TOOL FOR QUOTING WEBSITE

Here'a an interesting tool to quote any website. The online tool is kwout, http://www.kwout.com/

It is quite a simple tool to use. The beauty of this tool is that it allows you to take screenshot of any part of the webpage in the form of an ImageMap. This means the portion sut out from the webpage is retained with all its hyperlinks intact. Simply paste the link of the website you want to quote in the space provided and there it goes to display the mentioned website/ webpage for extraction.

Now, with the introduction of 'kwout everywhere', it surely helps quote anything on the website (blog, etc.) much easier and with a purpose. Look out for kwout everywhere on this blog of mine as well.

HIGHLY USEFUL RESOURCES BY 3M

Writing about two highly useful reosurces by 3M.



In these times of "Climate Change", it becomes essential that the younger generation understand "living". The first resource is on Sustainaable Living, 3M Worldly Wise. Indeed a great site with separate sections for Teachers and Pupils. "Town Plan" is a great way to make pupils understand various concepts like Carbon Footprints, Renewable Energy, Recycling, etc. The Students also understand the applicability of these concepts in our daily living. It is real fun to browse through the " Town Plan" and understand things that matter to us for a "Sustainable Living". The teacher section has a range of Activity Worksheets to help teacher deliver the concept to pupils.




The second resource is 3M Streetwise, which is about "Child Road Safety" where there are three sections - for Pupils, Teachers and Parents. The resource has a range of options like Quiz, Science behind Safety, games, road safety knowledge, etc.
Though these resource are more applicable to UK and Ireland but still be relevant
for countries like India and others.

Hats off to 3M for such wonderful resources.

FREE CLIPARTS FOR TEACHERS

Writing about an extremely useful site for free clipart images, www.fg-a.com

The site offers a good collection of free images with multiple categories and sections.

The site offers code to embed the cliparts blog, etc.

A good useful site

SITE WITH KID ACTIVITES

Writing about a cute website, EdHeads, http://www.edheads.org/ with interesting activites for kids ( if i can say so !). Though the activities listed are few but are well presneted and delivered. Also, the site contains lots of useful and relevant website resources and lesson plans for each of the listed activities. I am sure the number ( of listed activites) would go up.

Indeed a very impressive and useful site.

SITE FOR WORD AND IMAGE CONVERTER

Here's a useful site, DOC2PDF , http://doc2pdf.net for converting the following

• word to pdf
• image from one format to another. you may visit the link, http://image.doc2pdf.net/ for image converting.

After converting, the files can be directly saved to desktop.

Hope you find it useful !

ONLINE TEXT 2 SPEECH CONVERTER

If you are looking for a simple, easy to use text 2 speech converter, here is a simple site/ tool - Spoken Text, http://spokentext.net. With its easy to use interface you may record text and save/ download it in various audio formats. You may record the text from among the following options

• text entered
• PDF document
• HTML/ Website

Please ensure you take care of the following :

• types of file supported
• size of files supported
• type of converted audio file to be downloaded

Quite a useful tool even for non-English teaching instructors/ teachers

Hope you enjoy using the tool !!

FREE VIDEOS FOR DOWNLOAD

Here's an interesting site, Next Vista for Learning, http://www.nextvista.org/ to download videos. Though the collection is not huge but the site looks clean with videos put under well identified categories.

A good site to explore for your subject needs and for some general topics as well.

Hope you like the site !

NASA IMAGES - AN EXCELLENT RESOURCE

I write about an excellent resource site for NASA images, http://www.nasaimages.org more of a compendium on NASA. The site has excellent images and videos for download. The teachers could weave out entire projects fro children from this site.

Though i write only about tools that are neutral but couldn't resist writing about this excellent site.

Hope you find the site as useful as i have found it to be.

My Nominations for Edublog Awards

My nominations for Edublog Awards 2009 are as mentioned below:

Best individual blog : Mathematicslearning

Best class blog : Social Science

Best resource sharing blog : Math Class

Best educational wiki : Exploring Geography

Best educational use of a social networking service : Passionate Teachers

Best new blog : Biology

EDUBLOG AWARDS 2009

Hi,

The Edublog awards ( http://edublogawards.com) are back. Get set to nominate your favourite blogs/ wikis/ social networking, etc. and support them whole heartedly. Just remember to nominate them in the right category.

Also, lets be honest and support/ nominate only worthy blogs/ wikis/ social networks i.e. those who deserve to be nominated.

One imporant thing - you cannot self-nominate your blog/ wiki/ social network, etc.

Narinder

HAPPY TEACHERS DAY

Wishing all teachers in India a very "Happy Teachers Day". Wish there were more such days to celebrate for teachers. This small piece does deserve a place in this blog on technology as "Teaching/ Teacher" is incomplete without the "Learner". Teaching is more about relationship (teacher-pupil) than anything else. Any amount of technology is useless unless there is acceptance from the learner and there is the right impact on them. Lets pledge on thid day to mould our teaching-learning to how learners learn rather than how we teach. Sharing with you a beautiful poem about Teacher ( Author Unknown).

Quiz Creation Software

Quiz Faber, http://lucagalli.net/ is software to enable you to create multimedia quizzes and save them as HTML documents. With 6 options to select from, the user can create a good quiz. Also, the tool provides option for providing explanation and hints for the answers.

