Category Archives: Web 2.0 tools

Picsearch

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Picsearch is an interesting way to search for images (including clip art) on the web. It has three features that make it unique.

The first feature is that it has a ‘Family Friendly’ filter that is supposed to filter out any offensive images, which has to be a relief for educators. (Not exactly sure what their definition of offensive means, as what offends one person may not offend another. Suffice to say that if Picsearch’s claims are true, then it should be safe for all schools to use.) Picsearch claims that it is impossible for their filters to be bypassed, but also offer the service that if an offensive is discovered, send them the relevant details and they will block the site. As with any resource you use, before you unleash it on your students, if you have any doubts, have a play around with Picsearch yourself to see if you are happy with it.

The second feature is that ‘It has a relevancy unrivalled on the web due to its patent-pending indexing algorithms’.

The third feature is the ease of which images can be attributed. As Picsearch’s FAQs page says,

  • Picsearch downloads the original images only to create thumbnail images. Afterwards the original images are removed. Thus, users can only view the thumbnails when searching for a specific image. The thumbnails are accompanied by references to the original page it was indexed from. This enables the users to visit the original page and obtain the appropriate permissions to use the image.

This goes some way to relieving the copyright issues facing schools and teaches students to attribute their sources.

Thanks to Chris Smith of Shambles for the alert on Picsearch.

Netvibes

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Originally this post was going to be about Pageflakes, the Web 2.0 tool that enables users to create their own homepage without the need for HTML or any other specialist knowledge. But some time ago, this post by Michael Stephens came to my attention. It is certainly worth a read and warns what could become of all of the work we invest in particular Web 2.0 tools; we need some kind of backup. So on the back of what Dublin City Public Libraries have developed via the main alternative, Netvibes, here is some more information.

Netvibes is a tool that allows you create your own library (or other) homepage to bring all of your web resources to one place. So if as a school library you have a blog, some wikis, delicious, flickr  and so on, you are able to have them all sited on your Netvibes page.

Your own Netvibes page is as easy to set up as a blog or wiki. Netvibes have a setup wizard that asks what type of theme you’d like to use, your location, your (or your school’s) interests, the widgets you want and you have your page! Here is what the Dublin City Public Libraries’ page looks like:

If you don’t like the choices that Netvibes has made for you, you can easily delete them and add others. If you have setup your own blog or wiki, then you can make your own Netvibes page in a matter of minutes. Don’t forget to ask your IT staff to link your Netvibes page to the Intranet, do some publicity and away you go. Good luck! If you do decide to create a Netvibes or Pageflakes page for your library or you already have one, please consider submitting it to Bright Ideas so that we can feature it.

Text 2 Mind Map

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Text 2 Mind Map is a very simple and easy way to use Mind Maps in the classroom and you certainly don’t have to have a degree in astrophysics or brain surgery to complete a good map quickly.

You don’t have to sign up a for an account, just go to the Text 2 Mind Map homepage, delete the example in the text outline box on the left hand side of the page

 

and away you go. Type in your ideas, using the tab key to indent sub-topics. When you have listed all of your ideas, simply click the ‘Convert to Mind Map’ button. Here is an example that took five minutes to complete.

The right hand side of the screen gives you choices as to the size and colour of the font, the thickness of the lines joining ideas and the colours of the idea boxes.

You are given the option to save your map, but be careful if your browser doesn’t allow pop-ups as you may lose your map. You could always copy the map using Jing or even Paint before you try to save it.

Text 2 Mind Map is still very much under construction, so if you do use it, please do send feedback to the developers so that they can take your comments and ideas on board.

thisMoment

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An interesting Web 2.0 resource that could be useful for the beginning of the school year is thisMoment.

thisMoment is a type of digital portfolio that can chronicle events in a person’s life. As with all of the best Web 2.0 tools that can be used for educational purposes, thisMoment has privacy settings so that students’ work can be shared only with selected people.

