Don't be outfoxed. Foxit!

Several months ago I was ranting about a problem with my browser; it had frequent problems and I suspected that it had something to do with Adobe software incompatibility issues. PLN to the rescue, and Cherry Matthew mentioned that he'd stopped using Adobe Reader some while ago and had opted for something called Foxit instead. 

And there I was thinking that Acrobat was the only free pdf reader available! Silly me. After the usual barrage of Q&As, I decided to put it to the test. I might have tested a few others, but I honestly can't remember. Whatever the case, it was Foxit Reader which remains on the computer.

Originally, all I wanted was to have a PDF reader which wouldn't clash with my browser, and which was light and fast. But if you use pdfs as much as I do, then you may lament the difficulty of scrolling up and down pages, you may miss sticking Post-its or scribbling notes like you could do in books, and suffer the tediousness in keeping track of documents if you're in the habit of having several open at the same time, etc.

I, therefore, didn't take long to try out some of the tempting buttons on the toolbar and once I started using them, there's no turning back. I'll outline just some of them here. Incidentally, Foxit is also available on mobile devices. And, in case you're wondering, you don't need to have Foxit to be able to see the annotations; in other words, they can be seen by other readers.

Typewriter

Type directly onto the document. Great for writing answers on exercises.

Note

Pin a note. Unlike Post-its, these aren't likely to disappear! This and the typewriter function are probably the ones I use most. The great advantage is that it can be moved out of the document, so you can have notes on both sides of the screen, away from the original words/images. What you can't do is to edit individual words within the note; for example, if you wish to highlight some words or use a different font, you can't.

I've requested this function so I'm hoping Foxit can and will allow it. Another function I've requested is to be able to write phonetic scripts, something which isn't supported right now.

Highlight

For those of you who are fond of using markers, fret not! This one's especially for you. There are two places you can do this from - in the comment menu, it's on the left, and in the home menu it's towards the centre. You can also change the colour & opacity by right-clicking on your highlighted area, then choose properties.

Drawing

You can draw circles, squares, rectangle, polygon, you can draw lines or arrows, multiple lines or freeform.

Textboxes and Callouts

These have to be within the document but have the added advantage of giving you the ability to edit individual words within the box (see Note section above).

Pin an image

You may wish to include an image on the document. You can do this by using the Image Annotation on the right of the toolbar. To see the original size, however, you'll have to click on the Image Annotation button, right click on the image, choose properties. Go to Settings.

Bookmarks

Adding a bookmark is easy. You can use the functions on the navigation panel on the left, on the top toolbar in home menu, or Ctrl B. However, I find moving the bookmarks up or down somewhat problematic as Foxit has the habit of nesting the bookmark within where you drop it off. The way I get around this problem is to move it all the way to the top and then move it down again to where I want it.

There isn't a sort function either. To avoid these problems, remember that Foxit adds the new bookmark after the one you last clicked on. In other words, before you add a bookmark, click on the bookmark after which you want to add the new one.

Navigating the document

I used to find navigating on PDFs a messy chore on Acrobat. Foxit's hand function is wonderful - works like a touch screen - so much so that I often try to use it on Google Docs and feel disappointed when I realise that the capability doesn't exist there!

Alternatively, you can just use the standard page up/down or the arrow up/down for more minuscule movements.

Furthermore, Foxit allows tabbed browsing, so jumping from one document to another is a breeze; just remember to save your modifications although you will be reminded if you have made any unsaved changes.

Printing/Sharing

Of course, you may not want to share all the annotations you've made on the document. You may want to share a document and your notes with a colleague or you may want to print some pages (without your comments) for your students. You have 3 options of printing: document, document & annotations and annotations only. Having a toggle function where you can make the annotations disappear would be great if you want to beam up, say, some exercises, and then toggle on the answers. I've also requested this feature.

