I’ve just checked out the list of Edublog nominations and was happily surprised to see this blog in the list of those nominated for ‘Best resource sharing blog’. Given that I haven’t been updating as much recently, I was pretty chuffed to still be included. Thanks to those that nominated me That will help keep me making the effort to blog.

Carbonmade Website Carbonmade lets you display and manage your portfolio online by providing a variety of simple tools. The core idea behind the design is to keep your images and videos at the forefront, so they’re always the focus. Free account allows up to 5 projects and 35 images. What do you think of Carbonmade?

We are all looking for ways to connect with our students in and out of the classroom. And, here is an easy to use tool that we can use for different purposes. TodaysMeet is a backchannel which means to have an online and real time conversation. It is like an online chat room where everyone can send messages and interact with each other. You don’t need to sign up to use this tool. Simply, name your room and decide on how long the data will be saved. Then, share the link of your room with others so that they can participate. Each participant follows the link, write their names or nicknames and start talking. You don’t need to register or download a software to use this tool. The tool is also ad free which makes it more powerful. A few ideas to use this tool in class: As the students are presenting a project or a topic to each other, they can post their questions on TodaysMeet so that when the presentation is over, the questions can be answered. Students can write their feedback or their reflections about lesson/ presentation/ activity or a story that they have read. In groups, they can write a dialogue. Students can brainstorm about a topic. You can hold a debate using this tool. I think, this simple tool can be a nice and an easy step to mobile learning in the classroom!

This is a post for Mac users about the useful colour tips and tools that you can install for free on a Mac. I got these from a post by Robin Wood and have already found them incredibly useful. The post goes into great detail about how to use the Mac built in colour picker which you will be familiar with when using Mac applications. I learned a LOT about how to use this after reading the post. It is always amazing how some things you use all the time can do so much more than you realised. I had no idea about building custom colour palettes or creating palettes from images on my computer before reading his post. It also gives links to a couple of great free tools that add extra power to the colour picker. One of these is a free plugin for the colour picker called ‘Hex Color Picker’ which will give you the colour code for any colour and not just restrict you to web safe colours. I find this very useful for when picking colours for my wikis etc. There is also another plugin related to the Adobe Kuler colour palette generating tool. It will go out to the website and show you the latest and highest rated palettes created by Adobe Kuler users for you to use. Probably, one of the most useful things about Robin’s post is that he has included a script he has written that turns the colour picker into a stand alone application rather than just something that opens in other Mac applications. This is very useful for me as I can use it now to pick colours out of websites rather than have to take a screen grab and then open it in a Mac application to sample the way I used to!

Nota Website Nota enables you to mash your ideas and media together with others in a dynamic whiteboard wiki. Using photos, videos, and other web content you can instantly create brainstorms, presentations, scrapbooks, and enjoy an interactive chat with more than 50 people. What do you think of Nota?

As you may know, I and my colleague Demet Küyük have been developing mobile applications that are created by children. You can check several of them here! For next year, we are planning to develop a new educational application. It will be a digital storytelling app that will be student - generated. For this, we will need some pictures that are drawn by children themselves.  So, if your students are 6 to 10 years old and if you would like to be a part of this iPhone/iPad/Android application/ project with your students, please mail me here: ozge_karaoglu@hotmail.com  I will be sending you the details on a seperate e-mail.  We are looking forward to collaborating with you!

There are a few tools around for embedding books and documents into websites. I have historically always been a fan of Scribd where I can upload my docs and pdfs for embedding into my wikis. Recently I have found another couple of options and am now trying to figure out which I would use. I have looked at three below and embedded a version of the same document from each one to show their differences. I like the large Scribd community and the fact that when I embed docs into Scribd, they are easy to read at full size with the ability to scroll down them. I also like the stats I get about how many views and downloads the document has had. The embedded objects also autofit themselves to the space available whereever I embed them which is handy. It can be a pain that people have to sign up for a Scribd account to be able to download the documents I share. VoiceThread Youblisher is a new one I’ve just started playing with (thanks Allanah for the post that alerted me to this one). I like the page turning effects and the overall look but am not sure that I like the way it takes you out of your site to view it or the fact that you have to zoom in to be able to easily read standard sized text. I do like the fact that it looks neat and tidy on the page when embedded and that it is super easy for people to download by clicking the down arrow beneath the embed. It is interesting that I can’t seem to find where to get the embed code when looking at other people’s books - I only seem to be able to access it when I create my own books. Today I also signed up for Issuu which is another self-publishing platform. This one is very customisable with different ways to embed the document and three different views: one called magazine style with the two pages, presentation style with one page at a time, and paper style with pages that you can scroll down through (like Scribd). I like the fact that you can view an embedded book in full screen mode and then change between the viewing styles using the options that appear when you run your mouse over the top centre of the book space. You also get very good statistics for the document. You do still need an account to download the document though like Scribd. Magazine Style Paper style So what do you think? Which one do you like the best and why?

