Label 59 - free web based presentations and demos

Label 59 is a free, web app that lets you annotate photos with interactive labels. It's easy to use and actually pretty fun.

It's easy to use. Add your photo, add the markers for your labels, add some features, add actions for each marker and then publish it.

When you are done and publish your work, you get a direct link to share with people. You can also download a Zip folder with all the related files in the premium plan.

This is a great resource for teachers to use to create learning materials and for students to use for projects. Students can use a photo of something they are learning about and then add interactive labels based on the content. A Physics student could use a photo of a roller coaster and then add labels explaining the physics of different parts and features of the ride.

Check it out: http://www.label59.com/

Qwiki Creator - easily create engaging multimedia projects

Last year I wrote about Qwiki, which is a site that takes your internet search and creates a multimedia presentation with resources about your search term. Text, images, audio are all part of it. It's a very cool way to quickly create a presentation about a topic.



I just learned from my Edtech colleague David Kapuler on his site, that Qwiki now has Qwiki Creator available. Qwiki Creator lets users work online in their browser to combine text, photos, videos, maps, tweets, and more into an interactive online experience that you can share and embed anywhere and even add your own narration. It also allows you to create narration using text to speech.

Here's a great demo showing how to make a Qwiki, and how easy it is:

Play the Qwiki: Qwiki Demo & Background

This is a really cool service that I can see being used by students for projects and by teachers to create great resources for their students.

Check it out: http://www.qwiki.com/

Update on InstallFree Nexus and Rndr - work great on a Chromebook!

Earlier today I wrote about InstallFree Nexus and Rndr, apps that allow you to use other apps, like LibreOffice and Java, on any device. Here's the full article: http://educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.com/2012/05/installfree-nexus-us-ms-office-or.html

I've been using them all day on my CR-48 Chromebook and they work great! The biggest thing that I was not able to do on my Chromebook was accessing our Gradebook system, which runs on Java. Using Rndr, I was able to access it and use it on the Chromebook. It's not as speedy as on a Windows device, but not bad at all, and the company making Rndr tells me that there are some performance improvements coming shortly.

You can also use their apps to use LibreOffice (or MS Office) in the cloud on any device, including iOS, Android and Chrome. I was using the LibreOffice version and I was able to open up, view and edit LibreOffice and MS Office files directly from my Google Drive without needing to convert them to Google Docs formats.

All-in-all, these apps are a great resource for anyone, especially those using Chromebooks.

Check out my full review here: http://educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.com/2012/05/installfree-nexus-us-ms-office-or.html


Related:

Google Chromebooks and Chrome OS revisited - great for education
iPads, Chromebooks, on-device apps, cloud apps - great discussions

Squidoo - organize your interests online

Squidoo is a free site that allows you to organize things online. You can easily create portfolios of web pages and write about them.

You can also browse other people's collections. Here is the education page: http://www.squidoo.com/topics/education



You can use text, images, and even videos.

It's a great way to organize web pages for research, resources, and even projects.

Hojoki - make all your cloud apps work together - very cool & free

Hojoki is a new service I just learned about from the Hojoki team. It's a very cool idea - it takes all of your online productivity apps and turns them into a newsfeed and collaborative space to work on projects.

I played with it a little today and will be using it more this week. It looks like something that could be very useful for education.

It' is in Beta now and free and there will always be a free plan available.

Here's more information and a video about it:

Teachers utilizing the cloud: Hojoki is your collaborative newsfeed for Google Docs, Calendar, Dropbox, Evernote and more

Hojoki’s basic idea is very simple: they offer one newsfeed for productivity apps. It connects to apps like Google Documents, Evernote, Dropbox, Mendeley and Google Calendar, building you a newsfeed and a collaborative space for your work.

Anytime an activity in any of your connected apps occurs, Hojoki informs you. You can share your activities with others in workspaces, where you can discuss events and manage whatever projects you’re working on. You never miss important changes from co-workers and have all your content in one place.





Why this is so interesting for Teachers?
Some of the tools Hojoki integrates are very powerful and established tools for education:

Google Documents for classroom collaboration
Google Calendar to share calendars with colleagues and classes
Dropbox for sharing and syncing files
Evernote with lot’s of uses prior, during and after class
If you and your colleagues use more than one of those tools, you know the problem. It’s almost impossible to manage communication and collaboration across all the apps efficiently. So both teachers and students spend a lot of time logging into lots of tools, checking for updates and informing each other on changes and updates.

Hojoki solves that fragmentation problem as it brings all the tools and all people involved in one browser tab and allows the creation of workspaces for collaboration.


How to use Hojoki in Education

Hojoki brings teachers and students and, most importantly, their tools together on one page. Here are three suggestions from the Hojoki team for educational use:

Creating and sharing teaching materials    
When creating and sharing teaching materials, teachers often use Google Docs, Dropbox and Evernote. As long as everyone is using the same app, everything is fine. But as soon as content spreads across apps, things become confusing. Everyone needs to log in, check frequently for changes and give feedback on other channels, like email. With Hojoki, you can connect all relevant content from lots of apps to a workspace to get instantly notified if someone updated or added something. Besides that, you get a full searchable history of changes in your teaching materials. Here’s an infographic that shows a typical workflow in Hojoki: http://blog.hojoki.com/post/20002424193/teaching-in-the-cloud-infographic


Online Classrooms
If you share and update content from Dropbox, Evernote and Google Docs on a regular basis for a class, create a workspace with your students in Hojoki and add the relevant content. By doing this, Hojoki shows every activity as a newsfeed - who updated a document in Google Docs, created a note in Evernote or uploaded a file to Dropbox. Hojoki connects even to Google Calendar to view class events. Everyone in the classroom workspace can comment immediately and discuss issues. Hojoki saves time by making it easy and keeps everything in one place, so over time you get a fully searchable knowledge base on top of your tools.

Supervision
Workspaces also work great to provide supervision on writing and student projects which utilize more than one cloud app. Teachers can keep informed on the progress of either one student or a group of students. Students get instant feedback and guidance from their teachers and that extra boost in motivation. ;)



Hojoki www.hojoki.com is free, so give it a try!  http://hojoki.com/