinbox is bradpitt. That means the teacher has been assigned the email root of “bradpitt.otherinbox.com”

2. Anytime a student (let’s say SallyA) registers at any website, she can enter her email address as SallyA@bradpitt.otherinbox.com.

3. If an email is sent to SallyA@bradpitt.otherinbox.com it lands in the bradpitt Otherinbox account (separated from any others with different names). The teacher (bradpitt) can log in to his Otherinbox account and read the email that was sent.

Note #1- the student can’t log in to bradpitt’s Otherinbox account, read mail, or send mail. It’s just giving the student a unique email address without giving the student email access!

Note #2- notice that the teacher didn’t have to set up the email address (SallyA@bradpitt.otherinbox.com) ahead of time. When Otherinbox received it , it immediately created a sub-box for this. So any word before the @braddpitt.otherinbox.com will trigger a new sub-box to be created on the fly. Check out this screenshot of my Otherinbox account- this is a small portion of all the sub boxes that have been created.

Note #3- in the free version of Otherinbox, messages are only readable for 30 days. But that’s fine for most of us. Keep in mind that most Web 2.0 sites use this email only for password resets or email verification.

Note #4- You can (like I have) set it up so that Otherinbox will send a summary email to your real email address each day. This will inform you of any new emails received that day and in which sub boxes.

Other uses:

• give to vendors or companies who insist upon you giving them your email address
• set this up to use with your own kids for those times when they need to register at sites (such as Cartoon Network)
• make up a personalized inbox for someone special (“Hey, email me at angelinajolie@braddpitt.otherinbox.com. Yeah, I set this up, just for you.”)

www.280slides.com

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!

It has several nice backgrounds to pick from, and it allows you to upload your existing PowerPoint presentations to use and edit within 280 Slides. I uploaded a student’s dinosaur project, and had limited results. Here’s the before and after….

It might be able to handle a more simple presentation a little easier.

Another feature I really liked was that you could download your project, email it to someone, get a link to it, or embed it, which I did above. When it is embedded, you can view it full screen, and most people wouldn’t know it wasn’t PowerPoint.

I’m not sure if this product would be what I would want to switch to full time. It has it’s limits due to it’s simplicity, for example there is no undo button. For someone who makes a lot of mistakes like me that’s tough. I had to delete the slide and start over a couple of times, and accidently copied a whole section of text in twice. That was tedious to remove since it was below what you could see onscreen.

However, I plan to use it more frequently. I’m sure I will like it more and more as I get used to it. For now though, it’s great when I need a quick presentation posted to the web!

http://www.cooliris.com

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!

www.kidblog.org

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!

• text
• images (from URL or uploaded)
• video (from URL or uploaded)
• documents and other media
• HTML

HTML? That’s right! Students can embed HTML created from other Web 2.0 sites (such as Animoto, Voki, etc.). Imagine these student project possibilities:

• Go to Vocaroo and record what you already know about the War of 1812 then embed your recording in a new blog posting.

• Upload your PowerPoint to Slideboom then embed it into your blog posting. Then go watch your partner’s slideshow and make comments.

• Create an Animoto book trailer, then post it to your blog.

Want to try it for yourself? Go to http://kidblog.org/DigitalGoonies2 and log in as “blog” and the password is “goonies.” Make a post or two- I’ve set the permissions so that your posts and comments don’t need approval… that is, until it starts getting trashed and all!

This could easily become the electronic portfolio that you have needed for your students! Here are a just a few of their great features:

• Free and extremely easy to setup and use
• Student usernames only need to be unique to the class, not to all user of Kidblog
• Students don’t have to remember their exact username since they log in by selecting the username from a list
• No student email is required to register
• Can upload many different file types
• Teachers can manage all their classes in Kidblog from the control panel
• Teachers have absolute control of all postings
• Teachers can make “private” comments to student blog postings so that only the author of the posting can see it

www.google.com/squared

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.

The results gave me a list of rainforests, an image of the area, a description of each rainforest, and the total area of each. That’s so quick and easy- but wait…. there’s more!

I can also add columns, and have it add to the original search. Maybe I needed to know in what country we could find each of these. I can quickly add a column from their suggestions, or type my own. I’ll add country.

This now added an additional column for countries.

For quick, easy results… you can’t beat it!

http://www.openclipart.org/

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):

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.