Nowadays kids take rather more than packed lunches and books to school with them. From mobile phones and blu ray devices to Toshiba laptops and USB drives, they’re fully wired up and the kit they carry about with them on a daily basis can amount to a tidy little sum. The problem in the past used to be kids misplacing their trainers or homework but now parents rightly worry that their accident-prone child is going to accidentally offload their smartphone or portable DVD player rather than just a pen or ruler as of yore. Nonetheless, there are a few sensible steps parents can take when choosing technology items which kids these days seemingly can’t manage without. Laptops With laptops, for instance, you can try to get them one with a solid-state drive which has no moving parts and can put up with all sorts of rough treatment without crashing and go for a spill-proof keyboard wherever possible too. Smaller screens are less prone to breakage than larger ones and a netbook might actually be a better idea than a laptop in that respect. You should make sure that it has all the antivirus and anti-malware programs loaded as well because kids typically frequent sites that are dubious to say the least and which are adept at spreading infections. Kids also need to be taught about the dangers of opening email attachments and links and of visiting suspicious-looking websites. You can get a proper laptop bag for the machine to carry it separately from books, pens and other school-related equipment to reduce the chance of damage. If parents and kids share the same machine, password protection is also a must; with kids the fine line between curiosity and downright invasion of privacy is often blurred. Mobile phones If mobile phones have their own cases and preferably be attached to a belt rather than shoved into a back pocket, that would help too. We may try installing specialist software so that should the device be lost or stolen it can easily be tracked. As with all such devices, kids need to be warned about the risks of web surfing and even of chatting online with friends. With cyber bullying, malware and phishing rife in the online world, using a mobile phone can be as risky as using a regular PC and in fact more so because of its sheer convenience. Encrypted USB drives  You can pay a small amount extra to have a computer’s USB drives encrypted, to protect things like school assignments that could be lifted by someone else and passed off as their own effort. A password will protect any data on the machine so that only the rightful owner can access it. Best practice when using technology can result in valuable lifelong habits, such as keeping a close eye on all devices when out and about and making regular backups of all important data. Many of us fail the test here, so it’s doubly important that our kids get it right.

Facilitating at Ngaio School I have just started working one day a week at Ngaio School with the staff and students on incorporating ICT in all classrooms. It is great to get back to the chalkface and to practice what I preach! I hope to regularly blog about these days as a way to reflect on the teaching and learning that occurs and to share any resources I develop along the way. The first thing I did on accepting the job was to set up a wiki as a way to collect information from staff, to put in useful links related to topics being covered, and to profile work that was created along the way. This has already begun to work really well with staff jumping on to create bookings using the Google Form I’ve embedded. I also use it as a launch pad when working in classrooms and it will be added as a bookmark on all computers. http://ngaioict.wikispaces.com I had three sessions last Thursday: working on place value with a Yr 5/6 class, setting up online spelling lists and trying typing sites with another Yr 5/6 class, and working on maths problems and Kidpix counting activity with Yr 0/1. I will quickly outline each activity and its accompanying resource links. Yr 5/6 - Place Value I started with the whole class using a site that generates maths puzzles called ‘Guess my number‘ as a mental warm-up. To ensure that all kids were participating, I had them work in pairs on each question using mini whiteboards to work out the solution and record their answers to hold up. This worked well and also gave me a very quick gauge as to how the group were coping with the difficulty of the questions. After having a student explain the process for figuring out the answers, the number of correct answers increased markedly. We then went on to use the place value interactive teaching programme which I downloaded as a flash video and uploaded to the Ngaio wiki. While this was a useful visualisation of place value in action, it would have been great to have it go higher than three digits for the level of the group I was working with. After the whole class session, I then had groups using the Wishball Challenge place value game (hundredths) from Digistore (you will need a username and password to view this game). This was an excellent game for reinforcing place value receiving an average of 8 out of 10 from the students both for fun and educational value. Year 5/6 - Spelling, typing and podcasting Again, this started off as a whole class activity looking at the different spelling games that are available as part of Spelling City. I had previously set up Ngaio School within the online programme so that teachers can create their own logins and set up their own customised spelling lists. What I really liked was that you could also search for lists that others have created. I tried searching for Essential List 7 and found that many NZ teachers had already created these lists that I could import to my own login such as these lists created by a teacher in Nelson. The kids really enjoyed the different kinds of games and I could see that this would be a great way for many of them to do their spelling homework. I then worked with a small group in another room and at the request of the teacher, we looked at a site to help improve typing skills. I know that there is always a debate about the value of teaching typing as a skill. I think that as long as it is not the sole activity that kids are involved in, then it can be a useful extra to help cut down the time kids spent inputting information through the keyboard. My favourite online typing site is from the BBC called BBC Dance Mat. It gets the kids to use the correct fingering from the start and is very engaging. We also ended up doing a little bit of podcasting in Garageband when I got the group to quickly record what they had gained from the session. I think the biggest impact from this was that one student who had a hearing impairment was able to hear how he sounded and recorded it a couple of times with big improvements in the clarity of his speech. The teacher plans to do this again after seeing the benefits. Year 0/1 - Basic counting I finished up working in a Year 0/1 class for the afternoon which was a lot of fun! We started up with a whole class warm-up using another Digistore game called ‘Counting Beetles’ (again you will need a username and password to access this). There are three levels with this game. The first is when beetles come out into the open and you have to count them. This progresses to the third level when beetles come out and continue to hiding places under leaves and you have to remember how many there are. I loved the support built in to the activity such as the beetles wings moving when hovering the mouse over them to aid counting and the leaves being able to be pulled back to show the hiding beetles to jog memories. I had the kids all participate in selecting the right number by putting my mouse over a number and asking them to either shake their heads or yell out ‘Got it’. I would also ask if I should go higher or lower. The kids thoroughly enjoyed this. I then worked with small groups getting the kids to make a counting story on a Kidpix slide. They had to add a background to the slide, select an animal sticker and then add the correct number of stickers to the slide that we decided on as a group. Finally, they typed the number and their name. I taught them this in small steps pulling them down on the floor to watch my laptop and then letting them go back to the table to do it themselves. You can see examples of completed Kidpix slides on the Ngaio wiki. So basically, it was a good start. I definitely felt a little rusty at times after not teaching in a classroom for over a year now but it was refreshing to get back among kids in classrooms. I’m looking forward to next week when I will be tackling more place value work as well as creating plays in Garageband with sound effects.

Digital Vaults Website The Digital Vaults is an online interactive exhibit for the National Archives Experience. The exhibit provides visual records such as documents, photographs, and popular media, and illustrates how these materials can come together in unexpected ways to tell the story of the USA. What do you think of the Digital Vaults?

Here is a new chance for our students to practice English and improve their speaking skills. SpeakPipe is a web tool that lets others record their voices and leave messages to you.  When you get your account, you can the embed code to insert it into your blog. This lets your visitors or your students leave voice messages to your by simply clicking on the record button and record their voices via their microphones. You can then go to your account and listen to the recordings. SpeakPipe also allows you to add a voicemail application to your Facebook page. So, if you have a Facebook account with your students, you can still use this web tool.  If you don’t have a Facebook account or a website, you can create a page on SpeakPipe and give the link to your students so that they can leave their voice messages.  Here are a few ideas to use this tool with our students: SpeakPipe can be used for getting feedback from students. They can leave their voice messages on the blog post or the Facebook updates that they have published. Or, if students have their own blogs and a SpeakPipe widget, teachers can leave comments on their pages by giving feedback. If you would like to record your students’ voice, you can use this tool. That would be a good opportunity for everyone to practice speaking.  If students publish their projects online, students can leave comments or further questions on each other’s project page. I believe, this is a very handy tool to have it in our digital toolkit. 

