Friday, February 12, 2010

Webberific Resources

I love technology, don't you? I never fail to be amazed by the explosion of web toys out there. I wouldn't call myself a techie by anyone's standards. Man, I don't even have an iPhone let alone an iPad or iPod or anything else that begins with an i followed by an uppercase alphabet (yes, my hubby guy, that's a hint! Feb 14, get it?). But I like finding new online toys. The free-er the better!

Here's a bunch of my favorite free and mostly kiddo-safe web tools. We learnt about these only recently, a few through our wonderful online myths class and others by sheer stumble-upons. Most of them make home-learning even more fun than you would think.

COMICS & ANIMATION

Possibly the kiddo's hands-down fave site among the bunch, Pixton is available as a Public as well as For Schools version. We got to play with it because his Myths teacher got the class a temporary school subscription. But I know you can create an account for free. You get to create comics online and print them or download to share with friends. Here's the comic the kiddo created as a Mythology Project.

Similar to Pixton but with the added pizzazz of animation is Go Animate. Although the kiddo likes this, I felt that having the flexibility of a number of free custom characters instead of only one would make it a more popular choice.

CARDS and POSTERS

Big Huge Labs or BHL as we call it at home has been around a while but I just got wind of it. We used it to create trading cards for another Mythology Project but there's really so much more you can do with it. Use it to create personalized monthly calendars, pop art posters, jigsaw-ed photos, a photo collage, ID badge and so on.


How about creating online notebook pages in the form of an e-poster like this one on TJ? Glogster is an interesting tool that allows you to make your own interactive poster, called a glog. We haven't tried this in detail yet because I was a little wary of featured glogs that looked, well, um not really appropriate for the kiddo to see. Among all the sites featured in this post, I would say Glogster is the least kiddo-safe. So please preview before use with your kids.


NEAT EMBEDS

As a highly layout-picky blogger, I like tools that allow me to embed dynamic graphics on this blog. One of the tools that I've already blogged about a little is SlideShare. This is a nifty YouTube-like tool that lets you embed Powerpoint slides just as you would YouTube videos. Once it's embedded on the blog, you can view the slide without leaving the page. Cool eh?

Another tool I just found today through a friend's blog is the Issuu Smart Look. Smart Look allows you to view publications online without downloading them. One real-time version you can preview is on Loyola Press' Voyages In English site (note: this is not an advertisement for ViE and I'm not affiliated to them in any way, I'm just in love with the functionality of the site, that's all).

PERSONAL ORGANIZER

I'm such a sucker for organizing tools. Anything that makes life easier you know? Although I absolutely adore my Microsoft One Note software, Cozi just took the cake on flexibility. It gives you a personal/ family journal, online calendar (that you can sync with Outlook) and even a little email field where you can send an email to family members all from the same web page. It's not perfect. For example, I wanted the To Do list to appear on the same home page as the daily calendar but found no way to make that happen so I had to improvise. The Shopping List is now my To Do List. But otherwise, it's quite impressive. I can use it as a temporary space to note down something cute DS said or anything productive we did in the day that my charter school might like to know about and later copy and paste it into this blog or our learning journal. I can set it as my home page so that it's the first thing I see when I launch the browser. I think it's Mac friendly too. And if I own an iPhone (ahem!) or some other phone that doesn't look like it came from the prehistoric era (clearing of throat), I can sync it all together and read grocery lists at the store without having to transfer them hurriedly onto post-its.  And it's all free!


So if like me, you'd like to procrastinate packing for a long-distance trip for as long as possible, go check these great tools out! (grin).

4 comments:

  1. For comics my kid (who really loves comics) is a member at Bitstrips.com

    Thanks for these! I think my kid will like that poster-maker!

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  2. Thank you MamaShift! Anything to add to the kiddo's love for comic strip creation is very much appreciated :)

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  3. Oh you ARE sneaky! Or should I say sNEAKY?

    I want all technology. My problem is twofold: convincing my dh that I NEED it and getting the readies to buy it...sigh.

    ReplyDelete
  4. LOL :) How about iSNEAKY? Yeah, I hear you about the DHs needing convincing. Someday...

    ReplyDelete

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