My StoryMaker

A web app that allows students to create simple animated stories using a drag and drop interface:

http://www.carnegielibrary.org/kids/storymaker/

http://www.carnegielibrary.org/kids/storymaker/embed.cfm

"You have the power to decide -- choosing characters, taking them on adventures and creating your very own story along the way. my StoryMaker® lets you control characters and objects -- and it creates sentences for you! Or, you can enter your own words. Once you are done with your story, you can print it out."

One thing I noticed when using this app: If you accidentally press the "end" button while creating your story, it is immediately "published" and then cannot be edited any further.

The app is able to generate a "magic code" which enables users to view or print their completed story at a later time.

Linking to Youtube with a specific Start and End time

Sometimes it can be useful to be able to link to a specific part of a Youtube video. Luckily, it is possible to send a video link with a specific start and end time.

Linking a specific start time is very simple, and is actually built into the "share" function on the Youtube video page. Below the any given video, click on the "share" tab, then look for the "start at" check box:

When you share this link, the video will start at the specified time for the viewer.



Specifying an end time is a little bit trickier, since we need to add the start and end time to the URL ourselves.

Adding the end time only seems to work if you are using the embed link (NOT the share link). Navigate to the "embed" tab and you'll see a long line of HTML code. For example:

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/0Bmhjf0rKe8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>


Normally this line is for embedding the video into a webpage. Copy out the Youtube link from there (see example below).

www.youtube.com/embed/0Bmhjf0rKe8

To add the start and end time, we need to add it to the end of our Youtube link. Both the start and the end at counted in seconds, so a start time of 10 means it will start 10 seconds into the video, and a start time of 120 will start 2 minutes into the video. The format for this looks like this:

?start=10&end=15

Adding the above line to the end of our video link tells the website to start the video at 10 seconds in, and end it 15 seconds in. The full link would look like this.

www.youtube.com/embed/0Bmhjf0rKe8?start=10&end=15

MAPfrappe - Getting some Cartographic Perspective

An interesting website that is somewhat narrow in it's application, MAPfrappe lets users create outlines one one "map" and compare it to a second location around the world. The app automatically compensates for the slight size distortions at different latitudes which come out of how Google displays it's maps

MAPfrappe could be useful to share with a class studying Canada, or as a way to give students a direct sense of scale when discussing different countries around the world.

WordPress - Adding Newsletters to your Sidebar

I have written a short tutorial in Google Docs on how to create a new sidebar in WordPress to hold your newsletters or other uploaded documents.

Using Keepvid for the Classroom

Keepvid is a website and bookmark applet that lets you download videos from streaming video sites such as Youtube for offline use. This can be a lifesaver for teachers wanting to show video clips, while not being at the mercy of their internet connection which regular streaming necessitates. Personally, there have been more than a few times where I have tried to rely on streaming video, only to see that the video has been taken down, or that the internet connection is being unreliable again at the exact time I am trying to use it.

All you need to do is enter the link of the video you want to download, and then choose what quality you want the video to be. Higher quality will result in a larger file.

One thing to note when using this site is the often misleading download links. There are ads placed around the page that have big green "download now" buttons, but aren't what you should be clicking. The above image does a good job of pointing out where you should and shouldn't be looking.

Wonderopolis in the classroom

Wonderopolis is a website that posts daily "wonders" - questions submitted to the site and voted on by the community. These questions range from "Why does popcorn pop?" to "Where is the deepest place on earth?"

Welcome to Wonderopolis®, a place where natural curiosity and imagination lead to exploration and discovery in learners of all ages. Brought to life by the National Center for Families Learning (NCFL), our Wonders of the Day® will help you find learning moments in everyday life—ones that fit in with dinner preparations, carpool responsibilities, a stolen moment between breakfast and the bus, or within school curriculum and education programs.

Wonder is for everyone. It can happen anywhere and at anytime. Connecting the learning we do in our schools, our homes, and our communities, Wonderopolis walks the line between formal and informal education. Each day, we pose an intriguing question and explore it in a variety of ways. Our approach both informs and encourages new questions, sparking new paths of wonder and discovery in family and classroom settings.

http://wonderopolis.org/about/

To answer each "wonder" there is often a short video clip, along with a brief article discussing the topic at hand. Wonderopolis has over 1200 "wonders" already answered, and it is growing all the time.

Gibson Research on Password Strength

In the past few days I have had some questions about passwords, and I came across a great article about relative password strength with an accompanying Interactive Brute Force Password “Search Space” Calculator. This tool lets you see how tough your password is to crack if someone attempted to gain access to your account completely blind.

The bottom line is both character variety and length are important when creating a password. All those websites that force users to use "one capital letter, one number, one symbol" are definitely on to something, because it makes your password that much more difficult to break into when doing so blind. Password length also has a much bigger impact than you may realize.

For example, using the calculator, we can see that an 8 character password using at least one of each character type would take about 18 hours to crack in an offline best case scenario, but if you add just one more letter, that becomes two and a half months, and with one more letter than that, it the time to break becomes roughly 19 years! The article talks about a technique called "padding", where you simply add a string of easy-to-remember characters to an already easy to remember password to create a secure password.


Trying out some passwords on this calculator and having this discussion in the classroom could be useful for upper intermediate students who may start (or have already started) creating their own online accounts sometime in the near future.

Haiku Deck for education

Here is something that I've shared with several teachers already - presentation software called Haiku deck. Created for with both iPad and desktops, it's a very easy to use app that has multiple uses in education as either an instructional tool for teachers or a platform for students to share their learning. It makes it very easy to make striking presentations without having to touch PowerPoint.

https://www.haikudeck.com/

Haiku deck recently featured 10 ways Haiku Deck can be used in education to get the ideas flowing.

https://www.haikudeck.com/10-ways-to-use-haiku-deck-in-education-education-presentation-qo8iVGkRKI

If you want to have students use Haiku Deck to make their own presentations, there are some clever ways to set up a classroom account that keeps everything in one place using the "+" feature of gmail email addresses. More here:

http://blog.haikudeck.com/haiku-deck-education-accounts/