QuoteCovers can be my favorite web tool this year so far.  It does a very simple thing but in a very clever and an easy way.  It turns any ordinary text into a beautiful typography art picture for use on Facebook, Google Plus, E-Cards, Wallpapers, and Prints. First, you need to choose your quote. You can search the database of the web tool that has more than 2,500 pages of quotes or write your own text to use. You next step will be to choose your editor. Then, you can customize your picture in many different ways. You can upload a picture at the background and use effects on it. You can choose different and creative font combinations by simply clicking on the "next fonts" button. You can do the same thing for choosing the font color and the background. When you are done, you can download your picture. This tool is really fun!! How to use it in class: Students can find fonts that are related to your topic and they create their own posters and share them with their friends. They can vote for the best design/quote. We, teachers can create our own posters to peak 
students’ 
curiosity 
and 
motivation
 to 
learn about the new topic. This tool can be great for deciding on the classroom rules at the beginning of the year. Each group can create their own posters about the classroom rule that they have chosen.  You can inform students about an upcoming event using this tool.  Students can create book covers or an advertisement about a film with their words. Enjoy!

TFA Webstie TFA (Tours from Above) provides aerial virtual tours from photography worldwide. The team of aerial panoramic photographers will, over time, be bringing you some of the best cities, ranges, oceans and forests in a way you have never seen before. What do you think of TFA?

Here comes another cool web tool! IWishYouTo lets you draw your own animated greeting cards.  Without registering, on the page start drawing your card with your mouse. You can can the colour that you use, the thickness of the pointer, add a background image or add a shadow. When you are done, play the animation again. If you like it, proceed to the next step.  If you like, you can mail it to anyone and schedule the time that you want the recipient to get it. You can also have a look at the gallery and use the one that you like to send. The live cards are also compatible with Android and ipad! How to use this tool with students: Students can draw their live cards for birthdays, mother’s or father’s days, xmas … Send students a greeting card for special days or different occasions.  Students can create their own mini animations using this tool and share them with others.  This tool can be used with young learners as well as adults and it is great for sparkling creative ideas!

Stage'd Website Stage'd is a digital toy for creating animated comics. You can pick characters and choose costumes for them. Then you can pick from a library of animations and add dialog as well as some scenery. What do you think of Stage'd?

Anyone that has been to workshops I run on Web 2.0 tools knows that I am a HUGE fan of Voicethread. To my mind, the three big online tools are blogs, wikis and Voicethread. Other tools that I speak about are great but they are not as central to me as these three (though Google Docs would come close!) I am always impressed at the ways Voicethread continues to innovate (and they’ve just given the site a makeover too!). Here are a couple of features of Voicethread that I think are really valuable. They might have been around since last year but I’ve just tripped over them. I read about them within the Voicethread blog https://voicethread.com/blog/#20090911 Searching within Voicethread for Creative Commons images in Flickr This is a new development for adding images to Voicethread straight from Flickr that have a Creative Commons license. You do have to have a Flickr account to link to your Voicethread account for you to be able to make access this feature. Here are the steps involved. Step one Click on ‘Create’ to make a new Voicethread and then click on ‘Upload’ and select the option’Media Sources’ and then choose the ‘Flickr’ option. Step Two Click on the link to import Flickr images from your Flickr account into your Voicethread. If you have not done this before, you will be prompted to link your Flickr account with your Voicethread account.  Once you have done this, the option to search Flickr for Creative Commons licensed images is at the top of the screen. Step Three You can click on the ‘i’ next to the title of an image in the search results to see more details such as the specific Creative Commons license.  Click on each image you want to add to your Voicethread and then select ‘Import’. The brilliant thing about this option is that Voicethread automatically adds a link back to the image on Flickr on the Voicethread slide so there is no need to worry about attribution. Changing the order of comments on a Voicethread I have wanted to do this before but didn’t realise I could.  This is a direct quote from the blog: If you are the creator or editor of a VoiceThread you can now reorder the comments by moving your mouse over any comment segment on the timeline beneath the VoiceThread.  Just hold down the shift key while over the timeline and then click-drag to move a comment segment to another position.  This will allow you much greater control over the quality of your conversations. So basically, I continue to be impressed at Voicethread and look forward to ongoing future improvements.

Just like the QuotesCover, here is another fantastic web tool for creating images with your own texts. It is called PinWords. Pinwords lets you add text to the images in a beautiful way and share it with others. If you like , you can choose one of the backgrounds that it offers or you can upload your own images from your computer or your Facebook account. Then, choose your text style, play with the fonts and the colours, edit your text. When you finish, you can tweet it, mail it or you can download the picture to your desktop. The best part is that you don’t need to sign up to be able to use that tool. How we can use this tool with our students: Students can create virtual postcards to send to each other. Students can find quotes about their topics and design pictures. Students can write their favorite quotes from a book or a story that they read. Students can write short poems about a topic. Teacher can give one picture to each child and students can label or tag them with as many words as they can come up. I am in love with this tool!

