Using ICT in Further Education

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!!

Tag Galaxy provides a lovely visual interface to search for and view photos from Flickr. In this example, I initially searched for ‘badminton’ and then added ’sports’. This found 1,846 photos!

When you select your initial tag you will be presented with a ‘tag galaxy’ (see figure 1). You can then refine your search by selecting one of the ‘planets’. This produces the ‘world’, which you can rotate and zoom in/out (see figure 2).

Finally, you can select an image of interest and view it in crisp, clear detail (see figure 3).  The link for the originating Flickr page is also given. Would be perfect if Creative Commons search was added!

Simply beautiful!

Figure 3 – source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianlagonera/84323154/

Sitepoint are offering a time limited free PDF download of ‘The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques.

The book, written by Corrie Haffly, is very comprehensive offering 9 complete chapters covering everything from the basics to advanced techniques. I particularly like the chapter that is devoted to designing a website.

Don’t miss out. The offer ends in 25 days from now………

TiltViewer is another creation from AIRTIGHT Interactive who also produced SimpleViewer, reviewed in an earlier post.

TiltViewer allows you to “browse Flickr’s most interesting images in a 3D space. It’s designed to provide a fun, intuitive user experience“. By default, the images are taken from Flickr’s ‘Interestingness’ list.

However, TiltViewer now also has the option to display any set of Flickr images based on user id, group id, tags, etc. This is achieved by simply adding a query string on the end of the TiltViewer url .

flauntR is a one stop shop for online image editing and slideshow creation.

With flauntR you can create custom slideshows choosing from over “20 high end transition effects“. Although, as far as I could tell, you can only use one transition per slide show – not different transitions for different slides.

Through stylR you can edit your images by adding effects, frames, filters and overlays. There does not seem to be an easy ‘undo button’ to use if you apply an effect and don’t like it! There is a reset button but this clears all the changes even if you only want to clear the last one.

textR allows you to add text using all sorts of fancy fonts, sizes, colours and alignments. editR lets you re-size, rotate or crop the image as well as adding effects such as sepia.  

flauntR allows you to save your images to your online account or to your own computer.

Found this site from Paul Reid’s blog. On first impressions, I still prefer Picnik, featured in an earlier post, but I guess I will give flauntR another go!

The Open Clip Art Library is a continually growing archive of user contributed clip art that can be freely used. There is over 7000 items of clip art archived. The Open Clip Art objects are available for download in svg and sometimes png format.

Unfortunately, OpenOffice does not support the svg format but there are a couple of solutions available. Use a batch processing utility called svg2office to convert the svg files to odg files in bulk or open the svg file in Inkscape and re-save it in the odg format.

OpenOffice does, however, support the png format.

SimpleViewer is a lovely, flash based, image viewing application. SimpleViewer has a customizable interface where the text color, frame color and width plus navigation position can all be changed.

SimpleViewer also boasts an interface that scales to fit the browser window. Beware though, SimpleViewer is designed for showing, at most, around 50 images per gallery. Anything more than this will be too slow and the program may freeze!

Flash7 or higher is also required.

And, I think, this one paints even more. If this picture doesn’t get the words flowing then nothing will! It’s truly amazing.

Adam, shown above, is just one of many superb mosaics that can be found at Mural Mosaic.

A feast for the eyes!