Showing posts with label multimedia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label multimedia. Show all posts
Sunday, November 29, 2015
GoogleDocs for Learning on Scoop.It
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| View Google Docs for Learning on Scoop.It |
If you have ideas to share, please take a minute to complete my Google form and share.
ThingLink: Make Images Interactive
Thinglink is an interactive image tool that provides users with the ability to turn any image into a multimedia launcher. Users can create multiple "hot spots" on specific parts of an image and turn the image into a multimedia launcher. Embed video, record audio with the click of a button and a free SoundCloud account, or link to any website. Compatible with any blog or website that has a widget to support javascript, this is a great tool for those of us who use Blogger, Wikispaces or WordPress. To experience Thinglink, roll your mouse over the Apollo 11 collage I created below to see where the hot spots are, then click on any of them to enjoy the multimedia.
Directions:
To use Thinglink, simply follow these steps:
- Go to the Thinglinwebsite and sign up for a free account.
- Follow the directions on the site to install the widget on your blog or wiki.
- Upload an image to Thinglink..
- Click on the paper clip icon in the upper left corner to Edit Tags.
- Drag your mouse across an image. You should see the crosshair tool, or plus sign.
- You will be prompted to add a link to a website or video OR click the orange button to record with SoundCloud. A free SoundCloud account is required.
- Repeat as often as needed.
- Click the green Save button.
- Click on the Embed Image icon in the upper left corner.
- Copy the code.
- Paste the code into your blog or a wiki widget.
- Voila!
Uses in the classroom:
- Create a themed collage with links to multimedia resources to support all learners.
- Create a word cloud using Wordle, then turn the largest words into hot spots with links to more information.
- Use an image as a launcher with links leading to student-created projects.
- Post an historical photo and use 3rd party software, such as SoundCloud, to give students the opportunity to record their voices speaking from the person's point of view.
- Use a Thinglinked image to create a scavenger hunt or modified WebQuest.
Try Thinglink
*Go to my wiki to view my favorite copyright-friendly images sources for students and teachers.
Create a Multimedia Memory Book with ThingLink
As another school year comes to a close it’s time for students and teachers to celebrate and reflect on all the wonderful experiences from the school year. ThingLink is the perfect tool for creating multimedia memory books to help students capture memories, preserve them, and share them with friends and family across the globe.
Read more on the ThingLink Blog
Saturday, November 28, 2015
My Interactive PD Calendar - Created with ThingLink
I've been engaging in some constructive play and exploring the use of the new custom icons and slides available at ThingLink EDU.
My first slideshow is an interactive Professional Development Calendar. I believe the calendar will be able to grow with me throughout the year and I think it will be a lot of fun to use.
Click the side arrows to view this ThingLink_EDU Slideshow
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Google Art Project: Explore World Museums
As the end of the year approaches, teachers are often looking for engaging activities to keep their energetic students on task. Perhaps you might want to consider taking your students on a virtual field trip to explore art museums from around the world.
Google Art Project is an interactive website that uses the same street view technology you've probably seen in Google Maps to allows visitors to virtually explore museums and view hundreds of pieces of art. Even better, visitors can view them at incredible zoom levels to get even closer than you could if you were actually standing in front of the original painting. Visitors can even create and share their own collection of masterpieces.
A Few Ideas for Classroom Use
I have collected some interesting suggestions for classroom use and used Kwout to publish the screenshots and attribution you see below. Clicking on the link under each excerpt will take you to the full blog articles referenced, and in most cases lead you to more ideas for integration. Have some good ideas of your own? Please consider sharing them here through a comment.
Take a Sneak Peak
Explore at googleartproject.com
Jog The Web
The websites within a Jog are live and can be explored right within the page frame, which solves problems related to students getting lost within multiple windows. Even better, Jog authors can annotate pages within the Jog and also create original pages with unique content.
This appears to be a very promising tool for education because it's user-friendly, engaging and interactive.
View Sample: A Jog for teachers, featuring several Web 2.0 tools
Using Glogster to Construct Knowledge
Friday, November 27, 2015
News from ISTE: ThingLink gives educators free early access to its new video editor
Exciting news: in the past months we have been hard at work building a new editor for annotating video content with rich media. The new editor allows users to add notes and links to existing video content, and this way turn video into a digital discovery platform.
An early access to ThingLink for Video is announced at ISTE, one of the largest international conferences for educational technology. We at ThingLink believe that interactive images and video will become the 21st century textbook, and teachers are driving this change by being fast adopters of, not only new technology, but also a new way of thinking. As the use of video in education grows, ThingLink is empowering teachers and students to easily create interactive video content and facilitate in-video conversations.
