There are many web tools around that you can create online newsletters and share them with others. Tackk is one of them. It is pretty easy to use. After signing up, choose a theme, then use the editor widget to change the fonts, colours, backgrounds, add features such as contacts, items for sale, maps or a comment button. When you are done, just share your Tackk with others using a link or any social media platforms. By clicking on the theme, add pictures, text, lists, buttons, embed videos, songs or pictures from the web. You can also create your own buttons and link them anywhere. You can place the buttons wherever you like. A few ideas to use this tool in class: Ask students to create advertisements for different objects, houses or books. Create your own newsletters with this. This can be used for contacting with parents or for class announcements. Tackk can be used for creating a single page web pages for anything. Students can summarize a topic using different multimedia on this tool. This tool can be great for announcing events. Students can create their projects with this tool. Create a tack about a topic and ask students to leave their comments. Students can write a research project or a composition with embedding different media. This tool will certainly be a favourite of mine!

I’ve just responded to a question about the value of using Comic Life on student outcomes to the ICT English mailing list and I thought I’d put my thoughts here too so that others can join the discussion in this blog. Karen Mulhuish asked the question: Why use Comic Life over pen and pencil? What kinds of learning (or ‘affordances’) does it offer students? For example, does it help students understand sequencing because of the ease with which you can manipulate images? I guess what I’m driving at is, how do we know that, by choosing Comic Life (or any software, for that matter) we will add value to the learning experience? This was my response. For me, presenting information through a tool like Comic Life comes down to what the value is of comics and graphic novels within education. There are a number of sites that believe that information presented graphically helps to motivate students but there are plenty more advantages than just motivation. Personally, I think one of the biggest advantages is that students have to reprocess information in order to change it from a text platform to a visual platform. This removes the ‘cut and paste’ option for presenting work and requires higher order thinking to be able to represent something graphically with minimal text while representing the key information. Obviously, for visual learners, graphical representation of the work may be more effective for learning and retention than straight text. In terms of why a software application is better than comics with pen and paper, for me the benefit is that it takes away some of the time required to manipulate the images and information so students can focus instead on the learning behind the task. Here is the page of Comic Life in Education examples I’ve put together: http://educationalsoftware.wikispaces.com/Comic+Life Check out some of these other links. Read, Write, Think - has a number of comic based activities and has an article discussing the benefits of the comic form (if you haven’t explored Read Write Think yet this is an amazing resource) Eek! Comics in the Classroom! - an article from Education World Comics in the classroom: 100 Tips, Tools and Resources for Teachers - a very useful blog post Cartoons and Comic Life- a blog post containing video interviews with teachers about how they are using comics effectively (and Comic Life) at secondary level. So how would you answer the question Karen posed?

muvee Cloud Website muvee Cloud is an online space where you can share and view photos & video. Invite anyone to view and contribute their photos and video to each album you've created. Movies (muvees) can be created and posted to your blogs, Facebook and other social media sites. What do you think of muvee Cloud?

Yesterday was the World Environment Day and here is a great web tool to celebrate that day by planting our own virtual trees. We Heart Trees lets you create a tree from the answers that you give to these five questions: 1.If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you wish you could be?  2.How many paper towels do you use in a public restroom? 3.What do you do after you’re done reading a newspaper? 4.What do you do with a book after you’ve read it?  5. How often do you print or make copies at work? Then, you can submit your answers, and customize it by changing the colour, attaching accessories and quotes! You take the pledge to be ever mindful of the well-being of the trees all over our shared planet!! In return, a tree will be planted on your behalf! What a great idea!! If you like, you can share your tree with others using social media.   How to use it in class: Let children create their trees, show them in class and talk about the importance of them. Students answer their questions and compare their answers. Students discuss about the best solutions to answer the questions. Students write their own quotes about trees. This web tool is such a great way to increase the awareness of our students to become more eco friendly!

