Visual.ly - Create Infographics

VISUAL.LY - DISCOVER,    CREATE.    SHARE .....

http://visual.ly/

INFOGRAPHICS!
We all look in the lower left hand corner of USAToday to see the daily graphic!  We are visual learners .....Now, with Visual.ly we can create our own infographic with ease or use ones that have already been created. 

Visual.ly is a wonderful new webtool/resource that lets users both explore and create beautifully organized infographics. These visualizations can easily illustrate a complex idea and show a large amount of data in a simple to understand way. Students and teachers can create and find excellent representations using this unique site.

Click here to see the Top 20 Infographics created in 2011:

http://blog.visual.ly/20-great-visualizations-of-2011/

Click here for the FAQ:   http://visual.ly/about/faq
 

For Educators - Use the infographics created for discussions, examples, information or have students research to see if the data is accurate.   Then have students research data on any topic and create their own infographic!  Please notice that on many of the infographics, at the bottom, a "Source" is listed.  Teach students to give credit for the information.

Note: For best results use Google Chrome or Firefox 

TAGUL - Create Tag Clouds

Tagul is similar to Wordle. Both create customisable word or tag clouds, the difference is that Tagul’s clouds are embeddable into other websites such as blogs or wikis.

Tagul is a web service that enables you to create gorgeous tag clouds. It is created by Alex, an entrepreneur and tech geek from Moscow, Russia. You can read more in the FAQ section, visit the Blog or explore the Forums. 
It requires signing up with either a new Tagul account, or via some OpenID provider,

EDUcreations - Teach what you know - Learn what you don't.

 

www.educreations.com

Educreations is a global community where anyone can teach what they know and learn what they don't!

Educreations is a recordable interactive whiteboard that captures your voice and handwriting to produce amazing video lessons that you can share online. Students and colleagues can replay your lessons in any web browser, or from within the  app on their iPads. Check out the "Showcase" on the homepage or the "Featured" tab in the iPad app to view some great lessons that other teachers have created with Educreations.

Only public lessons may be embedded for viewing outside of educreations.com, so make sure to choose the "public" option in your lesson's privacy settings. Then, visit the lesson playback page for the lesson you want to embed. On the right side of the page, you'll find a link that says, "embed on the web." Once you click this link, you'll be prompted to copy an embed code that you can use to post your lesson anywhere on the web.

There are sections on English, Math, Social Studies,Science, the Arts, and Languages.

3D Toad - Move images 360"

The site is for educators and learners!  There are several subjects covered:  Skeletons for animals and humans; Disections for a cat, sheep heart, cow eye, pig kidney or ovary; Geology, Dental Hygiene, Chemistry, and several others.  The pictures can be turned 360' with your mouse.

Here is a quick YouTube video on 3D Toad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ecbb26IKKQ4&safe=active

Tumble Cloud

www.tumblecloud.com/



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TumbleCloud is a place for collaborative digital storytelling, where users can easily arrange, display, co-create, share and manipulate multimedia content.

They call it collaborative digital storytelling. All that digital stuff you have. All that digital stuff everybody else has. Photos. Videos. Music. You name it. Mix it all up together and then re-arrange it any way you like. Just by dragging and dropping, Tumblecloud makes it easy for you to tell stories your way, whether by yourself, or with a whole bunch of other people.
See what happens when you get together on tumblecloud with people that matter to you. See what happens when you make stories together.

• capture your special day

• market your small business

• give your digital stuff a home

• collaborate on a project
  

  

 

HAPPY SPRING BREAK!!!

BookBub - Get Free and Bargain Bestsellers For Your eReader!

What is BookBub?

http://www.bookbub.com

BookBub is a free (daily) email newsletter that keeps you updated about deeply discounted and free digital books. You choose the types of books you'd like with categories ranging from mysteries to cookbooks, and they send the best deals in those genres to your inbox.

