BeQRious Generator Website BeQRious lets you generate your own QR Codes. Simply select the type of code, then press the "create code" button. Once you do that you can save it (as GIF or PDF) for further use. What do you think of BeQRious Generator?

PowerPoint is not dead yet and it should’t be, but it is good to know that we have other alternatives online that we can replace it. PowToon is a new way of creating presentation and sharing them with others online.  After getting your free educators account, you can starting creating your animations. The editor is just like the powerpoint actually; but you can add many different characters and poses to make your presentation visual and fun to create. you can also add props and of course your own text. Powtoon also lets you import images from your computer or a specific url. What I really like about this tool is the animations. There are many fun and interesting transitions that you can use. When you are done, you export your transition as a movie or you can share it via Youtube, Twitter or Facebook. Here are some ideas to integrate: Use this tool instead of Prezi or Goanimate. Ask students to create their presentation using this tool. Students can create their videos that explain any topic or describe a concept. Powtoon is a cheap, but fun-filled and easy way of creating presentations and animated movie and just another way to motivate our students.

OK - so I am obviously a bit slow out of the starting blocks given that the following blog post on the Wikispaces blog is dated the 10th of December! Still, this is very good news. I have always liked the speed and clean lines of Safari but have steered clear because of how heavily I use sites like Wikispaces that have previously not given you ‘WYSIWYG’ editing in Safari. This has now changed! The following is from the Wikispaces blog: For all those Mac users out there, we now offer Visual Editor support for Safari 3. So if your school’s computer lab is full of Macs, or you just love the speed of Safari, you can now enjoy the ease of Wikispaces with it. This new release also brings support for other WebKit-based browsers, such as Google’s new Chrome browser. I also note from the blog that Wikispaces have also made it easier for teachers to bulk create student logins. Again from the blog: For the past 3 years, Wikispaces has offered a service to educators where we would create all the accounts for their students in bulk. We are excited to announce that we have made this process even easier. Now, for any of our K-12 wikis, you can create accounts for your students without having to send us an e-mail. Simply go to "Manage Wiki," and then "User Creator." All you need to begin are the usernames and passwords you want for your students. With the new user creator, you can: create accounts with or without e-mail addresses have passwords generated for you add a suffix or prefix to all the usernames to ease creation and make them members of multiple wikis straight away All of these features help keep Wikispaces as my wiki of choice. In saying that, PB Wiki has really added a lot of functionality in recent times including document management tools and an increase in the amount of storage space for free accounts (now up to 2Gb and if you pay $9 US, you can have unlimited!). You can put all of your uploaded files into folders to make it a breeze to locate them again. I also like the way you can set a variety of access levels for members: administrator, editor, writer, reader, or page level only. If you want to move into using wikis for digital portfolios, the page level access option is exactly what is needed (eg if you want to make only certain pages available to parents and children). It has also had the bulk student account creation tools for quite a long time. So the race for the best wiki tool continues with both Wikispaces and PB Wiki having excellent features. People are always asking me to tell them which one I recommend and it is becoming harder to be as definitive in with my opinion. It will be interesting to see how each of these continues to develop! One thing I am going to investigate is backing up all of the work I have on my wikis. After losing the collections of feeds I had (see previous post), I am particularly aware at the moment of how fragile all of my work is sitting on servers on the other side of the world! Anyways - I hope you had a wonderful Xmas (we had a really nice chilled out day at my parents) and that you do something fun for New Year’s Eve! Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

OSP Website The OSP Collection provides curriculum resources that engage students in physics, computation, and computer modeling. Computational physics and computer modeling provide students with new ways to understand, describe, explain, and predict physical phenomena. What do you think of OSP?

Here is a very creative and fun application for kids! Eye Paint Monsters lets kids choose images from world-renowned artists and color them.   The best part about this coloring is that you are using your mobile device’s camera as a tool  to capture colors, patterns and textures to interactively fill areas in the drawings selected by you. After you choose your illustration, tap on any area in the drawing to connect the live camera. You will then see the camera shutter button that enables you to capture the chosen pattern and finish your coloring. The images created can be saved to the device’s Photo Library by tapping the star icon or you can take the picture of it. Unfortunately, there is no social sharing feature available due to the child protection regulations.   Here are some ideas to use this app in class: Students walk around the school and find different patterns and colors to color their monsters. Students show their finished monsters and talk about where they get the patterns and the colors. They compare their finished monsters and they talk about their differences and similarities. Students describe their monsters to each other. Later, they can write about their monsters. Ask some guiding questions to your students to come up with their own unique stories. The questions can be: What’s his/her name? What does it like doing?/Where does it live?/What does it eat? … The creative possibilities are endless. This app is so creative, fun, animated and extremely easy to use with learners.

The Dumesnil-Vickers Family - Originally uploaded by courage.campaign Through a random series of web page clicks, I ended up on the Flickr set from the Courage Campaign group that are protesting the decision in California to outlaw gay marriages: http://www.flickr.com/photos/couragecampaign/sets/72157611501972510/ This is an issue that I feel very strongly about as a long time advocate for gay rights with a large number of gay friends (one of whom was a bridesman at my wedding!). I think that all couples, same sex and hetrosexual, should have the same rights in the law and in our society. If gay couples want to get married, then I believe they should be able to. I think that loving, healthy relationships should be what we aim for in our society rather than sticking to some antiquated ideal of the family unit. This set of photos on Flickr is a great way for people to show the world their support and solidarity for gay couples in California! I’m going to take a photo showing my support and invite you to as well. Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

If you are a busy teacher and if you have been looking for an easy way to create interactive and fun text activities that you can do with your students, here is Textivate! Simply, copy and paste the maximum 500 words text that you would like to generate your activities with. Click to "Textivate Now" button to see a wide range of activities that you can generate automatically by simply clicking on them. The activities are varied, such as drag and drop,hangman, fill in the blanks, put the text in order, memory game and many more. When you are done, you can share your activities with a link or embed them to your blog/website. You can play with Textivate on IWB or with your tablets as well. Here are some ideas to use in class: Create your own activities and ask your students to answer them individually or in groups. Divide the class into two and they compete each other while answering the questions.  Let students create their own activities and share them with the rest on a blog or a website.  I really like this tool as it is easy, flexible and functional! And it’s only a matter of choosing the right exercises for the level of your students.

OK - so I did actually have quite a decent break but it was also a time for me to ‘catch up’ with some web surfing and adding to the wiki a little. The video section in the online tools area of my wiki has been annoying me for awhile now so I finally restructured it. I have now added in a series of options once you go into the initial video tools page (thanks to cooltext.com for the menu buttons) As well as restructuring what was already there, I have added some new content such as the technical tips page and all the tools listed on the video creation tool (Marnie if you are reading this, some of these were the type of things you were trying to find last year). I still have a lot more work to do to update the examples but that might have to wait for the time being. Another thing that I added to the wiki in the offline tools section was a page for Timelapse tools. There are so many ways that you can use timelapse in a classroom. Some include: documenting a mould experiment over time creating a class art work charting the growth of a bean sprout watching shadows move during the day showing the change from a messy to tidy classroom! building a human pyramid creating a model or building something for technology There could be endless things to try really. There are some really useful tools out there to help in the process. If you have any more ideas on how you could use time lapse, let me know in the comments. I am going to put together a big list of them to add to the site. I am also looking for educational examples of completed time lapse projects if anyone has some online. I’ve also been reacquainting myself with some long lost software and abandoned tools. One thing I am enjoying is a Firefox extension that someone told me about ages ago but I have finally just installed called Speed Dial that gives a a Google Chrome type of experience each time you open a new tab - it displays thumbnails of sites that you select as being ones you visit regularly and then you can click on the thumbnail to take you there. Here are the ones that I picked though I would probably already change a few. I’ve been exploring other bits and pieces as well but think that is enough for now At some point I still have to work through all those links I saved to Diigo to explore at a later date. Now that is a scary prospect!! Authored by suzievesper. Hosted by Edublogs.

TagMyDoc Website TagMyDoc lets you apply a QR-code tag to a document, which can be scanned allowing the virtual copy to be retrieved. What do you think of TagMyDoc?

Today, I would like to introduce you, Smore which is an easy way to design flyers and publish them immediately. Start by choosing an event template that you would like to create. Smore takes you a page where it is ready for you to start. Go on editing in the blanks, add your text, add your pictures. Everything on this page is customizable. Just click on each box to delete, or to add something else. You can add videos, links, text, audio, embed a link, picture, event, gallery or bio.  don’t forget to change the colours, background and the font titles. You can go back to your flyer to change or edit anything. When you are done, click on save and your flyer is ready to share with the world. Now, you can print your flyer, you can allow comments, add social buttons, make your flyer public or private and see how many people have visited your flyer. How to use Smore in education: Create your school bulletins on Smore and share them with the parents. If there is an event at your school, create an online flyer or ask your students to create the flyers. Students can create flyers about the events in their area and share them with others. Let students create flyers that talk about a film, holiday resort or a book. Put all the links somewhere and ask the rest to vote for the best one. Students can create Smores that introduce themselves or their classes. They can leave comments or ask questions on each others’ pages. Students can present a project using this tool. Students can create an online poster about any topic that you are doing. Another simple way for technology integration .. Hope you and your students enjoy!