The ability to creatively combine web content with interactive images and video opens up new possibilities for teaching and learning. With ThingLink for Video, teachers and students can enrich educational videos with facts, detailed articles, additional content and questions. They can also search and share videos created by their colleagues, and this way access a wider network of interactive video content creators.
ThingLink for Video is currently available via invitation only. Educators can request a free early access starting from today.
If you are visiting ISTE this year, please come to meet us at ThingLink's booth no 2869 and share the news with your colleagues!
Zoom.It: Publish Zoomable Images
Mange Classroom Workflow with Showbie
Showbie is an iPad app that offers a solution to help teachers distribute, collect and evaluate digital assignments created on an iPad. Showbie is simple and efficient right out of the box.
Teachers can get started with Showbie by creating a free account to try the app. The free account allows for a limited, but substantial number of assignments before requiring an upgrade to the paid version. This should provide teachers with more than enough opportunity to thoroughly evaluate the effectiveness of the app within the classroom. Within the teacher account, teachers can create individual classes. Students join a class with a code, avoiding the need for an email addresses. Within each class, teachers create assignments with due dates and distribute them through a shared folder.
Assignments can be created and distribute through the shared folder using a variety of supported file types, making this a flexible tool that appeals to a variety of teaching styles and needs. Once assignments are turned in,teachers can provide students with individual feedback through voice or text notes. Assignments turned in via Showbie are stored in the cloud, which allows students and teachers to free up valuable storage space on their own devices.
A Wide Variety of Supported Productivity Apps
Showbie supports integration with many apps so it is designed to grow with teachers and students as they expand their toolkit of creativity and productivity resources. Currently there are 48 supported apps, but the list is likely to expand through feedback and requests from teachers in the Showbie community. The folks at Showbie have created quick video tutorials to help teachers and students learn to turn in assignments created with the supported tools. View the current list of apps that work with Showbie on the Showbie website.
Wednesday, November 25, 2015
YouTube for Teachers
Launched this week, the folks at YouTube appear to have been listening to teachers and edtech gurus. At first glance, I'm quite impressed with the new education site for many reasons. Here are the top three:
- Teachers can now create their own YouTube channel on the education site for easy student access. They can organize and archive videos for future use, ensuring that the content is safe and educationally appropriate.
- The site offers 10 ways to use YouTube in the classroom and they have hit upon many of the things I believe we should be doing to provide digital content to help all students succeed. My favorites include suggestions for differentiation, an example demonstrating how to solve math problems online to help students and their parents at home, and of course using video to facilitate The Flipped Classroom model. They've even created an instructional section on creating screencasts to help teachers get started.
- The folks at YouTube are clearly well aware of the opportunities that exist for extending the walls of our classrooms and opening the doors 24/7 and they've done their homework to help teachers succeed.
Check out YouTube for Teachers
GoogleDocs Presentation: New Look and Features
- Include transitions in between slides
- Use simple animations, or "flying text"
- Link images
- Include tables with improved formatting options
- Draw directly on a slide to create flowcharts, mind maps and doodles
To get a glimpse of the new tool in action, please view the Google Presentation below.
The Ultimate Word Wall with ThingLink & Padlet
I also love Word Walls and have been using them for as long as I can remember. While I was once frustrated by trying to keep taped images up on a physical wall, I now find the process to be streamlined and slick with the help of one of my favorite tools, Padlet
Benefits of Padlet at a Glance
- Padlet is a free, flexible and user friendly tool that is available online, 24/7
- Users can create account and design Padlets for a variety of purposes for teaching and learning.
- Students can contribute to Padlets without an email address, just tap to add an image.
- Padlet works well on a computer and also from the web browser on an iPad.
- There's no tape or physical space limitations with these types of word walls.
- Padlet is capable is displaying text, images and video.
- Padlet can be embedded into a blog, wiki or website.
- Padlet supports ThingLink interactive images!
Using Padlet to Create The Ultimate Word Wall of Interactive Images
As the interactive images for the challenge started rolling in, I had the idea to build a Word Wall of vocabulary activities. The word wall is embedded below, but to get a better view you might want to visit the full wall on the Padlet site.
Click on any image to preview and explore any interactive vocabulary image created by teachers from all over the world. If you want to explore the full version of an image, click the Share icon on the ThingLink image to grab the link. If you want to embed the image into your own space, grab the embed code.
Be sure to check back as many more images are submitted. This wall will grow throughout the summer.
Be sure to check back as many more images are submitted. This wall will grow throughout the summer.
For a better viewing experience go to Padlet to view this wall.
Join Us for the ThingLink Teacher Challenge
10 Minute Tech Tools
I've put together a new collection of user-friendly tech tools for busy teachers on ScoopIt. Unlike my other collections, the criteria for this list is not based on a common theme, instead these tools are included because they will take 10 minutes or less for you to start using and they are versitile enough to be used to enhance teaching across the curriculum. No login or account setup is required.
