ICT Friday - 'Picmeleo'

Mouseshade

MouseShade is an essential tool for everyone doing presentations or demos. If turned on, it dims the screen and puts a spotlight on the area around the mouse pointer, easily guiding the audiences attention to an area of interest. The shape of the spotlight, the colour of the shade and the opacity of the shade can all be varied by accessing the pop up menu available from the icon in the Taskbar, simply by right clicking.
All options set are saved when the application closes, ready for the next time you use it.  When in use, the shade can be minimised, giving a clear view of the whole screen, and can then be reactivated when you need to highlight a specific part of the screen by clicking the 'Show' option on the menu.  The download can be located here.

Blog Directory

As well as being a blog host, Edublogs also has a blog directory where you can find lists of educational blogs to browse.

If you are new to blogging and want to get a feel for it, or want to explore different styles and approaches to blogging, take a look at blogs organised by subject area.

  

Food for thought ...

A video which hopefully encourages reflective thought about both the students we teach and whether we are meeting their needs.

Digital Art & Collaborative Drawing

Best of the Web V. V

View more presentations from dkapuler.

PREZI - A PowerPoint and mind map in one

I have moved away from always using PowerPoint for my presentations. Lately I have preferred to create presentations through an online tool called Prezi. 

Essentially, Prezi is a mind map that when displayed as a presentation, zooms into individual elements of the map to concentrate the discussion around that particular element.  Text, images and video can all be embedded into the mind map.  Students have found the presentation more dynamic and report that seeing the entire concept or topic initially helps them to contextualise the information that normally appears on individual PowerPoint slides.

This video (found on the Prezi website) does a better job at demonstrating the features and potential of using Prezi. 

Free Learning Tools

Take a look at the list of free learning tools found on the Learn Central website. Among the list of 152 tools there's bound to be one you have been looking for.