Mostly Free Diagramming Tools Online

I've been exploring several drawing tools, particularly those for making graphs and diagrams. I'm trying to stick to free and online in this discussion, though a few for-pay tools have some nice advantages, mainly storage space and collaboration.

Among other advantages, drawing tools can help students mind-map and brainstorm; collect and display numerical data in charts and graphs; demonstrate reflective learning in storyboards or networked images; and so on. Graphing skills become increasingly important as an academic tool as students progress through school, but charts and graphs can be a fun motivation even for younger students.

Gliffy is one of my old favorites, but it limits you to just 5 drawings, unless you go for the somewhat pricey paid account (5 users for up to 200 drawings, for about $10, as of this writing). It does very nice Venn diagrams from templates, has loads of pre-formed objects, such as arrows and rectangles, and supports HTML5.

Cacoo is entirely free and looks like a very friendly interface, and one appropriate for middle school kids. You can create:

wire frames, mind maps, network charts, and site maps . . . simply pick and "drag and drop" elements from a large library of stencils.

Cacoo is one of the free programs with a free-hand drawing option, too.


Creately is another free program with great features, and like Gliffy, allows up to 5 drawings with limited collaborative possibilities.  It gives you only diagrams, but offers nice Venn templates, and a large selection of templates for K-12, including:

...Storyboards, Fishbone Diagrams, T Charts, Y Charts, Venn Diagrams, and much more..

Google Drawings has only a very basic toolkit, so don't expect a great deal, but it is quick and easy and the interface will be familiar from Google docs.


If you want a very professional look, but have only a limited project, try Microsoft's Visio or SmartDraw. Both of these have a free trial period and many features.

Using QR in the Classroom

You may have noticed increasing uses of QR (Quick Response) codes, for example, to make a trail of ecology facts in a national park, or to provide a self-guided tour of a museum exhibition. I've returned to this YouTube video, from the American TESOL Institute channel, several times, as it has some great ideas for using QR (Quick Response) codes with students:



http://youtu.be/V0kdbBTwF7U


The video describes what QR is, how you can make your own, and how you can teach students to make their own for content-based projects, to link to podcasts, to make electronic portfolios, etc. For example, as seen in this image, students can scan the QR with their mobiles to get more information about skeletal structure.





If students construct the content they create reusable learning objects for subsequent classes to read, listen to, and improve.

Thanks to Webheads for finding this great video originally. There are a number of other videos on QR with more ideas in the YouTube sidebar.

WolframAlpha

WolframAlpha is an amazing third-generation search engine that can tell you almost anything about anything: math, chemistry, socioeconomics, geography, etc. You can input a formula, or just a few words as a question, and Wolfram will make the appropriate assumptions about what you want to know. Especially good with relational data, e.g., what's the ratio of France's GDP to Italy's?



The screencast illustrates a few of the many ways this tool can be useful: http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

This should be an excellent classroom tool, both in content-based projects and math work, and for general English, writing research papers, making predictions, etc.

Resources for Teaching Poetry

Just came across Google's tool, Search Stories, for creating a video out of your online searches. I did one on Resources for Teaching Poetry.

It's a pretty nifty tool, and students might get a kick out of using it as a way to present their initial searches in a content-based project.

The Bases for a Personal Learning Network

These are excerpts from a Kim Cofino fireside talk at WorldBridges, as edited by Vance Stevens.

Her main points form the basis for a Personal Learning Network--what every teacher really needs in the Digital Age:

Tools
- RSS feed - find out what other professionals are thinking about and stay up to date
- Join an education social network - learn and share with other teachers
- Start a blog - express yourself and monitor your own growth as a professional
- Use Skype to share and connect with other professionals
- Attend online conferences - both synchronously and asynchronously [WorldBridges is a good place to catch up and get into conferences]
- Use Twitter - find professionals and make connections [Vance's own anecdotes are clear illustrations of how useful this can be]
- Design global online interactions for your students [e.g., iEarn, GLOBE, or your own class-to-class project]

Attitudes
- Be more flexible and try out more collaborative approaches
- Allow for student-led processes, and learning from peers
- Learn, create, and share with your students
- Use the Internet to let your students connect with other students--and teachers--around the world
- Students in developing countries already have "global attitudes" - multicultural and multilingual perspectives, so take advantage of these

The Christmas Challenge VoiceThread

A nice holiday student project where cultural concepts of Christmas and personal greetings and wishes are recorded. A nice use for VoiceThread, which can also be downloaded to a desktop as an archive for listening practice.

The Christmas Challenge
by Alex G. Francisco

A collaborative project developed by Esayan Armenian High School in Turkey and Escola Básica e Secundária Gonçalves Zarco in Portugal, Dec 7, 2009.

Sidebar RSS Aggregator for Firefox

The explanation below is pretty minimal, but the Firefox site will give you illustrated directions to get started. While it claims not to be a replacement for a full-fledged aggregator, it functions quite nicely as a quick and easy to install reader. This might be an easy way to get students reading each other's blogs.

Feed Sidebar

YouTube podEnglish Videos

These podEnglish language learning videos are unique in that they are based on social situations, e.g., vocabulary for discussing fear, as well as particular content topics.

