Atomic Learning

Prezi

I've used Atomic Learning before, and love that it has so much to offer.  Today, I viewed a lot of Prezi tutorials.  As is the norm with Atomic Learning, they had something for everyone.  They had tutorials for beginners as well as those who are familiar with Prezi.

One thing that I learned from the "Downloading a portable Prezi for presenting" tutorial is that you can download a Prezi without buying Prezi Desktop.  I was surprised, because I had heard that the only way to do this was to buy Prezi Desktop.  These versions of the files are not editable.  Embedded movies from sites like YouTube will work if there is an Internet connection.

We have some tech-savvy teachers at my school that already use Prezi.  We also have some novices that are truly trying to integrate new technologies into their classrooms.  One of these novices was so proud of himself when he had created his first Prezi.  He had it all ready to go.  Then the school's network went down, and he was left with nothing.  Of course he had another plan, but he wanted to introduce the day's topic with Prezi.

To prevent situations like that from happening in the future, I will make sure that Prezi-using teachers are aware of how to download a portable Prezi for presenting.

Delicious

My favorite Delicious tutorial was "Displaying tags using the tag rolls option."  I had always seen word clouds on websites and blogs before.  I'd even used some word cloud generators before.  But I didn't even know that one could create a word cloud based on Delicious tags.  I can see this being useful, possibly on my blog.  Anywhere that tech users visit to learn more about technology, this application of tag clouds could be beneficial.

ActivInspire Pro

A teacher at my school approached me with a question regarding his Promethean Board last Friday.  He heard that it was possible for him to record his lecture in advance for a day that he wouldn't be at school.  I own Camtasia Studio, but doubt that I could get my school to buy it for him.  I know that there are some open source solutions, but wanted to first give ActivInspire (the company that makes Promethean Boards) a chance first.  This tutorial showed me that it is in fact possible (and easy) for this teacher to record his lecture as an .avi file.  I figured it had to be possible, but I was surprised that it was so easy!