BingoBaker

Many teachers enjoy to integrate the traditional game of Bingo into their lesson as a nice review or practice activity.  The time consuming part of the activity is making the actual cards.  Well, now you can use Bingo Baker to make those cards for you.

Type in your words, definitions, math problems, or other identifier on the master Bingo Baker Card.  Then generate and print.  When you print you can select how many pages to create, which prints a pdf file of x number of Bingo Cards, each card being different.

Be sure to save the URL of your master Bingo Card if you want to use those same cards in the future.

Qwiki - search results in video form

Qwiki is a search engine that returns results in the form of a video.  You type in a topic, and a video is played explaining the subject. Try it out at Qwiki.com.

Now Qwiki has provided a free app. Teachers can quickly provide their class with information about most any topic. Get the Qwiki app here  

 Disclaimer – please preview content before showing to kids, as some results may provide content you don’t want previewed with elementary students especially when related to health topics.  With that said, most of the topics I previewed I’d endorse as fine in front of any students.

How to create a link inside your blog post

I’ve read a few blog posts recently and decided to create a short entry on an overview of creating and internalizing links.

Simple Steps to create a link:

Begin be creating your blog post, and write about a particular topic

In a second browser window navigate to the webpage you want to link to from your blog post

Copy the URL of that page, as this will keep what’s copied in your clipboard.  In my example to a particular post about Pinterest in Education.

Back on your authoring page, type what you want the readers to associate with as your link.

Highlight those words, and with the words highlighted find the link button

Paste in the URL appropriately

The words you highlighted should now be linkable words taking readers to a new online location

Post your blog entry

Below is an example of a blog post creating a link



Somtimes it may be nice to see the entire URL as a link, if the intent is for your audience to learn the URL lingo, like  http://pinterest.com/ .  As a rule you want to type in a word for the reader linking them directly to the website, like Pinterest.  Remember readers probably don't want to read http://stephenslighthouse.com/2012/02/08/pinterest-and-education/ but rather "Pinterest in Education"

Pinterest in Education

Stephen Abram writes about how Pintrest, the new social media craze taking the online community by storm, can be integrated into the educational curriculum.  He highlights many Pinterest resources among several categories including Lesson Plans, Professional, and Fun.  Read the post "Pinterest and Education" and find your inspiration.

What's Your Password

What makes up a good password, easy to remember and yet difficult for a hacker to break? I hope you aren't using a child's name, your anniversary, or your school mascot. Personal information relating to you, and easily discovered with little research, offers would be hackers little challenge breaking into your account.

What about generating a random set of characters, including numerals and punctuation? Not so good either, since several of us would leave that password on a post-it note near the computer in a secret hiding spot because we can't remember. How secure is that going to be? Toss the sticky, yet we'd forget the password.

One author's advice, Thomas Baekdal from an article "The Usability of Passwords", writes to use a phrase you can remember. Something like "thisisfun". He offers mathematical justifications for using phrases rather than single words, as computer algorithms can crack open any single word much faster than a phrase.

A few rules for your passwords you may want to consider:

1. Use a phrase you can remember, at least 3 words in length
2. Don't write it on the post-it note
3. Change your password every so often
4. Probably not a good idea to use the same password for every single account
5. Don't use easy to key keystrokes like "asdfg"
6. Substitute in punctuation or numerals for letters like "thisi$fun"

Not only should we practice these protocols, we need to be teaching these protocols to our students.

Visual Tweets

Use Visual Tweets to stream twitter feeds to your classroom. The best part is you can monitor the actual Tweet as Accept or Reject before it is displayed.

Start by creating your account and verifying in email. Then connect your your Visual Tweet with your twitter account. Once done provide a Search Term and then click "accept or reject" on tweets you want posted. There is particular URL you can sh

are or post maintaining the display of Tweet feeds, all while you control the management aspect on your computer.

Use this in the classroom to sit in on current event discussions happening around the world.

Iphone and IPad apps coming soon.

An alternative to Visual Tweets is Visible Tweets. Visible Tweets does not require a login, but does not allow you to preview the tweet stream either. It's clean, clutter free, no over head, and as the saying goes "you get what you get and don't throw a fit". Very easy to use, just type in your keyword search and watch the stream.

CoSketch

How would you like to create a drawing, using online tools, but you also need collaborative help? Now you can with CoSketch, and no account needed for the basics. Click on the Start Here Button, and begin exploring. Send the URL of the drawing window to another user for collaboration.

You can add pens, arrows, shapes, text, and images to your drawing. You can interface with Google Maps. There is even a chat window for all those in your drawing session. The finished sketch can be embedded to other entities such as blog posts or webpages.