Classroomtech.org.uk

One of the most consistently popular posts on this irregularly updated site of mine is about using timers in lessons. That post includes several timers that can be downloaded and used in the classroom.

Recently though the timer that I have actually been using regularly is from the website online-stopwatch.com.

The online-stopwatch site has a variety of stopwatches, countdown timers and clocks including chess clocks as well as an online calculator. The timers, which are written in flash, can be used within your web browser and they also offer downloadable versions of some of them.

My favourite is their main stopwatch and countdown timer.

Online-stopwatch has become my timer of choice in the classroom because of the simple uncluttered look and the ability to make it full screen. It has what I need without lots of extra features that just get in the way for day to day use.

There is also a new version in the pipeline, which is exactly the same, but looks a bit nicer.

Words; They make up the majority of our presentations, worksheets, and most other things we do in the classroom. How ever many things we write for our students most of us only use a handful of fonts. There’s nothing wrong with Times New Roman, Ariel and the other common fonts that are installed by default on many computers (although personally I am not keen on the over used Comic Sans), but if we all use these same few then all our worksheets and presentations look very similar.

One quick and easy way to make our presentations and worksheets stand out is to use new and different fonts, which happily are to be found free and plentiful on several easy to use websites. These fonts have been created by all sorts of people and shared on these websites for people to use, some without any restrictions and many others for non-commercial use.

Find free fonts

If you type ‘free fonts’ into your favourite search engine then you will find loads of sites with free fonts. The sites vary in quality and ease of use. I am going to tell you about four sites that are all easy to navigate and provide easy downloads of their selection of fonts.

Dafont.com has over 8000 fonts at the time of writing, which are organised into nine main categories such as ‘Fancy’, ‘Gothic’, ‘Script’ and then lots of sub categories. when you have selected a category you can browse the fonts in a list with loads of options for how you view them. You can compare the fonts with your choice of text, choose the size of the preview, whether to include accents and whether to see variants (e.g. bold). There are direct download links so that when you find the font(s) you want downloading them is easy and quick. Dafont.com is probably my favourite font site and is the first I go to when I need a new font.

1001 Free Fonts has been online since 1998 making it ancient in internet terms. With its simple layout, listing fonts with download links and the option of custom previews it doesn’t look it though. You can browse the fonts alphabetically or by category. 1001 Free fonts claims to be the most popular free fonts site on the web with over 1 billion downloads in its 10 year life, so it may well be worth a look.

A simpler site than the previous two, but including 2500 fonts, Get Free Fonts doesn’t have the same polish as dafont or 1001. There are no options to preview with your choice of text or order the list as you want. The fonts are arranged alphabetically by font name, so unless you know the name of the font you want it may be more difficult to find an appropriate one.

Like Dafont.com and 1001 Free Fonts, Urban fonts organises its 8000 free fonts into categories and allows custom preview text. There are lots of great fonts with easy download links and Urban fonts would be a great option, but it is slightly let down by the inclusion of pop up adverts on the site.

Install your new fonts

Once you have got your fancy new fonts downloaded to your computer it’s time to install them. The method of installing fonts varies slightly depending on which operating system. Below are brief instructions for the three most popular.

Before you start you need to make such that your fonts are not in a zip file. If they are, extract them before you begin.

Windows XP: Copy the font file(s) (.ttf, .otf or .fon) into the Fonts folder, which is usually C:\Windows\Fonts.

(You can also get to the Fonts folders via: Start Menu > Control Panel > Appearance and Themes > Fonts)

Windows Vista: Right click on the font files (.ttf, .otf or .fon) and select Install.

Mac OS X: Put the files into /Library/Fonts (for all users), or into /Users/Your_username/Library/Fonts (for you only).

Once you have installed your fonts (or even if you don’t add any new fonts to your system) you may want a way to compare the fonts you have to choose the best one for any particular task. There are a number of font management programs that will allow you to do this. If you are using Windows you could try The Font Thing which is an old, but effective program, or for either Windows or Mac OS Linotype FontExplorer X is a more modern and feature rich option. Both programs are free.

The Internet is home to millions of images. Scattered throughout billions of web pages. Give a class of students the task of creating a presentation, document, web site or whatever and they will often reach for their browser and trusty Google image search to locate stuff to illustrate their work.

