Students of almost every discipline use flashcards to help them master the terms and concepts of their courses. Quizlet, an online flashcard creation tool, takes those 3×5 index cards to a whole new level. Not only does Quizlet support the creation of “traditional” flashcards—index cards with a term on one side and its definition on the other—but it can also generate tests and learning activities using the user’s list of terms. Quizlet’s built-in translator and dictionary make it especially useful for the study of foreign languages and vocabulary, and its symbols and accent feature makes it equally useful for courses in math, logic, statistics, and chemistry. And there are thousands of user-created lists already publicly available; with Quizlet, students don’t even need to spend time creating the study resource—they can just start studying!
Posts Tagged ‘web’
Tell Your Students about Quizlet!
Work with Files Across the Internet
Why waste the time to set this up? Why not just work with your files via FTP? Trust me, if you are a Mac user and do any work on fileservers / web hosts across the internet [such as accessing your University of Michigan IFS space] this tip can save you lots of time. And its free.
If you do any web design / development you are likely very familiar with juggling files via FTP and your editor of choice. Some editors have very nice integration with some form of file handling. I will commend Dreamweaver and Coda for this. My choice however is TextMate. TextMate has no integrated file handling. What is a guy to do.
After some digging I came across MacFUSE and Macfusion.
Macfusion is an open source Mac application that allows you to work with files on servers across the internet, as if they were sitting on your computer. – Macfusion’s web site
This means that it is now possible to mount your web hosted drive as a local disk. Read the rest of this entry »
EmbedPlus Adds Extra Video Controls to YouTube Embeds
Embedding YouTube videos is a pretty useful feature, but it only gives you basic player controls. With EmbedPlus, you can start your videos at a certain time, skip self-defined chapters, add annotations, zoom, and more to tweak the video to your liking.
If you’re sharing your own video, you probably don’t need anything extra, but when you share other people’s videos, sometimes you want to tweak the video—start it at a certain point, ignore more boring parts of the video, or just add notes to the video to get your point across. YouTube doesn’t let you do this, but free service EmbedPlus adds these and some other pretty neat features to YouTube embeds.
To embed a YouTube video with EmbedPlus, just grab the YouTube link of the original video you want to share, paste it into EmbedPlus, and tweak the size, start time, and scene markers for your video. It’ll give you a new embed code that you can paste into your blog, PowerPoint, or another social network. Hit the link to check it out.
[via lifehacker]
Issuu
Issuu is a digital publishing platform that is used by a large number of publishers to publish their magazines, catalogs, and newspapers. Issuu includes an inbuilt exceptional browser that allows for life like browsing of magazines. It also includes an ability to download a published document in PDF format. Issuu allows the publication of a large number of documents. It boasts, as of date, 33 million monthly readers with over 2.4 billion impressions a month and nearly 250, 000 new publications per month. Issuu has won various awards including being one of the TIMES top 50 websites of 2009 alongside such websites as Google, Flickr, Facebook.
Issuu implements a highly realistic and customizable viewing of publications which includes items such as portfolios, books, magazine issues, newspapers, catalogues, brochures, reports and various other print media. Issuu integrates itself with various social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to promote publications uploaded onto its website. The publications on Issuu can be viewed online and downloaded if allowed. The view itself of the publication is animated with page flips and can be easily viewed in any web browser on a full screen. It is an immensely popular website that also allows users to engage with the publications and publishers thus allowing the publishers to build and increase their audience. Read the rest of this entry »
SlideRocket brings web presentations to iPhone and iPad with HTML5
Since the dawn of time, traveling professionals have sought easier ways to present on the go. Pico projectors! Netbooks! Converting presentations to video to show them on iPhones! Then there was Keynote on the iPad, and it was good. Not great, however: presenters with libraries of PPT content have had to convert them over, and keeping your decks up to date with the latest and greatest from the sales department is a drag. Wouldn’t it be better and easier if there was a nice cloud-based solution that played well with Mobile Safari?
Enter SlideRocket’s new HTML5 player; the freemium web service now supports playing back (not editing) presentations on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch with full-screen video, a handful of good-looking builds and transitions, and all the analytics and version control you want. While the normal SlideRocket player requires Flash or AIR to show content, this one works fine without them. Read the rest of this entry »
Draw on and Annotate Any Web Site
The Markup.io bookmarklet turns any web page into a whiteboard where you can draw, type notes, and easily share your annotations with others.
From any web page, click the Markup.io bookmarklet to get started. Markup.io’s editing tools are layered over the site and you can draw shapes, create text notes, and alter the size of text, borders, and lines. When you’re done you simply click Publish and share the URL with your friends, coworkers, or anyone else you want to share your annotations with. Anyone who visits the link can view your notes and choose to respond, either layering their notes over yours or creating a fresh MarkUp. The people you share the link with don’t need to have the bookmark, Markup.io gives them a quick summary of what’s going on, invites them into the editing process, and automatically loads the Markup.io editing tools.
[via Lifehacker]
iDevice Bookmarklets
If you’re a fan of bookmarklets (as I am) and also have an iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch (which I do), this may interest you!
First, what exactly are bookmarklets?
A bookmarklet is a small JavaScript program that can be stored as a URL within a bookmark in most popular web browsers, or within hyperlinks on a web page. Because Microsoft Internet Explorer uses the term favorites instead of bookmarks, bookmarklets are also less commonly called favlets or favelets.
Bookmarklets can be saved and used like normal web page bookmarks. Therefore, they are simple “one-click” tools that can add substantial functionality to the browser. For example, they can:▪ Modify the way a web page is displayed within the browser (i.e., change the font size, background color, etc.).▪ Extract data from a web page (i.e., hyperlinks, images, text, etc.).▪ Jump directly to a search engine, with the search term(s) input either from a new dialog box, or from a selection already made on a web page.▪ Submit the page to a validation service. [via wordiQ]
I took a few minutes to copy the Javascript from all my bookmarklets and made this iPhone/iPad formatted page with all the Javascript in a selectable textarea for each bookmarklet. This way I could open up the page on my gadgets, and in about 5 minutes have all of my important bookmarklets loaded into Safari on both my iPad and my iPhone.
I know this is far from ideal, and even further from anything resembling a solution, but until some smart person comes up with a way around this, or until Apple adds some better bookmark management or add-on capabilities to mobile Safari this will have to do for now.
Readability
As we browse the internet, often pages come up that are cluttered with advertisements, links, and other unnecessary items. This can make it difficult and distracting to read the content you wanted in the first place.
This is where Readability comes in. Readability is a web site that will let you easily strip down the information on any web page to just show the basic content. You first choose the options you prefer: style, size, and margin. It then creates a custom bookmarklet that you can easily add to your bookmarks or bookmarks toolbar. Once the bookmarklet has been installed, just click it on any web page. It will get rid of the clutter and allow easier reading. Those with poor eye sight can also use this tool to enlarge the displayed text.
It’s free of charge so I recommend checking it out!
§pecial Çharacters
Ever want to use special characters in a document, blog post, or tweet? I’ve got just the website for you. CopyPasteCharacter.com is a simple website that allows you to click on any of the available special characters (they are copied to the clipboard automatically) and then paste them into whatever you’re working on.
There are also a few extra features to this site. If you want to copy more than one character at a time, either hold “alt” on a PC or “option” on a Mac and click on as many characters as you want. They’ll all be copied to your clipboard so you can paste them in any application. The website even works on the iPhone, so all of you mobile “tweeters” can easily add smiley faces and snowmen to your posts.
