I want to

Educational gifs

Want to teach/learn something really quickly? Educational Gifs is a great site that provides you with access to a lot of different gifs that teach or demonstrate different things. For example, how to moon walk, how shark catch their prey, light traveling through a fibre optic cable and so on. It's really interesting and I could have spent hours there. Unfortunately you can't embed, but you can link to the images. 

Connect communities with local history

History Pin is a great tool, allowing you to add photographs to a map, in order to share the history of the place that you're interested in. You can also add images to other collections. Simply look for a location that you want on the map, and see if there are any photographs which have been uploaded. If not, add your own, comment and share. Its a great tool to create a local history project for school. 

Create People Plots

Create a family tree type resource - only it's not limited to genealogy. It could be a plot of people in a band, movie or a book for example. Nice and simple to use. 

It says of itself:

• Complete control over the layout

  Unlike most family tree software, PeoplePlotr lets you
  design your own unique layout for your tree.

• Easy drag and drop interface

  Your people plots will be up and running in minutes

• Works in your browser

  There is nothing to download. Just sign up for our free
  account and get started making your plot

• Add rich media to plots

  PeoplePlotr integrates with Flickr for images
  and YouTube and Vimeo for videos

• Share your creations

  Each people plot has its own unique url
  that you can share with family, friends or colleagues

• Colours and categories

  PeoplePlotr allows you to create different categories
  for people and colour code them

Tiki-Toki timelines

If you want to create an attractive 3D timeline, then take a look at Tiki-Toki. It says of itself:

• Nothing to download

  Tiki-Toki works in your browser. Sign up for our free
  account and you can start creating a timeline now

• Stunning 3d timelines

  No other online timeline maker
  allows you to view your timelines in 3d

• Include images and videos

  Tiki-Toki provides integration with
  YouTube and Vimeo for videos

• Share timelines with anyone

  Each timeline you create has its own unique url
  that you can send to friends or colleagues

• Colours and categories

  Tiki-Toki allows you to create different categories
  for stories (events) and colour code them

Online games and activities for children

I'd like to thank Christian Roberts for the link to this resource - Online games and activities for kids. Christian had found a page on my site that provides links to educational tools and thought this would be a good addition, so his mother wrote to me to let me know. It's a great resource, with lots of links to different educational games and tools that are suitable for a wide range of ages and interests. 

Thanks for the link Christian - you get a 'hat tip' - keep up the good work, and keep looking and searching.

Create questions in YouTube videos

Blubbr is a tool that allows you to create quiz questions when you're playing around with YouTube videos. It looks reasonably straightforward, and would appeal to teachers for example, but I'm a little concerned to see that they're asking for donations to keep it running. 

Zaption for training videos

If you're a teacher and you want to include questions, quizzes and discussion points in your classrooms, take a look at Zaption. It allows you to include all of these into your videos and more. There are both free and commercial versions of the product. 

eduCanon; add interactivity to your videos

eduCanon is a really nice, simple and free tool that can be used to enhance the videos that you create. It's made by teachers for teachers. You can choose an existing video, bring it into the eduCanon dashboard, add in questions in various formats, choose the appropriate actions to use for the responses and you're ready to go.

Thinglink for interactive presentations

One of the problems with traditional presentation formats such as PowerPoint is that they are linear. This can be a real issue when you're flexible about how you run a training session, and this is where Thinglink comes into play. It's based on the concept of adding information to images with hotspots. You can create your presentation based around the image and add options to follow someone/thing on Twitter, like a Facebook page, go to a specific URL, play a video and so on. I've worked with it briefly and produced an example. It's very simple and easy to use, with lots of examples of things you might want to try yourself. This would be a great tool to use in conjunction with an infographic.

SMS conversation generator

Like those amusing little discussions on smartphones? Want to make your own? Then try the SMS conversation generator. Simply type in a conversation, then save it, and embed it. Great for pretend conversations, discussions that may or may not have taken place in history, or for cinema quotes: