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

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?

Here is one of the tools that can be added to your favorite lists. SimpleMeet.me is a web tool that you can create a chat room and use it as a backchannel in the classroom with so many people at the same time. Good news, you don’t need to sign up to use the tool. First, get the number for your chat room and immediately create your room to chat. You can invite people via their mails or give them the number and they can join the chat from the website. There is no limit in the number of participants. Then, start writing and chating with the rest of your group. You can also upload documents or pictures to share with others. How to use this tool in class: Use this tool as a backchanell in class. While you or some students are presenting, let them ask you questions so that you can answer them at the end of the lesson. Give your students a topic and ask them to chat about this topic using this tool. You can hold a debate using this tool. Students can write their feedback or their reflections about lesson/ presentation/ activity or a story that they have read. This can be a good to break the ice in class! Image Source:ShutterStock

This is just a quick late night post to share a video about how to sign up on Skype as an educator in order to find other educators to collaborate with. Very cool! I am going to turn over a new blogging leaf after my long period of silence How to create a profile and find a teacher from Skype in the classroom on Vimeo.

I love picture collage makers but I think Loupe Collage is the best one so far as it includes three different applications in one website. What you do with this site is pretty simple. Choose your pictures from your desktop or Facebook or any other social media website. Then, choose a shape that you want to see your pictures. If you like, you can write a text or draw a picture; and the text will be in the shape or the word that you have written. You can also change the background color, shuffle the pictures, add more photos or add a border. Then, you can save it as a picture and use it wherever you like. You can also choose to draw a live card with your pictures and drawing a picture or text. The website will animate it itself. You can also try Waldo which is a picture hunt game. You have to find a picture among a picture collage. How to use it in class: Students can complete a picture collage essay. Students can find the relation between the pictures and the shape that they use. Students can create a drawing card for special days such as Xmas, Mother’s Day .. Students can create posters using this tool on any topic. Students can create book covers.   Share class pictures with parents using this tool. Image Source: ShutterStock

I am currently working with a group of eight teachers to work through a teacher inquiry process where they identify a curriculum need for their students and then match this to an ICT tool that can help them address this need.  Teachers have been sharing the curriculum focus with me over the last week and I have been helping them to identify possible ways of working with ICT that they will implement in Term Three. I deliberately set out to work with teachers who might be a little lacking in confidence and I am finding it interesting to see what they are deciding to focus on. One teacher wants to concentrate on improving the students’ general knowledge. I found this to be a little challenging to my own beliefs about teaching and learning in a digital age. Should we still be trying to build up ‘general knowledge’ at a time when students can find out almost any fact they want by doing a Google search? How could I approach this subject in order to make the teacher feel her ideas were valued while still keeping the focus on effective pedagogy? Was I right to think that general knowledge was now not as important? Do my own feelings partly stem from the fact I can never remember names, dates or locations so I am truly terrible in a quiz night team? So I did what I normally do - I started to search around the net using Google. In this way, I stumbled across an article titled ‘Is Google killing general knowledge’ I enjoyed the article and thought that it did a pretty good job arguing the point that we do still need to have a basic level of knowledge to be effective learners. Here is a quote from that article: IS GOOGLE KILLING GENERAL KNOWLEDGE? | More Intelligent Life via kwout This article still makes the case for knowing facts while also recognising that the internet is a game changer as it allows people to continue to build their knowledge over their lifetime by being able to tap into the great collective knowledge. So I was feeling a little more comfortable with the importance of facts but still not sure about teaching them in isolation. As a compromise, I came up with an activity that would help to develop information literacy skills while students learn ‘general knowledge’. Here is how I described it to the teacher: A group of students could have a category each week to research (eg Famous monuments of the world) and they have to write 10 questions that you put into a form tool for the rest of the class to answer (which they can also do by researching). The students writing the questions have to show that the facts they are using are valid using the ‘3 sources rule’. Then the next group can have a turn. To prepare for this, you could do some work with your class on knowing how to check the information you find on the net is valid. I have links and useful videos about doing this with students on my wiki. At the top of the page, there are searching tips including some videos from Google. Here is an example of a Google Form that they could use to put in the questions for the other students to answer (I ran out of energy after four questions but you get the idea). So, have I sold my principles down the river in order to work in with what a teacher wants to do or is this type of activity valid? I would love your thoughts.

GIFExploder Website GIFExploder lets you explode your animated gif images into seperate images. View the results and download each image seperately. What do you think of GIFExploder?