Now obviously this method will find loads of (usually) relevant images, but the problem is that Google’s image search (and others such as Yahoo and Live search) indiscriminately finds images on any web site in its index. This means that many of the images will be subject to copyright restrictions and using them without permission, even for school work, may be illegal.

A better option for finding images (and other media) that can be used freely and legally is to stick to stuff that has been released under a Creative Commons (CC) license. If a picture, video or piece of music has a Creative Commons license, it means that the creator has given permission for it to be used by others for non-commercial use and sometimes more freely.

There are four main things to look out for that explain the specific requirements for the use of an image. Each has a handy icon that helps you to spot which restrictions apply at a glance.

Attribution (by): Almost all images require you to credit the person who created it. A name next to the picture is enough.

No Derivatives: This means that you can use the image as it is, but not change it in any way (except changing the size).

Non commercial: The image may be used for any personal, educational or non-commercial use, but not for commercial purposes. This isn’t usually a problem in schools.

Share alike: You may alter and use the image in any way you like, but your work must be released (shared) under the same license.

There are several places that you can search for and find these images. Even the big search engines have got in on the act and now allow you to search for Creative Commons licensed work.

Creative Commons search

The website of the organisation which runs the licenses has its own search function that will allow you to search for all types of CC licensed material via Google, Yahoo and other more media specific sites. This is one of the best places to start for comprehensive searches, but may be a bit complex if your students are just looking for images.

SpinXpress – Get Media

For media searches (images, music and video) Get Media is a good option. It gathers several databases of media and allows you to specify the license restrictions that you want to restrict your search to as well as searching for one or all types of media.

Flickr – Creative Commons

If it’s images you’re after, Flickr may be the best place to look. The photo sharing website has at the time of writing over 85 million images licensed with one of the CC licenses! You and your students should be able to find something you can use. Flickr separates its images into the six different licenses and allows you to browse or search within each.

FlickrCC and FlickrStorm

FlickrCC and FlickrStorm are two other ways of searching Flickr for CC images. Both work well and allow you to select the license type you want to restrict your search to. These services can be quicker ways to compare images to find the right one for you.

You can find out more about Creative Commons, the licenses and how they apply to all sorts of content including written work at the Creative Commons UK website or the international website.

Google Docs has many uses in the classroom as a tool for creating documents and for collaboration. One of the newer features that Google have introduced is the ability to create web based forms that can collect data directly into a spreadsheet.

The idea behind Google forms is simple. In the Google Docs main page you select ‘New’ and then ‘Form’ from the menu, which takes you to the form editor. There you can enter a title and opening information for your form and begin to create your questions. Google gives you the choice of six types of question and you can mix them as you want in any form.

You continue to add questions until you have finished your form. At that point you save the form. You can embed the form in a website to be completed or you can use the link at the bottom of the form creator to share the webpage of the form. You might want to use a URL shortener to make the address easier.

Here is the address of my completed form

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pqWdwkQ2SenCigz8XGDgUOA

(and the shortened version is http://memurl.com/mefede)

Here is the same form embeded in the page

You can find out more about Google Docs and Google forms at the website docs.google.com

Have you ever been frustrated when a student tells come to a lesson and tells you that they have forgotten what the homework was that you set? Wouldn’t it be good if all your students could access a record of what you set for homework from home or the library even if they have lost their homework diary or were absent when it was set?

The solution is to publish your homework tasks on the Internet so that they are always accessible. I’m not talking about lots of detail or the homework itself being online, just a note similar to what you would expect a pupil to write in their diary, but maybe more accurate. Now not every teacher has, wants or could manage a full website or blog to post homework on, but every teacher should be able to use email.

With the online tool Posterous email is the only thing you need to be able to use to create a mini website with a record of the homework tasks you set.

As it says on their website you don’t need to sign up, all you do is email post@posterous.com and an account will be set up for you and they will email you straight back with details. The email you send will be converted into a post with the subject being the title and the body being the text. If you attach a word document or similar to the email it will be attached to the post and if you attach a picture it will be added.

You can then just send an email with each homework task and it will be posted, creating a mini website that your students can look at.

