Google Docs Viewer Rocks!

Google Docs Viewer is very useful for displaying any doc, pdf, tiff or presentation files that are saved online.

You don't have to worry about loading your files onto any third party server and although it is a basic version, no bells and whistles, it does the job that it is meant to do very well.

You can move forwards and backwards through the document, zoom in and out and show one page or four pages at a time. You can also choose a full screen mode where you can then select to download the file.

And, of course, you can also embed the viewer. Here is a little introduction to Google Docs in the classroom!

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Powerful Ideas from TED Talks

TED is a small nonprofit organisation dedicated to promoting "Ideas Worth Spreading" and brings together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment and Design. Live events include the annual TED Conference in California, the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, the TEDIndia Conference and the new TEDx community program.

On the TED website, the best talks and performances from TED and their partners are made available for everyone. Currently there are over 450 TED Talks to choose from, with more being added each week.

The talks and presentations are indeed excellent, being both entertaining and thought provoking. Many of the talks relate directly to education as highlighted by the two samples below.

In the first, Richard Baraniuk explains the vision behind the open source Connexions online education system, covered in a previous post.

In the second, Arthur Benjamin explains his bold proposal about making math education relevant in the digital age.

It would be well worth adding the TED RSS feed to your reader if you have not already done so!!

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Photos Galore at Photos8

Photos8 provides a huge collection of high resolution photographs. A great resource for presentations and projects alike, across many subject areas.

The Categories include:
Animals, Architecture, Art, Backgrounds, Birds, Electronics, Flowers, Food, Furnitures, Insects, Landscape, Macro, Miscellaneous, Money, Objects, People, Plants, Religion, Sky, Street, Sunset, Travel

The owner and creator of the site, Sam, explains what the site is all about:

Photos8  is a place for free public domain photos and desktop wallpapers. Large collection of High Resolution photos and wallpapers, Thousands of high quality public domain pictures, easy to search, You may use these images for any purpose, including commercial. As the owner I have explicitly placed it in the public domain. If you do use any photo, please consider linking back to this site or giving credit to this site. Just something like, "Photo courtesy Photos8", This is not required, but its a very good way to support the site efforts here.

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Technorati Tags: photos8, public domain

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Create Stunning Presentations

Prezi lets you "create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way". Prezi is a great tool for creating stunning presentations, performing completely differently to OpenOffice Impress and PowerPoint.

Just have a look at the two examples to see what I mean! You can click on the second button from the left to view the presentation in full screen. Follow the order of the presentation by using the direction arrows or simply click and drag to move about the presentation screen and zoom in and out as you choose.

1) Book Quiz - See if you can spot the name and author of each of these books!
from the HappyHippy



2) Learning with Technology at SAS - A presentation about how we use technology across the curriculum at Shanghai American School.
from U Tech Tips



Obviously, Prezi is a great tool for creating controlled presentations that will impress an audience. I think, perhaps, it also has potential as a self-directed learning tool.

Prezi is still in Beta development, but inspired by these great examples, I have now signed up and am in the middle of creating my very own first Prezi due for release shortly.

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Technorati Tags: presentations, prezi

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Edit Clip Art Images in OpenOffice Impress

Use OpenOffice Impress as an image editor! Didn't know you could do this until I read Amit's article about Powerpoint!

You can change existing clip art graphics in Impress so that the image appears more relevant to your particular presentation. You can also combine edited images to create new graphics.

 

Once the image has been inserted in a slide, simply right click on it and select 'Break'. Then you can select the individual elements and move or delete them. When you are finished, join everything together again by right clicking on the image and selecting 'Group'. It's as easy as that.

Create all sorts of new graphics - limited only by your own imagination. Thanks for the tip Amit!

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Technorati Tags: clipart, graphics, openoffice impress

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Online Goodies (7) - Scribd

Need access to your files anywhere, anytime? Then store them online using Scribd, which not only allows for the storage of files but also encourages public sharing of the documents. Scribd's stated aim is to "create the world's largest open library of documents". The files can be viewed in a web browser using Scribd's custom flash document viewer. Interestingly, the original file can be downloaded in a variety of different formats (pdf, word, txt or mp3).

This text document called 'Wiki as a Teaching Tool' includes an audio file on the page.

Files may be uploaded individually or in bulk. You can decide to keep the documents private or share them with the world! You can also create and join different groups and like other social networking sites, Scribd also lets you add friends.

MediaFire is a free file hosting service which allows anyone to share files and images. There is, currently, no limit on the number of files stored.

I am also using an account on Box (1GB storage). When I signed up it was completely free, but I notice now that they are charging for all of their accounts. The entry level Plus Plan allows 2GB of storage (50MB per file limit) for $25 per year. It will be interesting to see how long mine remains free!

Update: 25/8/08: Automatic convertion to mp3 at Scribd does not seem to be available any longer.

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Technorati Tags: flash, online storage, scribd, social networking, wiki

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