Of all the social bookmarking services I’ve looked at, I think I like Diigo best. I particularly like the ability to highlight and annotate shared web pages. I’m not yet using Diigo to full advantage, and this post is not really about Diigo.

I want to point out the visual way you can share lists of websites. In special education, we’ve long known that many people with “special needs” require visual supports in order to learn effectively. I believe, however, that most of us learn better when visual supports are available. So, I’m discussing a tool here that may be of value to almost anyone. It’s definitely worth a look.

Webslides is Diigo’s very slick option for creating and sharing sets of bookmarked websites as interactive slideshows. With Diigo, I can organize my bookmarks into lists. Any list can then be shown as a “webslide” presentation.

Each website on a list is represented by the actual page that has been bookmarked. Seeing the page provides far more information than just seeing the website’s address in a list! The slideshow is interactive in that it can be paused and you can go directly to the website via a live link in the bottom left corner of each “slide”. The slideshow can advance automatically, and you choose how long each slide is viewed. Or, you can move through the slideshow manually, and you can also choose to go back to any previous slide.

Clicking the button below will take you to the slideshow of my list of 55 websites that that I think support science curricula. I would appreciate your comments on this format if you check it out. (If you are reading this post in a Reader, you may not see the button . Please click here instead.)

Slideshows of listed websites can be shared in several convenient ways. Each slideshow has its own URL, and that can be shared. A widget, such as the button I’ve used here, can be embedded on a website, wiki, or blog. Or, the slideshow itself can even be embedded, but I found the slideshow too large to embed effectively on this blog. Embedding the full slideshow worked much better on a wider wiki page.

]]> http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2008/05/25/webslides-on-diigo-online-resource/feed/ 9 http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2007/10/24/sketchcast-online-resource/ http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2007/10/24/sketchcast-online-resource/#comments Wed, 24 Oct 2007 17:13:02 +0000 Paul Hamilton http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2007/10/24/sketchcast-online-resource/

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

FREE online resources and downloadable programs for learners and their teachers.

Larry Ferlazzo’s focus is on sharing resources for ELL, ESL and EFL, but almost every day he finds and blogs about numerous free online resources that are great for all learners and teachers. His blog is definitely worth checking out. Thanks, Larry, for directing me to Sketchcast, yet another excellent Web 2.0 application that deserves to be in every teacher’s UDL toolkit.

Sketchcast (online resource) This application may not be for everyone, but for anyone who can sketch to express thoughts and ideas, Sketchcast is a powerful option. With Sketchcast, you use your mouse to sketch on screen; and if you wish, you can use a microphone to talk while you sketch. This is great for presenting and visually illustrating a lesson or for sharing something you’ve learned. Sketchcast can also be used effectively to create digital art. In other wores, Sketchcast is yet another effective tool for digital story-telling.

As a Web 2.0 application, Sketchcast makes it easy to share what you do by assigning URL’s. They’ve also facilitated embedding Sketchcasts in blogs or on websites. Of course, you can also explore what others have created right on the Sketchcast website.

For a quick glimpse of how it all works, here’s the developer’s introductory Sketchcast.

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

FREE online resources and downloadable programs for learners and their teachers.

The Read/Write Web offers educators powerful tools that I believe should not be just optional extras in our schools. Too many of our students simply do not have adequate aptitude for traditional academic skills, and there are other learners who will never be engaged if we just keep doing what we’ve always done. I don’t think I’m overstating the case when I say that Web 2.0 tools provide practical keys to success for some of our learners. So, here’s a free opportunity to learn how we as educators can expand our boundaries so that we better meet the needs of all our students.

K12 Online Conference–Again (online resource) I believe this conference is such a terrific opportunity that I decided to do a reminder post about it. The pre-conference Keynote Address by David Warlick is scheduled for 5:00 am (on the Pacific Coast) tomorrow (Monday). That means it will be available to us any time after that. It’s entitled “Inventing New Boundaries”, and it’s bound to whet our appetites for the 40 sessions which are scheduled between Oct. 15th and 26th.