Have a look at the demo site I set up at classroomtechdemo.posterous.com

and have a go at starting your own by emailing post@posterous.com

Google Docs is an online office suite, like a cut down version of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc). It runs in your web browser and stores your documents online making them available from any computer. Google Docs makes it easy to collaborate on and share Text documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

There are lots of applications for Google Docs in the classroom and I will discuss others in future posts. One application of the word processor part of Google Docs is to create quick and temporary web pages.

Because the word processor enables you to quickly edit documents with instructions and links you can write some instructions or information for a lesson just as you would on a worksheet, except that because you can publish it as a web page it can include links to other websites.

When you have finished your page, you can publish it (go to ‘share’, ‘publish as webpage’) and you will be given a link to your new web page. Here is one I created for this post:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfbtbm3h_52c747dtgd

This is now a webpage that you can send the students to in order to guide them through an online task. You can use a URL shortener as detailed in another post to make the address easier to share with the pupils. When I ran the above address through Memurl.com I got memurl.com/duvote which is much easier.

When you have finished using the page with a class you can either leave it published or unpublish it, but save it in Google Docs. That way you can come back to it, ammend it and use it again.

For more information about Google Docs visit the website docs.google.com. I will endevour to write about Google Docs in more detail soon.

Almost all online tools and web applications not to mention blogs require you to register an account or at least give an email address before you can use them fully. This causes a problem when you want to use one of these services with pupils and they either don’t have their own email addresses or you don’t want them to use their own addresses for whatever reason.

Google Mail provides one option to work around this. If you don’t know anything about Google Mail, it is one of a number of web applications that are provided by Google and are free to use. Google Mail is an email account and webmail program (a bit like hotmail or yahoo mail). Google Mail has several advantages including a large amount of storage space (several gigabytes) and advanced search and filtering capabilities, making it easy to find messages. It is free and straightforward to sign up for a Google Mail account and you can sign up for as many different accounts as you want.

Google Mail is useful in overcoming the requirement for lots of email accounts because once you have signed up for an email address, for example mrtdolan@googlemail.com, you then get more than just the user name ‘mrtdolan’. You can add a ‘+’ to the username and then anything after it and it will be delivered to the same account. So email sent to mrtdolan@googlemail.com, mrtdolan+one@googlemail.com and mrtdolan+two@googlemail.com would all end up in the same place. Although Google Mail treats these as the same account, anywhere else they would be considered different addresses and so could be used separately to sign up for a service multiple times.

For example, say you were setting up a class blog and you wanted each student to have their own login so you could keep track of who wrote what. You could set up a new google account (e.g. mrtdolan08yr10@googlemail.com) and then use varations on that address to sign all your pupils up to the blog, e.g. mrtdolan08yr10+bob@googlemail.com, mrtdolan08yr10+jane@googlemail.com, etc.

Obviously there are always issues to consider when using online tools with students where they have to register for accounts, but by following careful procedures, only using first names, not requiring them to use their own email and having clear rules and guidelines it is possible to make the most of some of the great tools out there.

You can find out more about Google Mail and sign up for an account at mail.google.co.uk

I was excited when I first came across Mnemograph (I’m glad I am typing and not pronouncing that) and had a play with the demo. Mnemograph is a web based application that allows you to create visual and interactive timelines.

You add events and enter basic details like dates and locations and then more detailed information and links. The events are then organised into a timeline that you can zoom in and out of and explore. The main timeline view is nicely organised with more information available when you hover over or click on an event. You can create text labels for events or use pictures. It is possible to show two timelines simultaneously above and below the date line. The demo shows this well with a history of the Wright Brothers split into two timelines, one with text labels and the other with pictures.

Mnemograph is currently in beta (still being developed) and doesn’t have a complete feature set yet, but it is already a useful tool. The application is designed to allow easy collaboration on creating timelines and they can be shared easily too. The best way to get a feel for the application is to have a play with the demo and then sign up and try creating your own timeline on the Mnemograph website.

It’s worth looking at the instructions that explain more about the tool and how to use it. They also reveal the origin of the name Mnemograph.

As they say:

Why is it called Mnemograph?
Like many good technology companies, the origin of our name is Greek. Mnemosyne was the personification of memory in Greek mythology. She was the daughter of Gaia and Uranus and, after a nine night stand with Zeus, the mother of the Muses. To be honest, we aren’t terribly happy with the name. It doesn’t seem exactly main stream and is hard to type and pronounce. So, if you have any decent ideas, let us know!