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Posts Tagged ‘software’

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

 

Discovery Education launches new iPad app

07 Oct

The Discovery Education site is a fabulous resource which teachers from many disciplines use on a regular basis in the classroom.

If you are lucky enough to have class sets of iPads then it will be great news to hear that Discovery Education has just launched a free iPad web app.

If like the majority of teachers you probably don’t yet have iPads for your classroom it is worth letting your colleagues know about the app as many teachers now have their own personal tablet devices.

 
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Posted in Applications & software

 

UK government backs open source

01 Mar

opensource1

Many of us have tried and swear by some of the open source packages that are available.  I for one wouldn’t dream of using any browser at home other than Firefox and when it came to selecting a VLE to use at my school, my vote went to Moodle.   I’m even dabbling with Linux and Open Office on some of our departmental laptops.

Why then, if there is so much high quality open source software available and money in the public arena is so restricted, have the government insisted until now, that we use commercial software?  I was really pleased to see the news report this week which states that the UK government will start to ‘accelerate the use of open source software in public services.’

Read the full news story here

Suggestions for use in class and questions for students (subscription only)

 
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Posted in Software

 

Fresh start for lost file formats

14 Feb

olddisks

Most of us are pretty good at saving our work, making regular backups and even archiving old data that we think we no longer need.

But there has long been a concern by businesses and academics as to what will happen once the storage media on which it is held becomes obsolete.   How many of you could now read data held on 3.5 inch floppy disks – let alone older 5 and 8 inch ones?

Besides the obvious risk of not being able to read the files, many of us might not realise that digital files risks being lost by degradation of the storage media itself, for example, floppy disks can get brittle and crack if stored in sunlight.

A major research project is working towards the creation of specialist software which will be able to read files previously saved on now old and obsolete file formats.

Dr Delve, one of the researchers on the project says that, “without work to preserve ways to access the formats that are common today, 21st century citizens risk leaving a “blank spot” in history”.

Read the full news story here

Suggestions for use in class and questions for students (subscription only)

 
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Posted in Data, Storage