View my collection:
Scoop.it - Collect and Share Information Visually
Scoop.it is a curation service that allows users to collect information about a topic of interest and display it all on one attractive visual page. The tool integrates instantly with Twitter and Facebook, allowing you to share with the click of a button, and a newly added feature allows users to embed a preview of your Scoop.it page into any blog, wiki or website. See the Cool Tools for Drawing sample I created below..Besides for it's attractive and visual format, one of the biggest differences between Scoop.it and a traditional blog is that the creator can choose to simply collect and display content without having to write about it. Of course, users can add a post of your own too, but if you'd prefer to simply share, Scoop.it will do the trick.
Scoop.it is a user friendly tool. Simply install the handy bookmarklet in your toolbar and collect information yourself, or use the suggested resources collected for you based on the keywords you submit when you crete your page. Scoop.it will find images and descriptions of the pages you choose to display, or you can add your own with a few more clicks. The most important thing to remember when using this tool is to keep it simple and stick to one topic.
Click to view my Sample Scoop.it - Cool Tools for 21st Century Learners
Uses in the Classroom:
- Collect resources at a variety of reading levels on a particular topic or area of study.
- Collect news resources from different countries and/or perspectives to expose students to a current event or issue from a global perspective.
- Create a page of related resources using a variety of multimedia to provide students with multiple ways to access information.
- Collect and display primary source documents all in one place to help students bring it all together.
- Create a page of student-created projects for sharing on the web.
Collaborative Learning with ThingLink - Wagon Wheel
I recently added instaGrok to the bulletin board for one click access to a useful interactive learning tool and search engine. I used the Mastery Connect App to quickly reference the CCSS and demonstrated a way to use Wordle as a starting point to engage students in a CCSS aligned vocabulary activity.
Let's not forget Digital Citizenship. All images are linked back to original sources and credit is given. Creative Commons Share Alike Licenses are always appreciated.
There are many untapped learning opportunities to be pulled out of the song. I am looking for resources to make good learning good connections. Feel free to tap on the Padlet and add ideas and links or suggest learning connections you see. Stay tuned and watch it grow.
The Wagon Wheel is growing nicely!
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
mQlicker – Create Interactive Presentations
mQlicker is an audience response system that that allows users to turn a PowerPoint into an interactive slideshow to engage audiences and collect useful feedback. mQlicker is free, flexible and definitely worth checking out for use in a variety of educational settings. This cool tool has a lot of potential for collecting feedback and fine-tuning instruction.
mQlicker for Interactive Presentations
mQlicker is a useful tool that allows presenters to engage audiences in the classroom, during professional development or via online presentations. The response system works with any web capable device, and there is enhanced support for iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry devices. From an audience participant perspective, mQlicker couldn’t be easier to use. Members of any size audience can access questions through a link, or they can quickly scan an auto-generated QR code. Audience members identities are anonymous and their connection is secure.
From a presenter’s perspective, mQlicker goes beyond traditional audience polling options to collect many different types of useful information. Presenters can collect and display responses to traditional types of questions through polls and surveys that are displayed in real-time, and they can utilize some flexible options for collecting free response feedback. mQlicker allows presenters to do more than just check the pulse of their audience.
Types of Questions
There are several options for creating different types of questions to engage audiences. In addition to traditional text based polls and surveys, presenters can embed YouTube video and images into a question, providing audiences with rich content. For use as a quick quiz, multiple choice answers options can be shuffled to avoid sharing of answers. Several questions can be grouped on one page.
Types of Responses
mClicker includes the ability to capture feedback and display results in unique ways. In addition to traditional option, such as bar charts and pie charts, mQlicker provides the option of displaying results in the form of sticky notes and word clouds to provide interesting visual results. Participants can use a link to view real time results in full screen or they can view them embedded into the presentation itself. Presenters can export results and download them as a spreadsheet for evaluation and insight.
Uses in Education
The flexibility offered by mQlicker makes it a useful tool for a variety of purposes. There is no limit to the number of responses collected and multiple sessions can be created and open at the same time, a feature especially useful for teachers who teach more than one section of a class. Once you try mQlicker for yourself, I'm sure you will find it to be well-suited for a variety of purposes to help your audience tune in and to help you fine tune instruction. Here are a few ideas to get you started.
In the classroom
Turn a traditional presentation based lecture into an interactive session to give students a voice. Start with a video to provide students with a common starting point for instruction and provide them with an open-ended question that allows them to type questions and comments throughout the lecture. Display the Questions and Comments as sticky notes in real-time. Divide longer lectures into sections and create Exit Polls throughout the lesson to gauge understanding.