There are many web tools that you can create quizzes, today I would like you to meet with Quizpoo which is a very simple way to create online quizzes and share them with others.  When you want to make a quiz, just give a title and two answer choices like Yes/No, True/False etc. Then, follow the next step and start writing your questions. Don’t forget to click on the right answer below each question. When you are ready, just share it with others by mailing it to them. When you take the quiz, it gives you immediate feedback and a gold start for your true answers. At the end, it tells you your score and gives you the option to share it with others. Take this quiz to see how it is.  Some ideas on how to use this tool with our students: Create a true/false quiz on a topic that you will be doing. It could be good how much the students know about this new topic. Give a quiz at the end of a topic/unit to check how much the students have learnt. Ask students to create quizzes about the unit/book or the subject that they have just learnt and share their quizzes with others students. Create a true/false quiz at the beginning of the year about yourself and share it with your students. That would be a cool way for students to learn about things about their teachers. and you don’t need to register to use that tool. This can be a reason to like it!

Utubersity Website Utubersity presents the best educational videos available on Youtube in an organized, easy to find way for you to watch and learn. Videos are classifyied and tagged in a way that enables you to find these material more easily and efficiently. What do you think of Utubersity?

OK - so I haven’t been very prolific recently on this blog but with my son Toby due in a week’s time and my 14 month old daughter Zoe to keep me busy as well, I guess some of my online life has taken a back seat Still, here is an article I wrote recently for a magazine that looks at two different tools for creating live collections of websites. They are both good tools for different reasons though I probably lean more to Live Bookmarks. Organising the web In education, there are many times you need to organise content from the internet. You might be creating a bank of websites for the students to access around a topic (or be asking them to do this), categorising useful teacher websites to be able to easily find them again, sharing great websites with other educators, or creating activities for students to complete as they move through different websites. Bookmarking sites on your own computer may help you to find them again but it doesn’t allow for many of the other functions. There are online tools that allow you or your students to build up link resource banks that can be shared easily. Many people know about tools such as Delicious or Diigo for online bookmarking . However, there are now new tools that give you live versions of each bookmarked site rather than just a static link in a list. This article is going to focus on two such tools; LiveBinders and Jog the Web. Both are excellent options and have slightly different focuses. LiveBinders http://livebinders.com The name of this tool pretty much sums up the way this tool works. You can set up an online ‘binder’ around a topic of your choice. Within each binder, you can have tabs containing live versions of websites. You can also create subtabs within each tab so you can break a tab topic down into subtopics. Below is an example of a LiveBinder I have set up to share Web 2.0 tools. You can visit this LiveBinder at this address: http://livebinders.com/play/play_or_edit?id=26329 Live Binders subtopic The live versions of the sites that load within the tabs or subtabs can be navigated through without leaving the Live Binder environment or you can click on the hyperlink at the top of the window to visit the site directly. Clicking on ‘Edit Menu’ while working within Live Binders gives you a number of extra options. You can upload a file into a tab or subtab, change the position of a tab or subtab, insert media from sites such as Flickr, YouTube or Delicious links, change the layout of a tab or subtab so that you can include your own text or content, and change the properties of the binder including the title, description and colour scheme. Text layout options A LiveBinder can also be added to while surfing the net by adding their bookmarklet to the toolbar of your browser. Simply click on the bookmarklet (called LiveBinder It ) and you will be asked to select one of your binders to add the site to or be given the option to add it to a new binder that you can create on the fly. LiveBinder It Finally, sharing a LiveBinder is very straightforward. You can send people an email with the link to a specific binder or embed a visual link to the LiveBinder within a blog or wiki page. Embedded LiveBinders Jog the Web http://jogtheweb.com Jog the Web has less customisation than LiveBinders but what it does, it does very well making this another useful tool. You can create ‘steps’ within a ‘Jog’ which are basically live versions of the sites listed in a sequential order down the left side of the Jog. You can either use the arrows to move through the sites in order or click on each site listed on the left. Jog Interface You can add text to the top of the live website so that you can give information and instructions related to the site. I do think that the interface on Jog the Web does this function a little better than LiveBinders which is why it lends itself particularly well to building web challenges or guided tours of sites. Jog Step You can also choose to add your own content pages as a step within a jog. You have different layout options for these pages and the page editor gives you lots of customisation options within the page. You can even edit the html so I was able to embed content such as Slideshare presentations. Jog your own content Embedding Slideshare presentations If you are using Firefox, you can install an extension that allows you to add to a Jog while browsing the net. As yet, there is no support for other browsers. Firefox Jog Extension Finally, you can share your Jog easily by giving people the URL to visit the Jog. The embed option creates a ready made hyperlink but does not give you a visual object to embed on your wiki or blog. You can access the URL from the final page called the ‘End Page’. There are a couple of downsides in that there is quite a bit of advertising on the Comment and End pages which are added to every Jog created in a free account. You can also not control the comments that are added to a Jog, which can become an issue if people leave inappropriate comments. Overall though, I think this would be a handy tool to use in the classroom.

R Website R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics providing a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, ...) and graphical techniques. What do you think of R?