Animate your lessons for FREE

One way to grab your students' attention is to present your ideas in videos. It saves time and engages most of their senses. Today, I am going to talk about a tool that allows teachers to create and share animated videos for free. These videos are full of life, and adds one's personality to the content delivered through creating their own characters. 

It is Animaker!

Here is the Tutorials page that will help you to get started:

https://www.animaker.com/tutorials

FREE online course "Using Edu. Technology in EL Classes" April 16, 2018

This FREE 5-week MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) is designed to prepare English language teachers to integrate technology into their English language teaching. Participants will become aware of free technological tools, learn how to use these tools for language learning and teaching, and evaluate the appropriateness of a technology tool for their specific contexts.

This course is provided by Iowa State University, as part of the American English (AE) E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and administered by FHI 360.

Participants who earn 70% or higher will receive a digital badge and certificate as a mark of completion.

Technology Day @ IUP

Thanks Dr Lara Luetkehans & Dr. LIoyd Onyett
for providing this great chance to be updated with new tools that can make a difference in our classes.

It was the whole day
From 8:30 AM - 4: 30 PM

Snip; a free screenshot tool from Microsoft

Making tutorials for my students and other colleagues is a daily activity as a teacher. I already use Snagit program that helps me to capture my screen, add my annotations, and then save it as an image file. For many years, it works well with me. However, one needs more. That's why I share with you a free screenshot tool from Microsoft called Snip with many other fabulous features. 

Why Snip?

Advanced Canva Tips Webinar: Recording + e-Book and more

In case you missed this webinar about some advanced tips of Canva; an amazingly simple tool for graphic design, here is all the stuff you need. In this webinar, Canva senior designer Poppie Pack presented some great techniques that can help you to get started your journey of creativity in the world of design. She played with colors, font, text spacing, some photo editing tools like brightness, contrast, saturation, tint, blur, x-process and vignette, and adding transparency.
 

Canva Webinar: Free Graphic-Design Tool on June 16, 17, 18, 23, and 25, 2015

Canva is an amazingly simple graphic-design tool for free. It gives you everything you need to easily turn ideas into stunning designs. You can create designs for Web or print. 

You have many options to choose from:

Albums covers, banners, book covers, Facebook covers, brochures, blog graphics, presentations, flyers, posters, infographics, cards, invitations and so much more.

QuieTube: A Magical Tool to Watch Videos in Peace

Have you ever suffered from many distractions when watching videos? If you encounter this problem, QuieTube will bring you an amazing solution. It is a normal browser extension that can help you to remove all distractions by only a click. You will find your video in a blank page without any advertisements, side content, and comments. 

Keep downloading by KeepVid, but ...

KeepVid is a free web application that allows you to download videos from many sites. I’m so impressed by this website. Before knowing about it, I find it difficult to download YouTube videos. I have tried many programs, but this website looks great with a variety of features.

• It enables users to download any video with a variety of extensions, e.g., MP4, MP3, FLV, WebM, 3GP, and more.

ThingLink Challenge e-Store and Showcase

In this post, I try to collect all the resources shared by Susan Oxnevad or suggested by other colleagues, and the products created by participants during the ThingLink Teacher Challenge 2014. This makes it easier for me to reach and reuse later. 

Tools for Creating Interactive Images:

Can ThingLink Flip Bloom's Taxonomy Upside Down?

I had the opportunity to participate in Susan Oxnevad's ThingLink Teacher Challenge which is a free, self-paced, online course that aims to help teachers to transform classroom teaching and e-learning using ThingLink; a tool that enables users to upload their photos and tag them using a variety of media, e.g., text, audio, video, links, ... etc. It simply adds life to the static images and make them more interactive and engaging for the audience. During the ten weeks of this course, we created fabulous images that fulfill certain purposes. 