In the Flipped Classroom
Create an online presentation and assign it to students as homework to prepare them for work in class. Use mQlicker to collect feedback and monitor use, then use the results to inform and fine tune the instruction and activities students participate in when they return to class.
For Professional Development
Get the most out of professional development and demonstrate your own expertise by gauging the level of knowledge and interest of your audience. Use video and questions to launch collaborative group work and brainstorming sessions and use results collected to give the audience what they came for.
Final Thoughts
As someone who frequently presents to students and adult educators through a variety of formats, I am excited to add mQlicker to my toolkit of resources. I have used it successfully with a few small audiences and intend to use mQlicker in the next few weeks during a webinar and also a break out session at a conference. I believe the tool will allow me to capture those teachable moments and make the most of the time we have together.
Try mQlicker for Yourself
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| www.mqlicker.com |
Use Google Docs to Facilitate a Digital Writer's Workshop
Sharing and commenting for immediate feedback
One of the most powerful features of Google Docs is the ability for students to receive immediate feedback in the 24/7 classroom by taking advantage of document sharing and comments. Since Docs are stored online, students can work at school and at home from any computer with an Internet connection. They are likely to revisit their work if they know someone else will be commenting on it. Comments are smart and each individual comment actually disappears after the paper has been revised by the author. Docs also provide support for collaboration in real time, so students can actually have a virtual mini-conference about the writing, if the timing is right.
To insert a comment, highlight the text, then the find the option to insert a comment under the insert menu.
Integrated reference and writing tools to support all learners
A built-in dictionary and thesaurus supports 12 languages and allows user to look up words without leaving their own document. Word Count capability provides feedback on number of words in a selection or the entire document. Built in spell check allows students to use Control + Click on an underlined word to get spelling suggestions and identify simple grammar errors as they type.
To use the dictionary and thesaurus, highlight the text, then find the option under the tools menu > define.
Autosave and revision history
Continuous autosave to the "Google Cloud" virtually eliminates saving issues. Use the revision history, found in the file menu, to review, compare, or revert to a prior version of the document at any time, or to track contributions made by collaborators. It's easy to see what individual students have contributed to a document because Google Docs assigns everyone a color to each contributor.
To use the revision history, find the option under the file menu.
Use in the classroom: Digital Writer's Workshop
The features in Google Docs can be used to facilitate a digital writer's workshop based on peer editing, and they are particularly useful when combined with cooperative grouping strategies to fine-tune students' editing skills. While students are writing their drafts, teachers can take advantage of opportunities to lead small instructional groups to help them focus on specific cooperative grouping job-related skills, then students can share their drafts with other group members who use comments to suggest revisions based on their job. The immediate feedback provided by peers will likely encourage writers to check comments and revise at home and stay on task during classroom work time. The revision history will keep student comments and revisions honest and focused on the task. Here are some examples of jobs to consider, modify and adjust as needed:
- Word Smith: Check for words that are used well, overused, incorrectly used, or could be substituted for more descriptive or interesting words.
- Punctuation Person: Check grammar and punctuation. Look for fragments and run-on sentences.
- Reality Checker: Check facts and perform a plagiarism check by popping snippets of the writing into a Google Search.
- Big Picture Person: Check to make sure the writing is complete. Focus on main ideas, paragraphs and use of transitions.
- Description Detective: Check to make sure there are enough details to support the writing and suggest eliminating the extras.
- Tense Tracker :Check to make sure the tense remains constant. It's easier to write in the past tense than it is to write in the present.
- Your own: Design and redesign roles based on the skills you are covering in your writing curriculum.
Pulse for iPad: A Gorgeous News Feed Reader
Pulse is an iPad app that collects multiple sources of your favorite news feeds and displays them in a convenient and attractive way to create a highly enjoyable reading experience.
News sources you select are arranged as a stream. Just drag the screen vertically to scan all your sources, then drag it horizontally to view particular articles within each source. Tap the screen to read an article in text view or view it as a full webpage. Pulse will even collect and display your Twitter stream. Sharing is as easy as a couple of taps.
To get a glimpse of what Pulse can do, please watch the video below and try Pulse for yourself, available from the iTunes store.
To get a glimpse of what Pulse can do, please watch the video below and try Pulse for yourself, available from the iTunes store.
Monday, November 23, 2015
The Flipped Classroom Infographic
Check out this infographic about The Flipped Classroom created by Jeremy F. Stayer of Ohio State University.
2 Ways to Track Santa in 2013
This year Google has brought us a multimedia rich Santa Tracker which will use street-view technology to help us follow Santa's big journey on Tuesday evening.
Now there is an alternative to tracking Santa through the NORAD cameras. Which will you chose?
Explore and Enjoy 2 Ways to Track Santa in 2013
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| created with ThingLink_EDU |
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