Videos are one of the most important mediums in language teaching and here is a nice and a useful tool that we can use with videos in the classroom. ReelSurfer lets you crop videos and share from anywhere. Get your account and simply copy/paste your web link. Then, click on the buttons below the video to set a start and stop to the videos. You can also edit the times by clicking on the "edit times" below the buttons. When you are done, preview and share it with others. The best part is that you can get the videos from different video sharing websites. There is also a bookmarklet button where you can drag it to your bookmarks and click it to clip any video and share.  Here are a few ideas to use this tool: Crop your video and don’t show the ending. Ask students to brainstorm and come up with ideas. Crop your videos into different parts, let students watch them all and ask them to put the videos in order. Crop the beginning of your video and ask students to predict what has happened at the beginning.  or simply use to get your students watch the right part of the video you want them to see or split videos into shorter clips.  Image source: ShutterStock

I have just read a fasinating article about an experienced surgeon working at the top of his field that was looking for a way to continue learning and improving in his profession. He had a ‘aha moment’ when an unexpected tennis lesson made improvements to the speed of his serve despite having felt that his serve was the best part of his game. He goes on to look at whether other professionals make use of coaches once they are seen to be performing at a high level and talks to concert violinists, opera singers, and school teachers before asking a retired surgeon that he respects to be his own coach in the operating theatre. The results speak for themselves! Some of the interesting quotes from this article in relation to the coaching programme that he observes in a school district are: Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time. Even when a practice session with demonstrations and personal feedback was added, fewer than twenty per cent made the change. But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent. A spate of small randomized trials confirmed the effect. Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests. I also found it interesting that there was a lot of resistance to coaching by some teachers in the district where coaches are made available to them. All teachers in their first two years are required to accept a coach, but the program also offers coaching to any teacher who wants it. Not everyone has. Researchers from the University of Virginia found that many teachers see no need for coaching. Others hate the idea of being observed in the classroom, or fear that using a coach makes them look incompetent, or are convinced, despite assurances, that the coaches are reporting their evaluations to the principal. And some are skeptical that the school’s particular coaches would be of any use. The feeling of being ‘exposed’ while teaching is something that we have all experienced while being observed. As the article says, not everyone is a good coach so half the challenge I guess is finding that person that you are comfortable with and then being open to changing your practice. I know that when I was working as a facilitator for a cluster, I was in the role of a coach but not all the teachers that I was working with had ‘bought in’ to the process and the level of contact I had with each individual teacher was not really enough to be an effective coach. I also had trouble getting into a lot of teachers’ classrooms with teachers more comfortable to work with me while released from their class. This was probably to do with the fact that it takes time to build up the trust required to be that ‘critical friend’ and many felt a little threatened by the process. Having read this article, it becomes even clearer that this was not an effective way of working with many of the teachers that were in that cluster. Teaching online as I do at the moment, anyone can ‘drop in’ to my Adobe lessons but the timing isn’t always that great. I’ve taken to filming some of my lessons using screencast software on my computer so that these can be shared with people at a later date to get their feedback. I find this far less threatening than having someone in there during the session itself (which is something I am trying to work on!). So do we have enough opportunities for quality coaching in our profession? Have you had someone that has been a ‘coach’ that you’ve been able to work with successfully to make changes to your practice beyond those first few years in the job? There is a big movement towards teachers being involved in a continual round of upskilling through the teacher inquiry process but how many teachers get to do this with the input of a trusted and respected coach to help them through the process? Another thought - thinking around this also ties in with the e-learning framework which talks about teachers being mentored at the ‘Enabling’ and ‘Empowering’ levels of ‘Sustaining a professional e-learning community’. So what do we see this mentoring looking like?

Read It Later Website Read it Later lets you save videos, articles or pretty much anything you find interesting to your 'Read It Later' queue. When you’re ready, view saved content on any of your devices. What do you think of Read It Later?

If you are looking for new ways to create slideshows and share visual content, here comes a new website, BrickFlow.  BrickFlow is a building-blocks type of application that will enhance the way we share our online content and stories.  When you get your account, search for pictures, videos, links or online content by writing hash tags or keywords. Then, drag and drop each picture/video/online content wherever you want on your blank page and piece them together like blocks. You can remix your flow and rearrange your story whenever you like. You can also get your content from your different social media accounts such as Instragram, Facebook etc. When you are happy with your flow, just share it with your friends.  This new tool is sure to be one of the new ways of creating digital stories! Here are a few ideas to use this tool in education: Students can create picture gallery with their pictures from their summer holidays. Students create their own flows describing themselves. Gather all digital content that your students have created together on BrickFlow. Students can create their digital stories on any topic using this tool. Ask students to present their projects using this tool. Create your own slides using this tool. Sure to impact the way you are presenting! Image Source: ShutterStock

My first tip is how to use Flubaroo to mark the results collected from students through a Google Form. The video below gives you an overview of how you can use it. I’ve followed the step-by-step instructions on how to use Flubaroo from their site and it worked really well and in record time!  I can see this saving me HOURS of work. My second Google Form idea came from an older post on the Google Docs blog showing how you can use Google Forms to create a ‘Choose your own adventure’ story. This would be quite a novel way for students to build their own pick a path stories. Here are a couple of examples of this in action: The lily pad The woods The final useful idea is using Google Forms to collect information which can be used to create individual letters (mail merge). This would be really useful if you are using Google Forms for administrative purposes. Have you stumbled over any good Google Form tips recently or have you tried some of the above already?