It is NOT too LATE to Join the ThingLink Teacher Challenge 2014

My friend +Miriam Mahapatra shared with me a very great opportunity to play with a digital tool that I loved so much. It is ThingLink that allows you to upload your photos and tag them using a variety of media, e.g., text, audio, video, links ... etc. Once you finish your interactive images, you can share them via different social websites and embed them into your blogs so easily. 

Make it Easy to Speak using Graphic Organizers

Graphic organizers are visual tools and one of the scaffolding techniques that teachers can provide their students to help them think smoothly, classify ideas, find relationships, communicate more effectively, and construct meaning of their own. I always use them when teaching writing in my EFL classes and they were a great success. Today, I will not talk about how to plan writing, but I would like to share a speaking lesson utilizing such an amazing tool.

It is still PowerPoint, but more Interactive using Office Mix

I have just heard about Office Mix from one of Microsoft leaders in Egypt; Eng. Ebeid Atef Ebeid. It is an add-in to PowerPoint 2013 that allows you to create more interactive and engaging presentations. This means that this piece of magic will reinvent the way we present using the traditional program of PowerPoint and add more life to its boring slides and features.

How to Get your Visitors Comment on Google Sites!

Google Sites is a fantastic platform that helps you to create fabulous customized websites in a short time. It also enables you to invite other people to collaborate and leave comments. However, when it comes to viewers and visitors, it provides users nothing. Public can only view the website and leave without saying anything.

That is why I decided to find a way which can be integrated in Google Sites.The two resources below helped me a lot to embed a discussion forum easily and let the conversation go on my site:

Let's Create a Badge in 5 Minutes!

Learning English as a foreign language is not an easy job. I always try to motivate my students intrinsically by providing them a variety of opportunities to use their English inside and outside classroom, but it is not the only type. I also motivate my students extrinsically by giving them extra marks, presents, or certificates. This is very great for the traditional learning environment. 

What about the online classes? 

In this semester, I'm working with my students on a blogging project and it doesn't work without an extrinsic encouragement. That's why I thought of creating some badges. I tried to find a way to embed a system that generates badges automatically for free, but in vain. After searching, I found an online website that allowed me to create badges, hearts, and ribbons as well.

Try ChatButton to Get a Chatbox for Free!

Retrieved Dec. 24, 2013

My students badly needed a way to get my instant help when blogging for the first time. I just wanted to put all things together in the class blog to make this experience easier and more interesting. I spent a lot of time trying some tools for live chatting, but unfortunately most of them need accounts. Of course, this is a kind of headache when it comes to signing up for many websites to do a certain task. Then, I found ChatButton. It is a free and easy-to-install chatbox for use anywhere. 

Let's Enter the Project Competition and Win ...!

Are you interested in doing a creative project with your students? 

Then, 
Why not enter the Project competition. It is an international competition that encourages the use of language through projects.  

The task is very easy:

1. Ask your students to create a class poster on "Communication in the 21st Century" either online or physical. 
2. Once your students finish, complete the entry form posting either the link to their online poster or a j-peg image of the poster.
3. Click here to find all about this competition and the attachments you need.

Ghost: A New Blogging Platform is JUST Born

I have just received an e-mail that the new Ghost blogging platform is ready to the public. Ghost is a free platform dedicated to one thing: Publishing. It's beautifully designed, completely customizable and completely Open Source. Ghost allows you to write and publish your own blog, giving you the tools to make it easy and even fun to do. It's simple, elegant, and designed so that you can spend less time messing with making your blog work - and more time blogging. There are a lot of features of Ghost that can make it the future of blogging:

Have you Tried to Draw Like Picasso?

 

Picassohead is a lovely digital tool that allows users to create their own masterpieces using famous features drawn by Picasso. Teachers can use such an amazing website to unleash their students' creativity and bring the magic of arts into their classes. 

Let Pictures Speak!

Blabberize is a web 2.0 tool that allows users to upload a picture, draw a "mouth" on that picture, and then record or upload a sound clip to make it speak or sing along with the sound.