Speaking Image

Speaking Image is a great site with lots of possibilities, especially when one considers ADA compliance. The JFK Assassination graphic below was created on Speaking Image. Notice that you can add links to YouTube videos.

The user can increase/decrease the size of the image and/or drag it to the desired position. You can embed the image or simply provide a link.

The site is really easy to use. I started a graphic explaining Pipeline's Student Quick Clicks. It is in its beginning stages but grabbing the graphic took longer than adding the explanations.

How might you use Speaking Image?

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Add Captions to Video in PowerPoint

STAMP is a free add-in for PowerPoint 2010 that lets you easily add captions to videos in your PowerPoint presentation. With this simple add-in you can also add captions to audio files included in your presentation. This tool is clearly useful when one considers ADA compliance as we move toward Quality Matters course certification. One might wish to put the video or audio file in PowerPoint to simplify the process of including a text version of these types of files.

The STAMP site states, "The Subtitling Add-on for Microsoft PowerPoint (STAMP) helps Microsoft PowerPoint users add closed captions to the video and audio files included in their presentations, which boosts their impact for those with hearing disabilities."

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Symbaloo - Collect and Share Bookmarks

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360 Cities Panorama

"360 Cities brings you the world through the largest and fastest-growing collection of immersive, panoramic images on the web". Their "Popular Places" listing includes: Stuttgart, Italy, Isfahan, Tehran, The World, France, Moscow, Paris.
Take a look at the Khajo Bridge in Isfahan below to get an idea of what this site can add to your online courses. Then go examine some of the many other panoramas available such as this one of London that allows you to zoom in on chosen landmarks.
You can choose to view the map for any chosen panorama. The map displays unobtrusively on the left side of the screen allowing you to track just what you are looking at in reference to the world.





Khajo Bridge in Isfahan

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Compare your Life to Life in another Country

"The lottery of birth is responsible for much of who we are. If you were not born in the country you were, what would your life be like? Would you be the same person?

IfItWereMyHome.com is your gateway to understanding life outside your home. Use our country comparison tool to compare living conditions in your own country to those of another. Start by selecting a region to compare on the map to the right, and begin your exploration".

IfItWereMyHome.com is a wonderful visualization tool and also provides a myriad of information about numerous countries.

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Make Beautiful Music with UJAM

"UJAM is a cloud-based platform that empowers everybody to easily create new music or enhance their existing musical talent and share it with friends". Now, I can't carry a tune but the singer in the video below is just about as bad. Watch how his song improves in UJAM. Wouldn't this be great for a quick intro or announcement or weekly message? Of course, you will need to remember to add a text version also.

How about allowing students to submit an intro or some other assignment this way? You might be amazed by their work. Just another method to engage students and to implement differentiated learning.

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Create an ANGEL Page from an Excel Spreadsheet

OK, after I posted the Text Fixer tool, some people asked for a tool to create HTML code from an Excel spreadsheet. Well, here it is! Tableizer is a handy website that lets you create HTML tables from Excel. Using Tableizer you can generate HTML code from your Excel table and paste it in the ANGEL HTML Editor Source. Simply copy and paste the cells from the spreadsheet into Tableizer and click on “Tableze it!” button. The code is generated and ready to copy and paste in ANGEL.

Following is a sample of a table I converted in Tableizer:

Media	Category	Purpose	Website	Ease of Use*
Audacity	Audio	Audio Editing(podcasting)	http://audacity.sourceforge.net/	♦♦
Ipadio	Audio	Audio Recording	http://ipadio.com/	♦
Camtasia	Audio/Video	Screen Recording and Video Editing	http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/	♦♦
Jing	Audio/Video	Screen Recording	http://www.techsmith.com/jing/pro/	♦♦

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Voki for Education

I introduced Voki to my students this semester and they really like using it. You can have students simply supply a link or embed the Voki in a drop-box. To share, set the drop-box to Peer Review. Another option is to set up team file sharing and ask students to post their Voki there. There is a Voki lesson plan data base that anyone can access. One of the lessons' description reads: "Brief Description: College students learn how to organize a persuasive speech. By studying how to define persuasive communication, students will get a better understanding how persuasive speech can sway an audience, and even effect policy".

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Text Fixer

Text Fixer is a free online tool that converts the contents of a doc or docx file to HTML code, producing a much cleaner html code than Word. The converter strips many unnecessary styles and extra mark-up codes which, in turn, produces cleaner, easily editable pages in ANGEL. Text Fixer does not preserve images but it does preserve links and other basic formatting like bolding, bullets, tables, etc. in the conversion process.

1. Copy the text from your Word document


2. Paste the code into the Word-to-html-Converter


3. Click the Convert Word to HTML button and Text Fixer will produce the clean code


4. Copy the code


5. Click Settings on your ANGEL page


6. Click the Source icon in the tools at the top of the HTML editor


7. Paste the copied code in the Source of your ANGEL page


8. Click the Source icon again


9. Save

Voila, you have a clean ANGEL page. The page will look better and be much easier to edit than if copied directly from Word.

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