Check out the tab on the right of the YouTube video, >More From: podEnglish, to see several dozen different topics. The videos are obviously intended to be used as ipod lectures.

Thanks to Evelyn Izquierdo from Learning with Computers for this tip!

Using Mobile Technologies for Education

There was some discussion of using mobile technologies (cell phones, iPods, Blackberries, etc.) at TESOL Denver this year, but the following is the most succinct list I have seen:

Forwarding an edited mail from the Wikieducator list (Randy Fischer)

Randy found this 2008 University of Nottingham study on Mobile Phones
and secondary education, and thought it might be of interest.
http://emergingtech nologies. becta.org. uk/upload- dir/downloads/ page_documents/ research/ lsri_report. pdf

Several interesting things caught his eye:

1. the fact that in many schools, students 'own' their mobile phones,
not necessarily the computers. (Physical ownership and use feels
good);

2. the list of 15 Useful Things Students Do with Mobile Phones (below)

Could we use some of the 15 or more useful things to design
appropriate and culturallly- relevant learning activities?

What role could WikiEducator play in learning that uses mobile phones?

Fifteen useful things students did with mobile phones
1 Timing experiments with stopwatch
2 Photographing apparatus and results of experiments for reports
3 Photographing development of design models for eportfolios
4 Photographing texts/whiteboards for future review
5 Bluetoothing project material between group members
6 Receiving SMS & email reminders from teachers
7 Synchronising calendar/timetable and setting reminders
8 Connecting remotely to school learning platform
9 Recording a teacher reading a poem for revision
10 Accessing revision sites on the Internet
11 Creating short narrative movies
12 Downloading and listening to foreign language podcasts
13 Logging into the school email system
14 Using GPS to identify locations
15 Transferring files between school and home

--Thanks to Bee Dieu on the Webheads' list for this report

Movie Segments to Assess Grammar Goals

...is really something of a misnomer, since it is more a blog where students can practice various grammar and syntax items using questions and exercises set by the teacher, Claudio Azevedo (Casa Thomas Jefferson, Brasilia), with the prompt being video clips (professional), rather than a textbook.

The video at Movie Segments is a really nice motivator, and the questions and exercises have a good deal of subtlety, deploying a cognitive approach that engages the student and goes beyond sheer grammar. It is also a nice expression of how a blog can be used instructionally. Frequent updates are promised.

--Thanks to Ronaldo Lima, Jr., on the Webheads' list for the referral

Looking at objects in Second Life

Nice little instructional video on how to use the viewing options in SL, from sttaylor.

Second Life Tutorial: How to Look at Things


This YouTube page also has a list of other video tutorials for beginners.

Daily English Activities

Nik Peachey's new blog, Daily English Activities, for students and teachers (with teacher lesson plans and support) is developing beautifully. I especially like the way he finds interesting sites, like Yolango (which has video trailers with scripts and subtitles), and creates ready-to-use lesson plans making use of them; or points students to ways to enhance or make regular use of the resource.


Hope he keeps on with this development. It's also an interesting use for a blog.

WikiEducator

The WikiEducator site purports to be a clearinghouse for free and open source learning. Some of the projects seem very promising, but it is difficult to find one that is already complete. The content-based learning, including computer/IT look like they have potential. Let's hope the bandwagon takes off (is that a mixed metaphor?)

These are the goals:

The WikiEducator is an evolving community intended for the collaborative:

* planning of education projects linked with the development of free content;
* development of free content on Wikieducator for e-learning;
* work on building open education resources (OERs) on how to create OERs.
* networking on funding proposals developed as free content.

Nik Peachey's Technology Blogs

Today I had a chance to explore Nik's blogs in more depth. These are very rich because he indicates ways to use the technology with students and/or for teacher training. Following through with each of his blog entries is like a full course in IT for teachers.

His two blogs are

Quick Shout

and the more cumbersomely named

Learning technology teacher development blog for ELT

Enjoy!

Dipity

Dipity has an easy Google-type interface that allows you to create a timeline. This is an example from Michael Coughlan's Life.

Other Webheads have suggested using the interface in a jig-saw activity, where groups of students can add the info they collect as they read or research. You can add info/pix from other sites, such as Twitter and Flickr.

AuthorStream

Authorstream is an interesting way to quickly get your PowerPoint presentation online--without going through the fuss of saving it as html, and then mounting all the pages and files to a Web page.

I created a wiki for my presentation at TESOL on CALL and SLA research, copied it to PowerPoint slides, and then uploaded the resulting ppt to my Authorstream page. If there were video or audio attached, AuthorStream would convert the file to a YouTube format. Mine is just a slideshow.

UPDATE: Thanks to all who visited the slideshow. I now have the audio uploaded to both AuthorStream and Ourmedia.org.

WritingFix

Definitely for advanced learners, WritingFix is targeted toward U.S. high school students and teachers. However, it has a lot of good advice about writing, and is billed as "the home of interactive writing prompts." Various parts of the site will generate random prompts to start writing on a variety of topics and content subjects. It also has general advice about writing essays, e.g., developing voice, organizing, sentence fluency, conventions, etc. In Spring of 2008, the site will have an extensive section of the various parts of the writing process. A good place for EFL/ESL teachers to grab ideas.