I’ve just gone back and sat through the keynote David delivered for the inaugural K12 Online Conference in 2006. That’s what has left me feeling inspired about this year’s conference.

I doubt if I could describe it any better than Will Richardson did in a post this morning, so I’ll just quote him here. (If you don’t already read Will’s blog on “learning with the read/write web”, it is definitely worth checking out.)

“Breaking free of traditional conferences, the upcoming K-12 Online Conference: Playing with Boundaries (October 15-19th & October 22-26th) provides educators with an engaging, ongoing learning experience without time constraints. The K12 Online Conference is a unique professional development opportunity for teachers to engage with ideas and technologies that are having a real impact on 21st century classrooms.

The entire conference will be delivered as downloadable digital media via the Internet with over 40 sessions presented in four strands: Classroom 2.0, New Tools, Professional Learning Networks, and Obstacles to Opportunities. The conference launches with a keynote address on October 8th from respected blogger and author David Warlick and concludes with a global 24 hour live event, As Night Falls.

For more information, please visit http://www.k12onlineconference.org.”

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

The purpose of this blog is to highlight free downloadable programs and online resources of good quality that may be of value to educators and their students, especially those involved in special education.

Voicethread.com (online resource) Here’s another free Web 2.0 application that deserves to be well known and widely used. Voicethread lets you upload images and then record audio comments to accompany the images. Anyone who then views a voicethread can also be given the opportunity to add audio comments. Alternatively, comments can be typed. A Voicethread may consist of a single page with one uploaded image, or there can be multiple images , with each image on its own page. If desired, captions can easily be added to the images.

The user interface could hardly be any more straightforward. It is a cinch to upload images, record comments. Each voicethread is assigned a unique URL that may be either public or private. It’s easy to invite someone to a voicethread; and subscription is also available. The creators of Voicethread have provided convenient options for embedding voicethreads in blogs and on websites. (Unfortunately, this doesn’t yet work on Edublogs.)

Check out the examples below that show what a few early adopters have already done with Voicethread. I suspect that numerous private voicethreads are already connecting classrooms and students in different parts of the world as well.

Animals-Ms. Swanson’s 2nd Grade

Classroom 2.0

Favorite Poems

Flat Stanley Visits Yardley PA

Faces of the World

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Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

Today’s featured resource is elegant in its simplicity, while offering limitless potential. As I see it, Scrapblog is yet another UDL tool that should be in every teacher’s tool kit.

Scrapblog (online resource) This is an online multi-media authoring platform for creatively organizing, presenting and sharing digital media. You can combine photos, audio, video and text in almost any way imaginable. For a fairly thorough overview of Scrapblog, it’s worth taking the Quick Tour that is available on the home page.

Scrapblog offers students a creative way to present and share what they learn. It also gives teachers a quick and convenient way of presenting material digitally, with tremendous potential for engaging students. Here’s an example of an audio-visual Scrapblog on the life and work of ee cummings. (To hear the audio, be sure to allow the entire Scrapblog to download before playing it, and remember that you can pause it whenever it goes too fast for you to read all the text on a page.) Of course, there is also the autobiographical option of using Scrapblog for personal audio-visual blogging.

The intuitive user interface of Scrapblog allows you to be as creative as you wish. You can use one of numerous available themes, or you can create your own pages completely from scratch. For example, backgrounds, borders, frames and callouts are a snap to add and customize. It is also easy to add music and/or narration to a Scrapblog.

The “Scrapblog Builder” offers the user an amazing range of options, and it couldn’t be easier to use. Photos and videos are simply dragged and dropped on a page. Once on the page, images can be resized and positioned as desired. For photos, there is even the opportunity to do basic photo-edits right on the page. Click to enlarge the screenshot below of the Scrapblog Builder. (Use your browser’s back button to return to this page.)

