Make powerpoint suck less

Powerpoint as a communication medium is over-rated and has been almost flogged to death by boring presenters who make us want to kill ourselves. It is, however, easy to use and this makes it good to use with kids. It is good to see some designers trying to make it a little more exciting and useful.

SlideRocket

Beautiful layout, great transitions and easy to use, SlideRocket is fantastic. It also has a desktop app so you can view your slideshows from your desktop as well as the web.

web site: http://www.sliderocket.com/

280 Slides

A new kid on the block and just released in beta, 280 Slides is very easy to use and looks like Powerpoint with a makeover.

web site: http://280slides.com/Editor/

pptPlex

If you are using Powerpoint 2007, Microsoft Labs has a plugin called pptPlex which you can download and install. It allows you to put your slides onto a canvas and then pan and zoom each slide, making it a bit different and more interesting.

web site: http://www.officelabs.com/projects/pptPlex/Pages/default.aspx

There is also a good review of pptPlex here:

Give PowerPoint Presentations with pptPlex and Impress Audience from Digital Inspiration

Flowgram

Flowgram is another way to create presentations, using powerpoint but also combining web pages, photos, videos and more.

web site: http://www.flowgram.com/

SlideShare

SlideShare isn’t for making powerpoints, but is a good way to share them easily – it’s a bit like YouTube for presentations.

web site: http://www.slideshare.net/

LiveScribe

LiveScribe is a cool new gadget. It combines a voice recorder with a pen, but it also records everything you write by using special paper. You can connect the pen to your computer and it will show everything you have written. You can also click on text anywhere and the pen will play back what was said at that moment, which is great if you missed a note or were fast asleep like I used to be in Foreign Policies of the Great Powers on Tuesday afternoons at university.

Check out this great video telling you all about it:

Another company called Adapyx has a similar pen, but is bringing out another version shortly that does not require special paper.

Source: http://bit.ly/2XeIEP

I would love one of these, right next to one of Plastic Logic’s new e-readers.

DailyLit

With everyone being so busy these days, it gets more and more difficult to find time to sit down and actually read a book. I love reading, and often have 3 or 4 on the go in different areas of my house. DailyLit is an interesting attempt to get us to read again by breaking books up into small parts and emailing them to you daily. They have 700+ free books, as well as ones you can buy, and the free books are excellent – many classics (I am reading The Art of War by Sun Tzu at the moment) are free.

This site could be an excellent way to get kids reading – choose a text and email it to them every day, then do an activity for each reading.

web site: http://www.dailylit.com/

Letterfu

An interesting little site if you are doing letter writing, Letterfu gives you some simple, themed letters that you can print out, write on and then stick a stamp on – no envelopes, glue or cutting, the last two usually being the cause of my latest stroke when my students try them.

At the moment, there are cute letters for Christmas (see below) and Valentine’s Day, as well as a blank and a lilac one. Hopefully we will see more designs soon, but you can also download the template and create your own. Letters are available in A4 and Letter size, and save as pdf files.

web site: http://www.letterfu.com/index.php

OtherInBox

OtherInBox is a interesting take on email accounts. When you sign up, you get a base email account like yourname.otherinbox.com. Whenever you sign up for something, you can create an individual and unique email address using your base and it will automatically deliver it to your account. For example, if you sign up for a flickr account, you can use flickr@yourname.otherinbox.com and when you open your otherinbox account, there will be a category called flickr. It’s a great way to control email coming into your account, and otherinbox will send an update to your regular email account or even forward the whole message (which kind of defeats the purpose). As a teacher, I could see this being useful – you could set up multiple accounts such as parents@yourname.otherinbox and students@yourname.otherinbox.com, or even set up individual email addresses for all you students so you can automatically see who emailed you.

Otherinbox is currently in beta, so it still has some issues, but I think it’s great and I have been transferring all those ‘non-essential’ emails (i.e. anything not from my friends or families) over to clear out my Live mail account.

Head on over to http://blog.otherinbox.com/signup.html to sign up for the beta (you might have to wait a bit).

Great video sites for teachers

Trying to steer your students through YouTube with all its distractions – the latest Miley Cyrus video for example – is a pain at the best of time, especially when you don’t know what delightful things they might accidentally stumble upon. Two alternative sites you might like to try are John Locker and TeacherTube.

John Locker is a new hosting sites that aims to cull the best educational videos from a variety of hosting sources. The range of documentaries and videos seems very good and you can find great documentaries from the BBC, among others. Videos seem to be high quality too – smaller than YouTube but much clearer because of that. I give it two thumbs up.

Here is an example:

See More Videos at JohnLocker.com

Visit it at http://www.johnlocker.com/

TeacherTube is more of a hosting site for teachers to add their own videos, and is therefore more like YouTube. While there are some interesting videos, it seems to cater to those hyperactive teachers that like to dress up and reenact the Battle of Hastings or Gettysburg. Heavily weighted towards the US education market.

Some examples:

web site: http://www.teachertube.com/index.php

New ebook reader

Plastic Logic has been demonstrating their new ebook reader at some trade shows and we finally have some video of it. It looks like it will be very useful, and I can think of a number of ways it would be an excellent resource for teachers. Hopefully more information will be released soon.

All I know is I want one.

Here is another look:

A good review can be found at TG Daily:

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/39267/113/