Brief.ly

So, I'm in love with this site and I will be using it all the time. I just wish it had been around while I was teaching in the classroom. Brief.ly is a great website that allows you to create a simple web page with all of your links. Therefore, whenever you have a project for your students or teachers, rather than having to have several links for your students, you can create one web page, give them a "short code" link and instantly they have access to all of the links you've

previously selected for them. You can share up to three dozen links all on one page.

It is really easy to use and the finished product is very clean to look at.

When Brief.ly opens, you are given an empty dialogue box.

You can either copy and paste or type the links in from other web pages (see the image on the right). You can leave a space after the link and include a caption for the students of the various web pages.

When you have all of your links in, click on the scissors on the bottom on the page.

This action will then create your short codes that will link to the web page (see to the right.)

Share the link with your students by pasting it to a website, writing it on the board, typing it on to a worksheet, etc. The link below is a sample Brief.ly site I created on Shakespeare to show how easy this was to work with.

http://brief.ly/~0q29k

I strongly recommend checking out Brief.ly and trying it with your students. I plan to use it soon to share information!

Diigo for education

So it's summer time here in upstate New York and I've been a bit busy with my own school work and travelling around the state so I've sort of fallen off of the blog world a little bit. BUT, now Im back - sorry it's true... :)

Earlier this year I talked about social bookmarking and all of the benefits for bookmarking your websites using a web based tool versus the favorites bar on your stand alone computer. See that post here... I love social bookmarking because I am someone who moves from building to building, district to district, sharing great tools that are available to use with education. It's so much easier for me to login to one account and have all of these great articles, tools, pages etc. at the tip of my hands.

Diigo, which I have used for years for my own personal social bookmarking - see the side bar on the right for access to my Diigo account- has created a Diigo experience for educators now! I'm very excited for this because you can now create individual student accounts and class accounts. This means that each of your students can be sharing interesting articles, great reference materials, videos, podcasts, etc. with each other, at any time from any where they have an Internet connection! Yippee! Implications for education: they can comment on each other's resources. Great for teaching how to summarize or highlight key pieces of information. So, rather than using that textbook that was published 13 years ago, your students can create their own current text that has relevance to their lives.

In addition, in the educator accounts, students and teachers can communicate safely without outside people commenting and in the educator account mode, the advertisements are all educationally related. I tried it the other day for myself and can't wait to use it for professional development purposes with several groups of teachers I'll be working with this year. I strongly encourage all of you to check out the possibilities of social bookmarking in the near future.

PDF tips and tricks...

In education, we always seem to have a lot of papers flying in and out. Sometimes, these are sent to us in PDF form and we are not able to edit them and make them our own. However, one of our middle school teachers, Kevin Krause, shared with me this site, PDF To Word, which will allow you to convert a PDF file to either a Word document or a Rich Text Document. It is simple to use and even better, completely free. What's great is that you then get an email doc version of your file and are free to edit as you please.

The second PDF resource I found that is also free and easy to use is called PDF Hammer. With PDF Hammer, you can upload multiple pdf documents and create one file. It also allows you to upload a pdf file with multiple pages and then you can rearrange the pages or delete pages that you no longer need.

Had to share...

As many of you know, Im a huge fan of Apple. I love what they have done for hand held technology and truly believe that the Itouch and the Ipad are going to change eduction in a myriad of ways. So, when I saw this - I knew I had to share.

iPad + Velcro from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

Motivational quote maker...

So, earlier this week I posted a Flickr group of Great Quotes About Learning and Change and the majority of the images were inspired to be motivational posters. After looking at that, I learned about this site that allows you to create your own motivational posters for FREE. AutoMotivator is really easy to use so it's great for all age levels. The site allows you to take an image from anywhere, your computer or the web, and then add words to create your own poster. When you have created your poster, you can save it to your computer, print it, share it, etc. I had a blast creating some different posters I can use for training.

Uses for Education:

• One way to create a quick review. Have your students find an image they think exemplifies the topic. Then, use a one sentence summary to capture the content and the image.


• Great way to introduce a topic.


• Great way to introduce your kids to each other or you to them.