Each Scrapblog is assigned a unique URL that can either have restricted access or be available to the public. A Scrapblog may consist of as many pages as you wish, and objects on a page can be linked to other pages in the Scrapblog. As an added bonus, Scrapblogs can also be printed. This gives you the ability to use Scrapblog to create books, cards and DVD’s.

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Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

The free Productivity utility I’m highlighting today has been around since 2002, but it is still extremely valuable for anyone who needs to create and use screen captures.

MW Snap (downloadable program) This small and completely free program is simple and easy to use, but it is versatile and effective screen capture software. If you have any reason to create a screen shot–for a presentation, as an illustration in a document or on a blog, to create a tutorial, or just so you can show someone else a pesky error message–MWSnap will do it for you.

It’s a snap to take a “snap shot” of your computer’s entire desktop, an active window, a menu, or any other region of your computer screen that you choose. The user interface is intuitive and designed for ease of use. (See screen shot below.) Hotkeys facilitate the use of convenient keyboard commands. The program comes with a useful set of Help files, and it is currently available in 18 languages.

MW Snap also offers some helpful ways of working with your screen captures. You can flip or rotate images with the “Transform” tool. You can add frames, or even use the screen shot to create a button for a web page with the “Buttonize” tool. The “Cursor” tool enables you to add cursors to draw attention to specific places on the screen shot. Other tools include a color picker, a ruler tool, a zoom tool, and a tool to give you detailed info about your selected window. With MW Snap, screen captures can be saved as BMP, JPG, TIFF, PNG or GIF files.

The program can be downloaded from the website of its developer, Mirek Wójtowicz’s: http://www.mirwoj.opus.chelm.pl/winfreeware/mwsnap.html

MW Snap runs only in Windows.

Screenshots: (Click to enlarge, and use browser’s “back” arrow to return to blog.)

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RSS stands for for “really simple syndication”. This simple concept offers a marvellous way of pulling together and regularly updating internet content that is relevant just for you. If you aren’t yet subscribing to RSS feeds, today’s feature provides the tools you need to dive right in. Bloglines has the potential to save you a great deal of time, so it is on the Productivity page.

Bloglines (online resource) is a highly rated free web-based service that allows you to subscribe to the RSS feeds of websites in order to keep up with new material as it is added. This is especially helpful for keeping up to date with the news from your favourite online sources or from blogs (like this one) that are relevant to your personal interests. With Bloglines, you can do this with relative ease and keep your various subscriptions organized.

The Bloglines interface is simple, and the folder options are extremely valuable if you wind up subscribing to more than a few feeds. Because Bloglines is web-based, you can have access to your RSS subscriptions from any computer that is connected to the internet. If you wish, you can even host your own blog on Bloglines. For a very helpful video tutorial on getting started with Bloglines, check out what Joe Freidhoff has put together at http://freidhof.fts.educ.msu.edu/Tech_Handouts/tech_handouts.htm.

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

This online resource has tremendpous potential for enabling educators to share–ideas, work, resources, or virtually anything else.

/edublogs.org/”>Edublogs.org (online resource) This site offers free (and ad free) blogs for educational professionals. Edublogs comes with relatively convenient tools on its WordPress platform for putting together and maintaining your blog. Available options allow for considerable flexibility. The blog you are reading is but one humble example of what can be done with edublogs, but there are now over 10,000 other registered users of edublogs. The range of offerings is quite remarkable. For helpful tutorial material on using Edublogs.org, check out what Joe Freidhoff has prepared at http://freidhof.fts.educ.msu.edu/Tech_Handouts/tech_handouts.htm. James Farmer, the founder of edublogs, also offers three separate blogging platforms for teachers to use with their students–learnerblogs.org for K-12, uniblogs.org (post-secondary), and eslblogs.org (ESL, EFL, and other English Language students).