Using ICT in Further Education

Google Docs Spreadsheet provides a lovely motion chart widget which will very easily bring your static data to life! I can see this little tool being very useful for projects in ICT, history, geography, mathematics, social studies etc….

You can see the motion chart in action at Gapminder World as well as viewing many interesting videos using motion charts.

Gapminder also provides an excellent tutorial explaining how to use the motion chart widget.

Check out this interactive example, from Gapminder, to see what can be done.

The iLearn ezine created by Kelly Tenkely is a wonderful resource for all Mac Users.

Great layout and design and filled with lots of really useful information and links. You can keep up to date with the latest release through RSS. What a brilliant resource and productive use of the publishing platform Issuu.

Get your copy now!! Thanks for sharing Kelly

Photos8 provides a huge collection of high resolution photographs. A great resource for presentations and projects alike, across many subject areas.

The Categories include:
Animals, Architecture, Art, Backgrounds, Birds, Electronics, Flowers, Food, Furnitures, Insects, Landscape, Macro, Miscellaneous, Money, Objects, People, Plants, Religion, Sky, Street, Sunset, Travel

The owner and creator of the site, Sam, explains what the site is all about:

Photos8  is a place for free public domain photos and desktop wallpapers. Large collection of High Resolution photos and wallpapers, Thousands of high quality public domain pictures, easy to search, You may use these images for any purpose, including commercial. As the owner I have explicitly placed it in the public domain. If you do use any photo, please consider linking back to this site or giving credit to this site. Just something like, “Photo courtesy Photos8“, This is not required, but its a very good way to support the site efforts here.

Lexipedia is a visual online dictionary and thesaurus providing examples of nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, fuzzynyms, synonyms and antonyms for your chosen word.

Visually, Lexipedia reveals the related words in an animated visual word web showing their semantic relationships. Just hover over any word in the web to reveal its definition and an example of how it is used. The same information is also provided in the categorized side menu.

Lexipedia supports English, Dutch, French, German, Italian and Spanish. Could be particularly useful for communications, english and language classes.

Whether you are teaching, giving a presentation or creating a screencast, you might want to highlight your cursor so that it stands out making it easier for viewers to follow your mouse movements.

It is very easy to create your own customised cursor using the RealWorld Cursor Editor.

The RealWorld Cursor Editor lets you create and modify static (.cur) and animated cursors (.ani) of any size and color depth. The short little screencast below shows a highlighted-cursor that I created.

You can download this cursor, if you want to try it out and don’t want to create your own just yet. Just unzip the file to get the .cur cursor file.

To use your brand new cursor:
1) place a copy of the .cur file in the ‘windows/cursors’ folder on your computer
2) select control panel, mouse, pointers
3) make sure ‘normal select’ is highlighted and select browse
4) select your new cursor and then select open
5) finally select apply and then select OK

Don’t worry, it is easy to return to your normal cursor, simply navigate back to the mouse pointers tab and select ‘use default’ and then ‘OK’ and everything will be back as it was.

Google Docs just keeps getting better and better. The latest new feature, drawing, allows you to “create and insert rich, colorful drawings into documents, presentations and spreadsheets“.

The drawing feature is quite comprehensive letting you draw

using lines, free hand scribbles, text labels and a large choice of shapes that you can move, resize, rotate and adjust. Group, order, align and distribute and other features are available when you select objects you’ve drawn. You can also customize a range of shape properties, from line widths to fill color, and from arrowheads to font size, and much more. If you change your mind, there is undo and redo.

You can, also, collaborate with a friend or colleague on the drawing. Drawing even works in Google Apps. Happy Days!!

Prezi lets you “create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way“. Prezi is a great tool for creating stunning presentations, performing completely differently to OpenOffice Impress and PowerPoint.

Just have a look at the two examples to see what I mean! You can click on the second button from the left to view the presentation in full screen. Follow the order of the presentation by using the direction arrows or simply click and drag to move about the presentation screen and zoom in and out as you choose.

1) Book Quiz – See if you can spot the name and author of each of these books!
from the HappyHippy

2) Learning with Technology at SAS – A presentation about how we use technology across the curriculum at Shanghai American School.
from U Tech Tips

Obviously, Prezi is a great tool for creating controlled presentations that will impress an audience. I think, perhaps, it also has potential as a self-directed learning tool.

Prezi is still in Beta development, but inspired by these great examples, I have now signed up and am in the middle of creating my very own first Prezi due for release shortly.

flickrSLiDR allows you to easily embed flickr slideshows on your website or blog. All you need to do is enter the flickr URL address of the user, photo set or group.

flickrSLiDR also allows you to interact with the slideshow in three ways:
* hover over the top of the slideshow to reveal a control panel, where you can play/pause, move backwards/forwards and change the speed of the slideshow.
* hover over the bottom of the slideshow to reveal a selection of the slides, where you can select any slide directly.
* click on any slide to reveal the details that were entered by the person who uploaded the photo to flickr.

This is the flickrSLiDR slideshow for the ‘Bird Watching’ group with over 50,000 photos!

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.