BookBub doesn't actually sell books -- they simply alert you by email to fantastic limited-time offers that can be purchased from retailers like Amazon's Kindle store, Barnes and Noble's Nook store, Apple's iBookstore, and others. When you sign up, you may choose from their list of retailers. Book publishers offer deals at these sites for promotional purposes, and the BookBub staff works with them to determine the best ones to send to members.  Each deal is available for a Limited Time!!  Sometimes for just that one day.

BookBub features works ranging from big-name authors like Michael Connelly, Debbie Macomber, and Jodi Picoult, to independent authors who might be lesser known but whose books are getting rave reviews. The team of book experts is working around the clock to bring you the best deals on quality books that you'll love.

 

Just enter your email and select you retailers and your reading interests:

 

PADLET (Formerly Wallwisher)

http://padlet.com/

(The old Wallwisher)

• Put the wall on your blog or website. Make it more wonderful.  Embed it!

• Paste link to a youtube video? Check!

• Drag a word document from your computer? Check!

• Take a picture from your iPad camera? Check!

• Keep your wall private between friends. If you like them, give them permissions like the ability to change what you write. If you are the social kind, make a public wall for the whole world to see.

• Mobile:   Your phone, your tablet, your TV- Padlet works on everything.

• Like flexibility? Use the free form layout. Like organization? Use streams.

EXAMPLES:

 

 I have used this as an "evaluation" tool.  After a presentation, I would ask participants to go the web address I give them and post a comment on the day's learning.  I am sure you can think of many other ways to use Padlet!!

How to use Padlet.com in the classroom?  from their Blog: http://tinyurl.com/awwy5ad   Click to see more ways to use!

"Teachers often write to us about how they use Padlet to pose a simple question to their class, or to collect exit tickets at the end of the class, or, sometimes, to collect assignments or projects from students."

Purple Planet - Royalty Free Music

Most of you are probably familiar with Purple Planet - if you have searched for Free Music!!!  Just a reminder that this is one of the better free music sites for educational use.
Here are the types of music available:


Purple Planet is owned by 4 fellas from England.  They create this music and offer it to all - to share!
All they ask is that you give credit to any music you use simply by adding the website to wherever you use their music.   http://www.purple-planet.com

 

Live Minutes - Free Conferencing (Webinar)

http://liveminutes.com

LiveMinutes is a FREE service that lets you organize web meetings (webinars) to share and annotate documents with team members, students, clients, etc. You can use LiveMinutes for internal meetings, training, teaching...FREE.

First, sign up for an account - follow the tutorial when you sign in.  To get started just click "start sharing" and a meeting space is created for you. That meeting space is assigned a URL that you can share with the people you want to join you.
 

Live Minutes offers a good selection of tools that you can utilize to share ideas with others. You can talk to each other using either the Live Minutes audio or by connecting through Skype. Live Minutes offers a collaborative whiteboard for drawing. You may upload images and documents for others to see and comment. And in the future Live Minutes will allow you to share videos during your webinar.

This is a great way to quickly host a live online tutoring session with students or talk to you collegues wherever they may be. The drawing option on the whiteboard could be very handy for illustrating concepts that are difficult to type quickly on a keyboard or that lose meaning when someone is just explaining rather than showing.

Really Free Conferencing!

Hangout with your friends or colleagues, share videos (up to 9) and conference for free. Join the call with your browser, Skype or your phone directly. No long distance charges, the number is toll-free, really.

More? In the US, you can even get called by the conference on your landline or mobile directly !

Meeting is recorded : The recording of your call are saved to your reports or to your Dropbox account.

 

WatchKnowLearn - Educational Videos

http://www.watchknow.org

Imagine hundreds of thousands of great short videos, and other media, explaining every topic taught to school kids. Imagine them rated and sorted into a giant Directory, making them simple to find. WatchKnow--as in, "You watch, you know"--is a non-profit online community devoted to this goal.  Launched in October 2009 after a year-long development period, WatchKnow is a wiki-style portal that gathers and organizes educational videos for students ages 3 to 18. An age filter slider allows you to easily focus your search. 

