new education resources

It’s been a while since I last blogged. However here are some great resources for educators:

  1. New Horizons has created an excellent database of reviewed learning tools and you may look for tools based on level of education.
  2. Museum Box: a fun tool for presentations especially in the humanities field [requires financial subscription]
  3. If you want to create animations similar to the RSA animations, you have the opportunity to do so via Sparkol –  fantastic tool for any kind of presentation. Pricey though.. but worth it if you can pay.
  4. Movly is another presentation and animation tool that is available for free – and you may pay for advanced features, though not as excellent as sparkol
  5. Emaze lets you create beautiful presentations but somewhat slow. However it could be downloaded in its entirety so you don’t have to wait for the presentation to load.
  6. Tagxedo, word cloud with styles – similar to Wordle.
  7. Visuwords: where you may look up dictionary words and the result is giving you the word as nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs. It also tells you the relationship between words.
  8. Polleverywhere: wherey ou may poll your students instantly in class.
  9. Wikihood’s ultimate goal is to organize the world’s knowledge – stored in the Wikipedia – for any location worldwide, accessible to anyone anywhere.

Besides those, one of the most exciting technologies  to-date is augmented reality. while I love it and find it thrilling as pages come to life, it is still unsophisticated. The requirement to download specific software each time you want to run an AR is daunting. I think it will take off once we can view any AR marker just by opening the camera.

Here are some tools:

  1. Aursama: either download on your mobile – which is very easy to use and create on the fly auras, or use the aurasma studio.
  2. Zooburst allows you to create animations online.
  3. Information about augmented reality in education is also on this wiki
  4. Imaginality unleashed

This is a great example of creative augmented reality: The Sancho Plan video he Sancho Plan] is a group of writers, musicians, animators, designers and computer programmers who use create interactive entertainment. On March 24, 2010 at the BBC Big Screen Millennium Square in Bristol, they created an augmented reality performance where the participants were able to control the music and movement.