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Archive for the ‘Web 2.0 tools’ Category

YouTube and ViewPure

30 Jan

If you have access to YouTube in school then it can be an invaluable source during lessons for demonstrating skills or providing further information about a particular topic.

Whilst many of the videos are excellent what has often put me of using them in the classroom is the large number of inappropriate comments left by other users.  No matter how careful you are when projecting the video clip onto your whiteboard the comments often get seen by other students before you can put the video to full screen mode.

ViewPure is a site that will help overcome such problems.  You can either paste in the YouTube url that you wish to view and view the videos without any comments, suggestions or advertisments.  If you find it to be a useful tool you can add the ViewPure button onto your bookmarks toolbar and when you see a video you want to play all you need to do is click the button whilst on the YouTube page.

 
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Posted in Useful websites, Video editing, Web 2.0 tools

 

Cut My Pic

28 Jan

Many teachers run graphics units as part of KS3 and KS4 to teach students the skills required to use different graphics applications.  However, no matter how confident my students were with using said package, whenever they wanted to resize a picture for a piece of work either they seemed to have forgotten that the application existed or they just couldn’t be bothered to use it (their words, not mine). 

I came across an excellent web tool today that I think students would ‘be bothered’ to use.  In literally a few seconds they can upload an image, resize it, change the outline and even add drop shadows.  They then save the edited image and insert it into their work – it really couldn’t be any more simple. 

Find the website here

 
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Posted in Graphics, Web 2.0 tools

 

Flipbook – the future of magazines?

02 Jan

It is that time of year again when everyone looks back at the old year and starts making best-of lists. Well we are no different and have been looking at the best App out of 400,000 in the Apple store.

Enter ‘Flipbook’. This is an amazing free application that collects links, articles, images from your twitter feeds, facebook or any other  RSS feed you subscribe to and then cleverly puts it into a beautiful magazine layout for you to ‘flip’ through. It is perfect for the iPad as there is plenty of space to lay out the pages.

It has won the ‘App of the Year’ award from Apple. Wired magazine have also voted it the best in 2010. We have got to agree – there is something fascinating about seeing photos of your friends party from facebook mixed up with interesting tech articles from your RSS subscriptions. And it is never the same twice, as your feeds update.

Perhaps this is the way magazines will go in the future. You subscribe to their feed, then it gets put together with all your other interests into a personal magazine.

Have a good year everyone!

Can be download from here

Flipbook iPad App

 
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Posted in Applications & software, Entertainment, Social networking, Web 2.0 tools

 

Topicmarks

31 Dec

I came across a web tool today called Topicmarks.  

Topicmarks summarises text documents electronically and provides you with a short synopsis of the text a few minutes later.

There is a great example here to demonstrate the power of this tool.  From the original text the following is provided for you:

  • a list of facts
  • a condensed symmary or synopsis
  • the keywords from the text
  • an alphabetised index of words or terms with links to the original source

 I can see this being an excellent tool to use for anyone who needs to write an academic essay or paper prefaced with a synopsis of their work.

At the moment this tool is in beta and is free for everyone to use.  Further down the line it looks likely that there will be a charge for heavy users.  However the developers state that it will remain free to use for light users such as students.

 
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Posted in Software, Web 2.0 tools

 

Message Hop

29 Dec

I came across a superb web tool today called MessageHop. This tool allows you to quickly and easily create an animation using your own images and text and then share your work almost instantly with friends and colleagues. You don’t even have to sign up for an account – something which often stops many web tools being used in the classroom due to their age restrictions.

Here is an example that I put together in literally two minutes (excuse the text animations, this was the default but there were other options available).

You can then email the url to a friend or publish your work to one of the social networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook.

It is an incredibly simple and intuitive tool to use and I can see so many applications for it in every subject from a tour of castles in History to the development of a glacier in Geography.

There is a tutorial here if you would like a quick run through on how to set up your first animation.

 
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Posted in Applications & software, Web 2.0 tools