Other functions

There are loads of other buttons you can play with. You can link to websites, insert video, copy texts and images, etc. Copying doesn't always work because of the nature of the pdf format. Having said that, it's certainly easier to copy on Foxit than Adobe! You can either select text or do a snapshot. If I managed to copy texts, what I usually do is to paste them onto Notepad and rectify any discrepancies.

Manual

For the official manual, click here.

Feedback

So, what do you think? Are you using Foxit already? If you are, what do you most like/dislike about it? If you aren't, what do you find most attractive about it?

RSCON5: Maxis and Minis

This year, the free Reform Symposium Conference will be held over the weekend of 11th to 13th July. The interesting addition is that prior to the marathon event, there are 2 mini half-day conferences, one of which was held on 6th April. Unfortunately, that coincided with the IATEFL in Harrogate but recordings are available here. If you'd missed that, you might want to get involved with the next one, to be held on Sun 6th May. Take a look here to see the exact time in your city.

What’s happening in this MiniCon?

For starters, we have teacher-poet Chaouki M'kaddem to open the event for us.

Chaouki will hand the mic over to super tech guru Steve Wheeler, more famously, perhaps, known as @timbuckteeth. Needless to say, we’re over the moon to have Steve as our keynote.

Following this, we’ll have 7 inspirers who will give a 3-5 minute sneak peek at their forthcoming presentations in RSCON5. We had 8 in April’s MiniCon and we ran a little over time, so we’re reducing it to the magical number of seven. These speakers have yet to be decided. If you’d like to be one of them, go here.

To wind up the half-day event, and leave you wanting more ;) tech smackdown comes on. Here, in just 2 minutes (per person), enthusiasts introduce us to their favourite app or web tool and tell us what’s so good about it. If you’re passionate about a tool, why don’t you tell the world? Fill in the form here.

For all other information, please visit Future of Education.

See you there!

#ELTChat January Blog Challenge: How do you manage your bookmarks?

I've been meaning to write on something like this for some time, but like a lot of my ideas, it was gradually heading towards oblivion - when one tries to juggle too many balls, some of them are bound to fall, aren't they? - until I saw @tarabenwell's tweet on an #ELTChat blog challenge: What are the best methods for organising bookmarks?

Seeing that it was Tara who proposed the challenge, she was the first to take it on, and her favourite is Scoop.It. You can read about her ten reasons here.

Unfortunately, I'd missed the chat on the advantages and disadvantages of social networking for language teachers, but I saw some of the chatters' favourite bookmarkers here.

If you're reading this, you are probably one of those who finds it increasingly challenging to be able to read everything you would like to, and, no doubt, you spend more time skimming than reading, and if you're quite organised, you might bookmark some for archiving or for reading later.

Well, that's what I do. I used to use the browser's bookmark feature until I had just so many bookmarks that I hardly looked at them unless I was trying to find a website I'd forgotten.

I'd also used Google Reader, but I found I stopped going through the list after a while. I'd also dipped my fingers in Delicious, Diigo, Livebinders, but none of them lasted very long for me.

I like Scoop.it, and I can understand Tara's choice, but, unfortunately, it only allows five topics for the free version. Scoop.it is fabulous, and I use it, but not for day-to-day bookmarking, not for sifting through all the stuff I want or may want to read.

So, what do I use? Which are my current favourites?

For indexing useful ELT resources, apart from Scoop.it, I use my Useful Resources page; I categorise them under meaningful headings, its weakness being I have to do it manually. Still, I think it's a good place to have them for myself and to share with others.

I'm scratching the surface with Evernote, but it has so many possibilities that I'm afraid it may get so overwhelming and may follow the footsteps of the others I've used. I'm trying not to put too much stuff on it, but just my to-do list alone threatens to fill up pages, and what I don't see I tend to forget!

I still use my Chrome bookmarks, especially the bar, where I put things I'd like to get to easily. When they are no longer required as frequently, and if I remember, I remove them. I also use the option where Chrome reopens all previous unclosed tabs upon reboot, but this gets cluttered up pretty quickly, so I put it all in a folder called 'Pending' until...

