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/

Kids these days

It’s amazing what kids can do these days – I wish kids reacted like this to maths!

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Easystreet – Make your own street sign

Easystreet is a nifty little site where you can enter any text you like and it will create a street sign for you which you can download. You can make them in three different sizes, but even the largest is not very big – it would be good to be able to download a picture that would be printable at A4 size without pixelating.

 

web site: http://wigflip.com/easystreet/

You can also download the fonts used in at the following site:

http://www.triskele.com/roadgeek-fonts

The fonts are free to use for non-commercial use.

Where the Hell is Matt?

Not educational (maybe for geography?) but begs the question - why can't I get a job like this?

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

SHIFD – take your sticky notes with you

SHIFD is a great site for those who, like me, write themselves sticky notes everywhere to remember things. With SHIFD, you can type or post notes using the Internet, a program on your desktop or even your mobile phone. They automatically synchronise so they will always be up to date.

On your desktop, you can have your notes sitting nicely organised in the SHIFD application like this:

or float them on the desktop like real sticky notes.

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

An alternative to SHIFD, for use on one computer, is the handy little program called Hottnotes, which lets you create sticky notes on your desktop. You can also download a portable version which you can use on a pen drive to take your notes with you.

web site: http://hottnotes.com/

Widexplorer

Yet another search engine, but a quite cool one none the less, Widexplorer takes your search query and gives you a heap of different search engine results side-by-side. You can scroll along and see results from Google, Live.com, Yahoo! Answers, YouTube and Wikipedia, all in the one browser window.

web site: http://widexplorer.com/

eCalc Update – Download to your desktop

I previously posted about the great eCalc online calculator here. They have added a downloadable version for free (Windows only). Go and get it now.

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

Some more search engines

In addition to the previously mentioned search engines, you might like to look at these.

Redzee

Redzee presents results as a circle on the page, you just click and drag to move the results around. Again, it’s a visual search engine so you get to see the pages before you visit them.

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

Scour

Scour allows you to search Google, MSN and Yahoo all at once. You can also sign up to receive points which can be redeemed from Visa, although accumulating enough points will probably take you the rest of your life.

web site: http://www.scour.com/index.html

Firefox users

If you use Firefox as your browser (and you should because it rocks), you can use the Google Preview add-in. This puts a little thumbnail of the web page next to each Google result.

web site: http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/

web site: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/189

Some useful search engines

Here are some new search engines which should be useful in the classroom. They are particularly good for classrooms because they are visual search engines, and let kids have an idea of what the page looks like.

Viewzi

Viewzi is great because it gives you different options to search by. You just enter a search term and then choose the type of search that fits it best.

web site: http://www.viewzi.com/search/

SearchMe

SearchMe is similar to Viewzi. It uses a carousel approach so that you can just scroll through the images of the web pages. They are nice and large, great for kids, and you can narrow your search topic at the top of the page. You can also see the results in a full screen mode.

web site: http://www.searchme.com/Initial.html

Yoozila

Yoozila is a simple search engine like Google, but also shows a thumbnail of the web page next to its entry.

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

Chinese Zon

A promising looking web site for learning Chinese is Zon. It is a bit like a virtual world where students can practice their Chinese. It begins in an airport and students have to navigate their way through, asking and answering questions.

web site: http://zondev.educ.msu.edu/WebFront/

SpeedyMarks

SpeedyMarks is a great start page with visual bookmarks. You can add your favourite sites to it and it will place a visual bookmark on the page. When you click on the picture, it will open in a new tab. You can also sign up with your email and it will store your bookmarks for use on any computer. Otherwise, it will just remember your bookmarks on one computer.

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

eCalc

Sure the calculator on your computer is great for adding up stuff, but what if you need more? eCalc is a full scientific calculator, available online and free. It even has all those buttons for cos, sin and tan, which once upon a time I knew what were for, but now don’t have a clue.

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

Scrapblog

Scrapblog is an online scapbooking site. I found it great for doing my yearbook entry for my class – you add your photos, put in some text, and use the backgrounds and stamps provided by Scrapblog. Once you finish your scrapblog, you can save the pages as jpeg files and download them. Be aware though that the size of the jpeg is not the same as the web page – I found that two fitted nicely on an A4 page in Word.

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

Acrobat.com

Acrobat.com is the latest offering from Adobe. It combines an online word processor (Buzzword), a pdf creator and a file manager. It also gives you 5gb of storage for your documents free. You can also share your documents with others just by adding their email address, allowing them to co-edit your documents. Acrobat.com also comes with the new Acrobat Reader 9 as an AIR application for your desktop. Acrobat.com is also very nice to look at, unlike most free word processing applications.

web site: https://www.acrobat.com/

Spelling City

I hate spelling tests. I hate giving them and I hate marking them, especially when I have three or four spelling lists each week (I teach a multi-age class). So I use Spelling City. On Spelling City, I just type in the list of words for the week, save it and post a link to my blog. My students can go to the list, hear the words spoken and put in a sentence, play games and then I use it to test them (you can print their results for your files and a nice certificate for them to keep). They have about 30,000 words on the site, so it is rare that one on your list won’t be there. And it is an American site, so be prepared for the pronunciation if you teach in a British school (like me) or another nationality’s school

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

Speech Bubbles on Photos

Ever needed to put speech bubbles on photos? Great for newsletters and yearbooks. Here are two sites which make it simple:

Superlame

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

Kyolo

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

Ekpenso

Ekpenso is an online mind-mapping tool. It can also be downloaded as an Adobe AIR application or integrated into the learning management system Moodle.

web site: http://en.ekpenso.com/

For another excellent desktop mindmapping program, try Cayra. Although it can be a bit fiddly, but it is beautiful to look at and my students love it. You can also save the mindmaps as a picture file so you can insert them into Microsoft Word or similar programs.

web site: http://cayra.net/

Kigose

Kigose is a new search engine for kids. Its designers state:

Kigose only includes public websites that are for educational purposes only. The list of the websites included are suggested by teachers, parents and students. We also encourage school community to respect copyright policy by creating citation.

A great thing about Kigose is that you can suggest web sites to help build it.

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

Face in the Hole

Face in the Hole is a great bit of fun. You can upload your photo and then put it on the body of someone else. The results are often hilarious.

web site: http://faceinhole.com/home.asp

Edublogs

Edublogs is an excellent blogging platform for teachers. I use it to inform parents of what is happening at school and in my class, and to post homework and web site reviews. It is easy to set up an account, and because it is designed for teachers, they have an excellent support blog with ideas for using blogs in the classroom.

web site: http://edublogs.org/

21 Classes

If you are looking to set up blogs with students, an easy way to begin is with 21 Classes. Teachers can sign up for their own blog and then set up student blogs inside the main blog. I like that it is secure (all blogs need a password to access) but that all students signed in can view and comment on other students blogs. 21 Classes will also send you a weekly update with all the activity by your students. The only caveat is that each blog gets a maximum of 2mb of storage, so it is only really useful for text blogs. I use it for my students’ homework – it’s quick to check their work and it’s all available in the one place.

website: http://www.21classes.com/

Tutpup

A great site for practicing maths and spelling. Similar to the excellent Mathletics site http://www.mathletics.com.au/ but currently free (in beta). Teachers can sign up for a class code which allows them to track their students’ results.

website: http://tutpup.com/