I am continuing with my day a week working around Ngaio School. Before I went to the school I spent more time working on the wiki I’m using to support the staff. I used Wix to create navigation pages for the site. This gave me a chance to see how Wix has developed since I last used it and to make the wiki a little more attractive and inviting. Click on the image of the wiki below to go and check it out. Ngaio wiki I worked with three classes again. In the morning, I worked with place value activities but with a different Year 5/6 class than the week before. I mostly recycled some of the place value games and activities from last week so won’t spend to much detail on that here. However, I had a problem with the internet connection so ended up playing some ‘low tech’ games too such as the one where you toss some dice and the students have to try and make the highest number they can by entering the number of each dice throw into one place value column of a six of seven digit number. I found a website with a ‘virtual’ dice toss so that I could have this up on the data projector for all to see but wasn’t too happy with the way it worked. I have since found some other sites that I think could be better such as this Virtual Dice site where you can select how many sides your dice has. I’ve also since found a lesson plan with downloadable ‘Place Value Houses’ that would be a useful resource to have used to help students say the large numbers correctly. After morning tea, I headed off to do a play podcasting session with four Yr 3/4 children. I have put the process I went through on the wiki but will replicate it here as well: The play we used to create the podcast is called ‘Your Time is Up’.  School Journal, Part 3, Number 1, 2005. There is a lesson plan for this play available for download. Below is the process we went through to create the podcast: Parts were assigned and students read the play through silently. Themes and new vocabulary discussed (ideas for themes can be found on the link below). The students read through a section of the play once as a group and strategies for presenting a play successfully were discussed ie being aware of cues. I showed the students how to record and playback audio into a podcast in Garageband Students went and practiced reading their one line of their part into Garageband and then listened back to hear how they sounded. I roved discussing possible improvements with individual children who then rerecorded. I showed students how to split audio files and how to change the volume of clips. Students took earlier recordings and experimented with reordering parts of their lines using the split function and changing the volume of split clips. The students then met back again around a single laptop and recorded the chosen section of the play. I showed the students how to access the built-in sound effects in Garageband. The group discussed which could be used for this play and phone sounds were added. The finished play section was exported out as an MP3 and uploaded directly to this wiki. When MP3’s are uploaded to a Wikispace wiki and then added to a page, they are automatically shown within a player. Listen to the play podcast below! Finally, I worked with a junior class in the afternoon on creating a similar Kidpix counting pictures as I did last week. However, we used a different Digistore activity to start off with as these were slightly older kids called ‘Number Trains’ the children had to put carriages of a train in the correct order with numbers up to 20 (clicking the image below will take you there). The whole class was involved this time as there were enough laptops for one between two. I noticed that when we were using Kidpix, the students had difficultly with clicking and dragging using the laptop touch pads. We practiced together on the mat the actions of holding the button with one hand and dragging with the other. Then they went back to their laptops and we played an impromptu ‘game’ where they had to drag as many animal stickers onto their picture as they could within a time limit. The partners took turns having a go. Skill drills can still be useful and fun when a need is identified in a lesson. So that was it for last Thursday! I’d love to see some comments that aren’t spam! I seem to be having a lot of spam comments left at the moment.

Tools for English Website Tools for English provides a variety of tools that can help you prepare English language exercises. COPY/PASTE or write the text you want to use in to the quiz generators and they will instantly create a WORKSHEET and an ANSWERSHEET, which can be printed or exported to PDF. What do you think of Tools for English?

Secret messages have been used since the ancient times. Today, I would like to introduce you a new web tool that you can create secret codes. Mozaiq is a new web tool that you can hide messages in a plain site inside of pictures that you can, then safely share.  And, none will be able to read or share the message without the secret code and knowing the way how to do it.  What you do is pretty simple. Go to the website, write your message and choose a picture that you want the message to hide. If you don’t have, the website finds a picture for you. Add a password, but this is optional. To retrieve the hidden message, you should go to  the decryption page. Be sure to share the decryption page with your intended recipient separately from the message.  This tool can be a fun way to send a message about a surpise or a fun activity that you are planning for the students.  Students or teachers can write the ending of a story using this web tool and share it with each other.  Students can create their own hidden message pictures and they can send it to eachother. The picture that they have chosen may represent the secret code behind it and the students try to find it in class. Teachers can send "thank you" or "well done" pictures to the students with a secret message about how good they have been in class. I do have fun with this tool!!

