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Haiku Deck for Great Presentations

Sep 16th, 2012
by Polly-Alida Farrington.
1 comment

Haiku Deck is the simple new way to create stunning presentations – whether you are pitching an idea, teaching a lesson, telling a story, or igniting a movement, it’s fast, fun and simple for anyone to use.

I know, I fall in love with apps easily and Haiku Deck is my latest love. It’s an  iPad app for creating great presentations, quickly and easily. Type in a few words and Creative Commons photos are retrieved to be used as the background for your slides.  Each slide can only accommodate a few words, which fits right in with Presentation Zen concepts of simpler, more meaningful slides that enhance, rather than overwhelm your presentation.  You can also use your own images that are on your iPad.

Slide decks can be shown from your iPad or exported to PowerPoint. The iPad share menu also posts to Facebook & Twitter. You can also access your decks via  the HaikuDeck web page. From here you can download a slidedeck as a a PDF, share via some additional social networks, leave comments on public slidedecks and get a snippet of code to embed the slidedeck on other sites.  (I’m having trouble embedding anything here on a WordPress site though.  A link to one instead: http://haikudeck.com/p/e1ulaBH3uY/)

This would be a great tool to use with kids and teens, since it won’t find anything but Creative Commons licensed photos. No more struggling  through dreadful Google Image search results and wondering who really owns an image that you want to use.  One caution though, the image source info is available when you’re viewing a slidedeck on an iPad, but that information seems to disappear when exported to PowerPoint or downloaded as a PDF. It would be great if there was a final slide that included the credits for each image and/or an option to place the source in tiny print somewhere on the slide.

The app is free and comes with a choice of several free styles and fonts. There are also some premium themes available for $1.99.

(via: Linda Braun)

Pinterest: curation, image sharing, collaborating, bookmarking & obsession

Feb 14th, 2012
by Polly-Alida Farrington.
3 comments

Like so many other folks, I’m having a lot of fun with Pinterest. When it released invitations last spring, I grabbed one and included it in my school library workshops as a way for students to gather images and curate collections of ideas for projects. But mostly I tried to forget that I knew about it, it was just too much fun and tempting to spend far too much time there. Fast forward….. interest in Pinterest has exploded and finally a client asked me to use it for a legit work purpose, really. Thank you Karen!

This week I set up an account for your NYS Summer Reading program and added boards for programming ideas, crafts and book trailer videos. The idea is to have folks collaborate and add pins with fun ideas. And after the experience of setting up this account and starting to add collaborators, I wanted to share the tips I learned about Pinterest. Or maybe I’m just justifiying playing with it some more. Whatever!

What is Pinterest?

Not familiar with Pinterest? It’s an image-based social network where members set up pinboards for their favorite obsessions and interests and add photos and images that (in theory, more on that later) link back to the original source of the image. If I see a craft project that has a fabulous image to go with it, I can pin that image on my Crafts board and share it with others. Pinterest doesn’t have a private board option, so everyone in the world can see everything you post.

Pinterest is… Social networking, image sharing, collaboration, social bookmarking, curation…. a little bit of everything. In the US, Pinterest is incredibly popular with woman who are interested in crafts, home, fashion, etc. (more…)

iDoneThis

Jan 5th, 2012
by Polly-Alida Farrington.
Comments are off for this post

iDoneThis

Will I ever catch up and finish this challenge before it’s over? Day 10 of #blog12daysxmas was 2 days ago. I think the challenge is probably over in Australia, since it’s already Day 12 there! A quick post then.

iDoneThis is a handy tool that might help you keep track of what you’ve done everyday. You receive an email every day asking what you’ve gotten done that day. Just  reply with a list of what you’ve done and it goes on your private calendar on the iDoneThis website.

Handy, simple, fits in with my work flow.

 

Sharing with Evernote public folders

Jan 2nd, 2012
by Polly-Alida Farrington.
2 comments

I’m a day or two behind, but I’m catching up – this is for Day 6 of #blog12daysxmas!

Evernote is one of several tools that help keep me organized. And that’s saying a lot. In 1977, I applied to library school after reading the course catalog and thinking I might become an organized person. Didn’t happen! Sure, I can organize my work life, projects, schedules, complicated trips, other people, but not my own little world of notes, papers, ideas, etc. But finally, with Evernote, I almost always know where I can find what I need. Since it synchronizes information with all my computers and other devices, I always have access to the information I need, wherever I am.

Beyond keeping notes, photos, ideas, etc organized, I love being able to selectively share folders full of information.  In Evernote, folders can be totally private, totally public or open only to selected people.   This is handy for sharing information with selected family members, ideas for trips with friends, notes for a project with colleagues, etc.  And one of my favorite uses is sharing recipes with friends. I’ve also found a few twitter friends who are sharing their recipes, and since these folders have unique RSS feeds, I’ve popped those feeds into Google Reader to aggregate all those recipes. Handy!

For students who are already using Evernote to clip and save information from the web, shared folders become an easy way for teachers to keep track of student progress.

I’ll post more about Evernote in the future. In the meantime, go try it.

ifttt sends my Summify updates to Instapaper

Dec 29th, 2011
by Polly-Alida Farrington.
1 comment

Dcoffeeay 4 of #blog12daysxmas and that means it’s already 1/3 over. Maybe this is a challenge I can actually meet?

Yesterday I posted about Summify, a tool for monitoring social media for the  articles and links being shared by people in your social networks.

Today I want to share two more tools,  ifttt  and Instapaper, that help me keep up with reading those articles from Summify and other sources. (more…)

Summify is good for my blood pressure

Dec 28th, 2011
by Polly-Alida Farrington.
3 comments
Stressed Girl by mitopencourseware, on Flickr
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License  by  mitopencourseware 

It’s day 3 of  #blog12daysxmas and I have a confession.  I don’t visit my Google Reader account as often as I would like to. Some days (weeks?) are just so busy & I run out of brain cells.

And then there are the tons of great articles and links flying past in Twitter & Facebook every day too.  Thankfully there some free tools to help deliver just the “best of” what your community is sharing.

Summify is one of those tools and the one I’ve been relying on the most lately. It monitors your Twitter, Facebook & Google Reader accounts and filters out the dreck. It then delivers a limited number of articles. As you select articles to read, Summify learns more about what you like and don’t like. (more…)

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