Moreover, it allows to embed into quizzes multimedia objects as images, sounds and videos, since it is compatible with the more widespread Internet formats (JPEG, GIF, MID, MP3, AVI, MPEG), also with Macromedia Flash, Apple QuickTime, Liveupdate Crescendo, RealAudio, RealMedia browser plug-in.

A nice, simple to use tool for creating HTML quizzes easily.

2 More YouTube Video Downloader

Sharing with you a couple of more youtube videos downloader to help you download videos for
your students with ease for later use and sharing

YouTube Downloader 3000, www.download3000.com/download_19063.html
It allows you to easily grab and save desired youtube video to your local computer. Simply paste the URL of a video into the program, press Start , and the AVI file will be downloaded into the selected folder

YouTube Downloader, http://youtubedownload.altervista.org/

It's software that allows you to download videos from YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video, and many others and convert them to other video formats.

The program is easy to use, just specify the URL for the video you want to download and click the Ok button!

It also allows you to convert downloaded videos for Ipod, Iphone, PSP, Cell Phone, Windows Media, XVid

Another (Web Page)HTML to PDF converter

www.html-to-pdf.net/free-online-pdf-converter.aspx is an online (WebPage) HTML to PDF converter which helps to save the wepages in PDF format.

Simply paste the webpage address into the URL blank space and click on 'Convert to PDF' to get a pdf version of the same.

I have found the tool very useful when visiting webpages (websites) with scrolling windows or when wanting to retain a copy of the webpage for later reading and reference

Adding Effects to Image

Here's a cute online image tool called Photofunia, www.photofunia.com for adding effects to images. At times, when you are looking to make your images look interesing, this little tool can help the cause. Simply select the effect from the list provided, choose your image and here you go, the final image with the selected effects.

The best part being that you can save the image for later use.

Image Collage Maker

Sharing about another simple, useful interesting tool to play around with images (jpeg/ jpg). Shape Collage, www.shapecollage.com/. The need to do more with images, maybe put them in a collage form in different shapes, sizes, dimensions, etc. is fulfilled by this downloadable tool. The Java version (jar) is also available for download.

The tool offers a lot of features like 'Shape and Size', 'Appearance' and various Advanced options. The images could be dragged and dropped directly or the entire folder be added.

A must try tool for some of your image based needs.

Free eAcademy for Indian School Teachers

CII-Shiksha, http://www.shikshaindia.org/, an Indian non-profit working towards Teachers Empowerment has launched a Teacher's Academy that will empower and enable teachers with free and open technologies. Visit www.eshikshaacademy.in for more details on the same.

Please note this Program is just being offered to Indian teachers teaching in Indian schools

Image Compression Utility Tool

Here's a little yet useful utility tool for image/ photo compression, Shrink Pic, http://www.onthegosoft.com/

Need for the Tool:
While uploading photos/ images, at times there is an issue about compressing/ resizing the images so that they could be uploaded properly. Rather than using a software to do the resizing/ compression, this tool would do it automatically.

How the tool works:
Once installed, the tool would rest on the taskbar (bottom right hand side of the Windows) and whenever some image/ photo is being uploded, this would automatically resize/ compress it to the best possible size. The tool prompts you when it resizes/ compresses

Saving Videos for Offline Viewing - CatchYouTube

Need for this tool :

No doubt, Youtube (www.youtube.com) is a highly popular and useful video hosting site and as a teacher you would like to share Youtube videos with your students. But because of factors/ reasons known to all, teachers do not want students to be directed to Youtube site. This is where this site, www.catchyoutube.com would be very useful.

Features of the site :
www.catchyoutube.com has some real useful features by way of providing options to save downloaded videos in various formats. Follow the following steps for downloading youtube videos

• Visit the Yoytube site to copy the specific video's url
• Paste the url in www.convertyoutube.com site
• select the format for saving the video
• click on "Convert & Download"

I have tried it and the speed of covenrting and downloading is quite good.

No need for providing/ embedding youtube links when you can save them offline for use with your students.

Get started with downloading your favourite videos

Another Screen Capture Utility....But with a difference

Discovered this small but very powerful utility, WebKut, http://toki-woki.net/p/WebKut/

Though i had used various other free utilities for screen capture but none of them were able to capture the entire part of screen and the scrolling part was ignored. WebKut is a utility that fulfills the need to capture the entire screen ( the scrolling part also) and the output can be saved in different formats like .pdf, .jpg, .gif and .png

WebKut requires AIR runtime ( by Adobe) so while installing WebKut please install the AIR when it prompts.

The tool may act funny when capturing very large web pages.

Hope you enjoy the tool !

PDF Merge Tools

I am back after a hiatus...Sharing about 2 PDF merging tools. I realised the need to do PDF merging when i had to send a compiled PDF document and what i had were discrete PDF files. The tools are

• Adolix Split and Merge PDF, www.adolix.com/split-merge-pdf/ is a downloadable tool which does merging and splitting both. The tool is easy to use but has a limitation of merging only 5 pdf documents in a single instance. Also, there's no refresh screen option and so if one has to use it next time one has to delete the displayed files using the '-' (minus) button.
  

• Merge PDF, www.mergepdf.net, is an online facility to merge multiple files. The maximum number of files allowed in this case is 10 and each file should be of maximum 5 MB size.