Thanks again to Karen Schweitzer being a guest author for this blog. She has put together another  useful and informative post on collaboration tools. 10 Collaboration Tools for Students and Teachers Collaborating online is a good way for students and teachers to communicate and engage each other in classroom projects. There are many different fee-based tools that can help with this, but there also a number of free tools that work just as well. The following ten collaboration tools are free and well-suited to an education environment. HotChalk - HotChalk is a free learning management system that makes teacher/student collaboration a breeze. Teachers can manage classes, assign work, receive homework from students, communicate with students and parents, and streamline the teaching process. Wikidot - More than 2,000 education wikis have been created with this wiki-maker which allows easy collaboration, private sites, and unlimited pages and revisions. Wikidot is free unless you would like to remove the ads from the wikis, in which case, you will need to pay $5 per month. NoteMesh - NoteMesh was made for college students but can be accessed and easily used by students in any grade. This free note collaboration system works like a wiki and allows students and teachers to create a unified collection of notes for any class. Wridea - This free application offers a set of tools that allows multiple people to brainstorm together online. Users can set up an unlimited number of idea pages and then categorize them, share them, revise them, and comment on them. Thinkature - Thinkature offers real-time collaboration for the web. It includes a voice chat and a workspace where people can share documents, images, ideas, outlines, diagrams, and more. Stixy - Created specifically for people who want to collaborate online, Stixy works like a web-based whiteboard. Users can paste photos, notes, to-do lists, documents, and other items onto a board and share them with other people. SimplyBox - The American Association of School Librarians recently named SimplyBox one of the best websites for teaching and learning. The SimplyBox tool allows students and teachers to clip and share portions of the web in a safe, controlled environment. Diigo - This unique research tool can bookmark sites, permanently archive web pages, and highlight and annotate portions of the web. Anything that has been marked with the tool can be stored in a personal learning network or shared with a private group. Yugma - Yugma is a free web conferencing and desktop sharing tool that works well for students, teachers, and parents who want to collaborate online. Up to 20 attendees can be present on a Yugma conference at one time. Zimbra - Zimbra is a web collaboration and productivity suite. The free version of Zimbra includes email, file sharing, an interactive calendar, search features, and much more. Guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes about online degrees for OnlineDegreePrograms.org.

Shmoop Website Shmoop provides a writing guide, summaries tool, analysis tool and discussions room. Created by educators and experts from Ph.D. and Masters programs at Stanford, Harvard, UC Berkeley (and other top universities) to make learning and writing more fun and relevant for students in the digital age. What do you think of Shmoop?

Many web tools turn content creating into great looking videos. SooMeta is one of these tools. SooMeta lets you create videos by dragging different multimedia such as Youtube videos, picture sounds and text from the internet and you turn them into a video. After you sign up, you simply search for web content with a search tool or pasting the links. You can crop videos, re-size images, add text, define the layout and remix your story whenever you like. When you are done, you are ready to share your story with others or embed it to your blog. This tool also lets you add a poll, embed a quiz and you can get the statistics of people who, when and where answered to your questions and what the response was. Here are some ideas to use this tool in class: Students can create their own videos about a certain topic using different multimedia. This tool can be used as an engaging version of powerpoint. Teachers can pull content around the web and mash it up. They can share it with their students. Students can create their own quizzes and share it with others. Teachers can create videos and embed quizzes in it and check understanding. Teachers can create polls on any topic and collect the results. Students can create online advertisement or book/film trailers. This is certainly a new and a powerful way to integrate digital content into our lessons!

I spent another busy day going around classrooms at Ngaio on the 11th of March. I started off working with a Yr 5/6 class who had already created scripts about the key competencies and now wanted to transfer them into a podcast using Garageband. I walked them through how to use the Garageband tools with the data projector and then the kids got to it. One skill that proved to be useful for the students was to be able to cut a track (command T) in order to remove a section that they wanted to improve rather than just deleting the entire track as many of them did initially. They were also adding some music and so needed to learn how to layer tracks along the timeline. I encouraged them to think about the mood of the music they selected and to make sure they adjusted the audio where necessary so it didn’t drown out their spoken recordings. This took pretty much the entire session! The idea is that from there they will drop the podcast track into the audio soundtrack of a Keynote presentation with a series of slides containing images representing the competencies timed to the length of the podcast. If you want more detail on how to do this, let me know in the comments and I’ll create an instructional handout for it. In the middle block, I worked with a group of Yr 3/4 children to create informational mindmaps about guinea pigs (they have a pet guinea pig in their classroom).  We looked at the ready made templates in Kidspiration and they began to transfer the information they had gathered into a mindmap. We looked at skills such as how to drag a square around parts of the mindmap in order to select all the items within the square. This makes it easy to move whole sections of the map rather than each bubble individually. Below is an example of one of the completed mindmaps. Guinea pig mindmap Finally, in the afternoon I worked with a Yr 2/3/4 class on how to graphically present their ideas around key competencies using Comic Life. I walked them through a few tips and tricks on how to use the software and then they added the photos they had taken earlier to their Comic Life pages. Below is an example of what they came up with (with the faces blurred to protect the privacy of the students). Using Comic Life to show 'Relating to Others' From here, they plan to drop these ComicLife images into Keynote slides and then drop videos of the students talking about the key competencies into the corner of the slides. To help the teachers understand the power of ComicLife, I put together a page showing different examples of how to use the software along with links to tutorials online. You can access these on my Educational Software wiki by clicking the image below. Comic Life examples Well that’s it for another week. One more week of the term to go.

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.