‘Moments’ appear in the form of a timeline, with the ability for you to upload photos or videos alongside the text that you write; a description of what the moment is and how it made you feel. Getting students to create their own moments could be a great way of getting to know them at the beginning of the year. If thisMoment was introduced to year 6 students on orientation day, they could collect moments over the Christmas holidays ready to upload and share with their new school mates and teachers. For those schools with pets, accounts for pets can be created and (for example) the life cycle of a pet could be chronicled. This type of activity has applications for VELS areas such as Science, English, Humanities, ICT and Personal Learning

There are lots of social networking tools that users can tweak to add to their thisMoment experience.

Elluminate

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Elluminate is an online ‘lecture capture’ application that is currently available free of charge to all Victorian educators (State, Independent and Catholic schools are all included) through the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development’s Knowledge Bank.

Elluminate lets people communicate in real time via their Internet connection. People who schedule an Elluminate session meet in a ‘room’. They are able to speak to each other via a headset with microphone, use the chat function, raise their hand to ask a question, draw on a whiteboard amongst other things. The moderator or person running the session is able to upload powerpoint style slides to give the session a focus. At the end, sessions can be saved and archived for access at a later time.

Once Elluminate is installed via the Knowledge Bank page, users are able to access demonstrations, archived sessions and participate in online training sessions. There are two sessions on how to use Elluminate coming up in the next few weeks; Tuesday 13th January at 3.30pm  and Tuesday 27th January at 3.30pm. To participate in these very useful sessions, click on the date/s above to register. (Please be aware that you will need a headset with microphone and have downloaded Elluminate prior to the session.) Once users are confident using Elluminate, rooms can be booked to run your own online sessions.

A view of an Elluminate room

Elluminate has so many possibilities in regard to educational applications; staff can capture professional development sessions or staff meetings for part-timers or those who are absent. Those schools who find attending professional development sessions difficult due to distance or funding can access Elluminate sessions easily and for free. And archived sessions mean that you can revisit a session at anytime. Elluminate also has uses to work with students in a virtual enviroment. Once you become confident using Elluminate, the rest is up to your imagination. 

For examples of previous Elluminate sessions, click here. A previous Bright Ideas post on Professor Stephen Heppell linked to his Knowledge Bank visit. To access it, click here.

For more information on Elluminate, see the Knowledge Bank Elluminate site or contact:

Tamara Carpenter
Senior Project Officer
Knowledge Bank Online Events
Innovation and Next Practice Division
Office for Policy, Research and Innovation
Department of Education and Early Childhood Development

Ph. 03 9637 3010
carpenter.tamara.c@edumail.vic.gov.au

If you do use Elluminate, please leave a comment to let everyone know what you think of it and how you used it in your school.

Thanks to Tamara for her assistance.

Scribd

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Sribd is an interesting resource for would-be authors; indeed anyone who is interested in seeking an audience for their work should consider signing up to Scribd.

Scribd is a site where all kinds of documents can be uploaded and shared with either the general public or selected people through assigning them to groups (ideal for schools as these documents are accessible only to those invited to the group). Writers can receive feedback from readers and threaded discussions are available to both readers and writers, so Scribd makes it is easy for students to collaborate with others.

Documents uploaded to Scribd can be converted to a file called ‘ipaper’. ipaper files can then be easily embedded into blogs or websites; rather like the way YouTube videos can be embedded.

Scribd supports a number of document types such as

  • Adobe PDF (.pdf)
  • Adobe PostScript (.ps)
  • Microsoft Word (.doc/ .docx)
  • Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt/.pps/.pptx)
  • Microsoft Excel (.xls/.xlsx)
  • OpenOffice Text Document (.odt, .sxw)
  • OpenOffice Presentation Document (.odp, .sxi)
  • OpenOffice Spreadsheet (.ods, .sxc)
  • All OpenDocument formats
  • Plain text (.txt)
  • Rich text format (.rtf)

so any or all of these document types can be uploaded. Tags and categories can be assigned to uploaded documents, and folders can be used to keep documents organised.

Scribd has an extensive FAQ sheet, which is sure to answer any questions that you have and several that you haven’t thought of!

As well as providing an instant audience for writers, there is a vast library of documents for members to read and review if they wish. Once any documents that are deemed to be open or available to the general public, they become searchable in Google and other search engines. Scribd also supports numerous languages, so LOTE classes are well catered for.