Stitch.It Website Stitch.IT converts a set of links, that you you copy-and-paste, into one short URL for you to share. The resulting url produces a slideshow of the linked pages. What do you think of Stitch.It?

The online realm has become a huge part of our lives, meaning that schools, companies and people are more reliant than ever upon digital security. It doesn’t matter what you are dealing with, there may not be a room for success without planning for the future. Here, let’s have a look at a few considerations we may need to make in order to secure our digital presence moving forward. Domain names Finding a suitable and memorable domain name can be considered as one of the first step for going online. The domain name that you choose will not only help to determine the success online as a company or as an individual but is something which may be tied to the brand image for years to come. In the event of a technical failure or the collapse of the websites, companies need to be safe in the knowledge that their ownership details are preserved. This is where the registry data escrow comes into play. This will see that key information is kept safely by a third party to be recovered when it becomes necessary. Reliable hosting We not only need to know where to find the right domain but we also need to be able to access them whenever we need. If your website/blog is down, it can reflect poorly on your brand image and could even push your customers or your followers to your competitors. Finding a reliable host is just as important as securing an ICAAN Escrow in that it secures your online presence for the foreseeable future. A powerful and successful online presence is of utmost importance and we should take every possible measure to safeguard the online brand that they build. E-commerce security in business Where businesses encourage their customers to take part in online transactions on the company website it is essential that customers are afforded a high level of security. The credibility of a business in security terms is something which consumers take very seriously. Beyond the step of the Data Escrow, firms need to recognize the measures they can take which are in the interests of their customers. A secure and trusted connection has become an absolute necessity for all online shoppers. The digital revolution has brought great opportunities for growth in industry but there remain concerns over the potential for fraud and the security of data. Just as companies are keen to secure their own data they should see that their customers’ data is equally secure.

I have recently presented to a conference of teachers in Palmerston North looking at the connected world we are a part of, considerations for when starting to work online in school contexts, and great examples of kids being connected through technology. You can view this below: Confident and connected - updated June 10 View more presentations from Suzie Vesper.

If you want your pictures talk, here is a super easy and a great web tool that will help you to do that! Phrase.it allows you to add cartoon speech bubbles to your pictures and share it with others.  The best part is that youdon’t need to sign up to use that tool. It’s simple and fast. First, you start choosing a picture. It can be a picture on your desktop or you can import it from your Facebook or let the tool find a random picture for you. When you get your picture, add a speech bubble, write in the bubble. If you like you can play with the colours of your picture. Here you go!! You are ready to publish it on social media. You can also get a link or download it to your computer. How to use this web tool: Ask students to fill in the speech bubbles on the same picture. Write a message for your students and share it with them. Let different animals pictures talk about themselves. Have students write something that they want to learn about the new topic. Students can write about their feelings.    Students can add as many speech bubbles as they can on one picture. Students can add speech bubbles to the same picture and they can vote for the best one! Give many phrases and picture links to the students and ask them to match with the suitable ones. or give them many phrases and let students find the suitable pictures from different sources, then they share them on your blog/website. Enjoy the fun activities!

JustPaste.it Website JustPaste.it lets you paste and format text, import images and word files, insert maths formula and videos, backup and export to PDF. Pulish and share your document with others by sending them the link. What do you think of JustPaste.it?

I’ve just found out about a handy Twitter tool that helps to ‘mine’ information from your Twitter contacts. One of the best things about Twitter is that you can access a huge number of interesting links that people Tweet about. However, if you are not watching Twitter 24/7 then you are going to miss a lot of that Twitter goodness. The Twitter Times goes through all your contacts and puts together a top list of links ordered by the number of people in your network that have tweeted about it. As most of the people in my Twitter network are educators, this list of links becomes very interesting from an educational perspective. Try making a list of links from your own Twitter followers. http://twittertim.es/ The Twitter Times You  can also see my own Twitter Times page to check out the links there: http://173.13.167.171/suzievesper