The Vision behind WatchKnowLearn is simple:
To provide a world-class, online domain on which educators can store, categorize, and rate the best, K – 12 educational videos on the Internet today. And to make this service FREE so teachers, parents and students everywhere may have access to those videos.

WatchKnowLearn has indexed approximately 50,000 educational videos, placing them into a directory of over 5,000 categories. The videos are available without any registration or fees to teachers in the classroom, as well as parents and students at home 24/7.

ThingLink - Create video, music, text IN a picture!

http://www.thinglink.com

What is ThingLink?

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. Follow image channels from your favorite bands, bloggers and friends. Your ThingLink interactive images form a channel that other users can follow.

Share your channel with friends on Facebook and Twitter, and follow your friends. Touch and discover.

Here is a link to a picture for Valentines' Day

 

http://www.thinglink.com/scene/346325469999661056?buttonSource=searchPage
You may click on the hearts and get a history of Valentine's Day or a Beatles' song, "And I Love Her."
Click on the link above and see how this works...

You may search by a subject.  There are many pictures with Martin Luther King Jr. with clicking points for his "I have a dream" speech, facts about his life, and websites for additional information. 

 

Simple task:  Locate a picture that relates to your topic.  Attach videos, music, text, images, websites, etc.to create a "talking" picture.  I can see some very interesting presentations!!!

AuthorSTREAM - UPLoad Your Powerpoint for access anywhere!

www.authorstream.com

AuthorSTREAM is another one of many websites that allow you to upload a PowerPoint presentation and access it from any computer with an internet connection. It’s nice because you can select the privacy settings you want for your PowerPoint.
 

Create an Online Book Club - BookClubIT

Create Online Book Clubs 

What is Bookclubit.com?

Bookclubit.com is the web first and only book lovers portal where users can create and manage book clubs online. Whether you just need to keep your local book club organized or would like to connect with readers around the world. Bookclubit is a full service solution for you.

How does it work?

Bookclubit.com was made to be as simple as possible. It follows the same general rules you use for your in-person book club.

1.     Register for free

2.     Create your book club

3.     Add your favorite books or books you would like to read to your book shelf

4.     Read the current book and create topic discussions for each book

5.     When you change books, simply change the book and create discussions for that book

6.     If you would like, you can create meetings to meet up with your book club or meet online for quicker discussions

Who can use it?

Bookclubit.com is great for any book reader! It is used in schools across the country and growing every day. Whether your a teacher is looking to get your class to participate in book discussions or a group of book lovers looking to expand your reading repertoire

Bookclubit allows you to set up a bookclub within seconds. Create your very own customized book club and invite friends or connect with friends online who have similiar book interest. Or just create for your own information on books you have read.  I've not tried it, but it looks fairly straightforward.

TagCrowd - WordCloud, TextCloud, or TagCloud

What is TagCrowd?    http://tagcrowd.com/

TagCrowd is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any text by creating what is popularly known as a word cloud, text cloud or tag cloud.

A word cloud is a beautiful, informative image that communicates much in a single glance. TagCrowd specializes in making word clouds easy to read, analyze and compare, for a variety of useful purposes:

• Topic summaries for Speeches and written works.
• Blog tool or website analysis for search engine optimization.
• Help writers and students reflect on their work.
• Name tags
• Resumes
• Visual poetry
• The list goes on and continues to grow.

There are three ways of entering text into TagCrowd to generate a word cloud:

1. Enter the URL for a web page you wish to visualize,
2. Paste (or type) the text you wish to visualize into the text box,
3. Upload a plain text file to visualize.

 

TubeChop - Edit YouTube Videos!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

TubeChop    
www.tubechop.com

If you want to show a YouTube video in class that is too long or only parts of video are relevant, use Tubechop to cut out all of the excess and only keep what you want to show.

TubeChop lets you take a YouTube video’s URL, pop it into their system, and then select and use a clip from a longer video. You can link to your selection, or you can grab the code to embed on your news site or blog.

NOTE:   For Senior Projects:  If you are using a YouTube video, this is a way to just use a couple of minutes of the YouTube video in your presentation.