Just a note of caution, there may be some documents on Scribd that are inappropriate for school age students. As with any Web 2.0 site that the general public has access to, there are items that as educators, we would rather our students not see. You can flag any documents as inappropriate if you are concerned.

Scribd is an excellent resource for English classes, especially where students wish to seek feedback from an audience other than their teacher.

Flickr Commons

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Flickr Commons has been set up so that the general public located anywhere in the world can view and access photographic archives from public places such as the Australian War Memorial, Library of Congress, the State Library of New South Wales and the Smithsonian to name a few.

As well as wanting to share access to these collections with the general public, Flickr Commons is asking people to add tags and comments so that information and knowledge is shared as well.

Nice idea Flickr and great to see several Australian institutions on board already. What a great way to start a unit on War in Australian history by using the photographs from the collection of the Australian War Memorial. Nothing better than having a visualisation of the conditions and locations where wars were fought.

ToonDoo

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ToonDoo is another social networking/comic strip creator that has relevance to education but is also a lot of fun!

The best part about it is that the ‘toons’ use just one, two or three frames. Such a short toon means that students must really think about how to get their message across in three ideas. Applications for ToonDoo could include:

  • Book reviews
  • Demonstrating understanding of a historical event by using three key ideas
  • Writing Haiku poetry

And as users can select from multiple languages, there are endless uses for LOTE classes.

ToonDoo also have their own blog that gives examples of educational uses of ToonDoo. One example is to learn a new word each day and make a one frame toon that shows understanding. A great tool for literacy.

For teachers and parents worried about the content of the site, there is a ‘safe search filter’ which edits out any toons that have been flagged as inappropriate by other users. And toons and books do not have to be shared with other users if you prefer students to keep them private or share with friends only.

It is also simple to embed toons into blogs by simply clicking on the toon and dragging it into the blog. You can also save your toon to your computer and then copy it into Word, PowerPoint, etc.

ToonDoo also has ‘books’ where comics that are longer than three frames can be created. Books are perfect for story writing or longer presentations such as planets in the solar system.

ToonDoo has a range of images, props, backgrounds and effects that you can select from or you can upload your own pictures to incorporate into the toon or book.

ToonDoo also has a help wiki linked to its site and you can add features that you’d like to see on ToonDoo to their wishlist. If you would like to see how ToonDoo works, access this slideshare presentation which outlines the steps.

Have a look at this toon I created in about 5 minutes:

ToonDoo has a lot to offer educators and students. The use of the three frame toon means that students really need to identify the three most important points of any idea they are addressing. An excellent tool!

Totlol

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Just in time for the holidays, but with educational applications too, comes the fabulous Web 2.0 resource Totlol.

Labelled YouTube for toddlers, Totlol uses videos from YouTube that have been selected by parents/educators as appropriate for children aged 6 months to grade school (primary school). Videos are then placed in a queue to be moderated by other Totlol members before they are uploaded and available for public viewing.

Parents or teachers that are still concerned about the possibility of inappropriate content can set filters, parent locks and timers (so that children do not watch videos for too long).

As with sites like Hakia, Totlol’s viability really depends on the community helping to build it by recommending videos to be added to the site. Totlol is a brilliant idea as there are so many useful and educational videos on YouTube, but YouTube users are meant to be aged 13 and up. Parents/educators worried abour questionable videos available on YouTube can now breathe a sigh of relief!

Thanks to Gerald Brown via IASL listserv for the heads up on this great resource.

Comiqs

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Students are just going to love this Web 2.0 resource! Comiqs lets users create and share their own comics, which can be created by using your own photos, photos from Comiqs’ photo library, or photos from the internet and then adding text. There is also  a privacy option when saving completed comics, so it is ideal for schools. Comics can be published publicly, just for friends or only for you to see.

Students could use Comiqs to create their own stories, but also for school work such as

  • How a science experiment was conducted
  • A book review
  • A review of a school production
  • How to apply a mathematical formula
  • Explain the rules of a sport
  • And many other ideas

In fact, when Google launched their new web browser, Google Chrome, they produced a comic to show people how it worked.

Here is a short example of what can be created in a few minutes. This example was achieved using the Comiqs photo gallery. Comiqs could also be a good holiday boredom buster for the kids.