Cool Tools

This week I have found a few really cool tools that I feel will be HUGE timesavers for teachers!

The first is a handy little tool called Screenhunter. Screenhunter is a screen capture tool that you can use to capture anything you see on your computer screen, instantly and only the bit that you want.

Let me explain: The old way to take a screen shot would be to press the "Print Screen" key on your keyboard, then paste into an image editing program where you would need to crop, resize it, and then save it so you could then use it. The new way with Screenhunter simply involves hitting a 'hotkey' and bypassing all that messy editing. Yes that's it!

The basic Screenhunter tool is free to download and once you have it installed you can start grabbing only the bits of your screen you want, and using them straight away, very very quickly. You hit your 'hotkey' and then just drag your mouse over the section you want to capture and it captures it in a BMP, JPEG or a GIF format and saves it straight to your desktop. You can then upload it straight away, move the image to a folder to keep, or simple delete it when you are done. Simplicty at its best.

The second cool tool is called Quizlet. As the sites author states "Quizlet eats flashcards for breakfast!". Oh BTW he only graduated from high school a few weeks ago!

Quizlet is a vocabulary learning tool. You can make a list of words, add definitions and then learn the words in a number of different formats including a few familiarising flashcard like activities, a test with mulitple choice and true and false answers, a space race and a mix and match game. You can make as many sets as you like and the best part is that you can embed the code from the scatter activity into a html block. have a play with one created for the Human Skeleton below.

You can see a few examples of what I was able to do with quizlet in the Languages Matter project in OzProjects.

Tags: cooltools snapshot timesavers quizlet screenhunter web 2.0
Posted at 03:11PM Jul 09, 2008 by Alison Hall  |  Comments[0]

Want a search to knock ya socks off?! The power of visual search

Viewzi is certainly a different way to search!

When you search for keywords using Viewzi, instead of getting one big long list of millions and millions of sites, you instantly get a to make a choice about how you will see the results.

There is a selection of around about 12 unique visual views to choose from, which then adapt for the content you are looking for. Some results are very broad but the fact that the results can be visually filtered is a very powerful thing. There's news, celebrity gossip, shopping, recipes and the one I like the most, a 3D photo search of flickr. Here is a screen shot of a search I did using the 3D photo search. You can check out the search here.

First I searched for 'fish', then by clicking on the screen I added 'goldfish' and then finally 'aquarium'. You can zoom in, click individual photos, follow the photo URL or add more or delete the results and start again.

If you then decide to try looking at another view, Viewzi remembers your original keyword no matter what view you choose. So I can now search for fish recipes, recent news stories about fish, fish mp3s, or screen shots of websites about fish.... The list goes on and on and on.

Tags: cooltools visual literacy search visual viewzi
Posted at 11:22AM Jul 02, 2008 by Alison Hall  | 

Feeling Shy?

 Sentence 3: How do I represent myself online?

Are you are feeling a little shy about putting your picture up for your me.edu.au profile, or having your students put photos of themselves up on blogs and projects? Why not create an Avatar! edna has some great links to interactive, fun and kid friendly avatar makers which you can then use to represent yourself or your student when online.

Here's one I created with a nifty little online avatar maker called BuiLD YouR WiLD SeLF whilst on my learning journey around the web (you will find more listed in edna by following the link above).

To add your avatar to your profile, simply go to "edit my profile", and click on the Image tab and then upload your avatar and save. Then stand back and admire!

How did I embed my avatar pictures into this blog post? Check out About Me's instructions in the blog post Adding Images to a Blog.

Tags: cooltools showme image avatar
Posted at 03:25PM Jun 26, 2008 by Alison Hall  |  Comments[1]