A few weeks ago, I discovered this new tool, which is just perfect as a complement to the others I'm using. I tweeted about it, but none of my followers seemed to have pick up on it.

It's called Read It Later, and claims to work in your tablets, mobiles, browsers, and more. I've only been using it on my Chrome browser. It offers the all-important one-click button on your bookmark bar: click it and that page gets filed on your read-later list. When you've finished, tick it off and it disappears from the list. The tool's getting a facelift, and below I've included two different ways of looking at your list.

So, there you have it. Yes, I cheated - I didn't choose one, but these are what I'm using at this moment. To sum up:

1. Read it Later: used mainly for pages I intend to read in the short term. However, I noticed that the list has extended to two pages, which means I've slacked!

2. Evernote: I pile up my things-to-do here. I'm starting to bookmark some web pages here, too, so it could very well be where I 'archive' them after I ticked them off #1.

3. Chrome bookmarks: I don't close the tabs of pages I haven't "finished with" so that they reopen automatically the following day. When they stay too long, they get moved to #1.

4. Scoop.It: The five topics only means that it is the first to go if I had to make a choice, much as I love it. I've used up the five topics - I didn't know about the limit when I started. Perhaps I might have done it differently had I known, but I don't feel like changing now. These are pages I share with others.

5. The other place where I can readily share my bookmarks is my Useful Resources page. Added 22/01/2012: I'd forgotten to mention that I follow so many blogs that it does get out of hand, so I created a blog to follow their feeds; when I have some spare time, or I'm looking for a person's blog and can't remember what it's called, I go to http://chiewpang.blogspot.com/ Take a look!

So, what are the tools you use for bookmarking? How do you organise the information bombarding us from all angles?

Best 7 of 11 stitched up

Just as you thought it was safe to store away all your PCs for the festive break, along comes yet another tool to help enrich your browsing experience. Will it? Or will it stay stitched up? Take a look at a quick Stich.It of the best 7 of 2011 of this blog. If you disagree, I'd love to hear from you!

Top Tools for Learning 2011

C4LPT (Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies), run by Jane Hart, is taking votes for their annual Top 100 Tools for Learning. This is the fifth time they'll be compiling the list, and voting closes on Sunday 13th Nov. To be honest, I've never participated in their previous compilations, nor, for that matter, in any other such lists run by others. There are so many so-called tech tools for learning, that one just becomes overwhelmed, and, furthermore, it's an area that doesn't remain static. Free sites may start to charge, software disappears, but for each that dies, 5 more are born, so if you don't keep abreast of the situation, you will simply lag too far behind.

I decided to participate in this year's compilation, but I had to think long and hard for my list. My criteria may be different to that of others, though. I thought to myself, which tools are imperative to my needs? Which would cause me the worst hardship were they to be removed? Which tools do I use, day in, day out? I'm sure some of these on my list would not appear on the list of others because they're simply so taken for granted that they're no longer considered a tech tool as such!

Here are my choices, in no particular order.

1. Gmail: I've been using this since their beta days, and it's just revolutionised the way I manage my emails. Without Gmail, I don't think I'd have subscribed to so many sites, and I certainly wouldn't have been able to archive so much mail.
2. Twitter: At first, I didn't understand what the fuss was about. Who wants to know about who you're having coffee with or how many miles you've run? Who has time to read a constant barrage of 140-character snippets? This was until I decided to take a look at...
3. Tweetdeck, and when I found out that there are so many people who are using it not so much for social but for professional purposes, and when I learn about hashtags and such, I became hooked. Incidentally, Tweetdeck has been bought by Twitter a few months ago.
4. Blogger: I've seen the other platforms, and I even have two wordpress blogs, but blogger makes it to my list because of its user-friendliness and versatility. Handling widgets is a piece of cake, and even if your knowledge of HTML is null, you'll be able to get a blog up and running in no time. Wordpress, on the other hand, gets to be such a pain, sometimes. It doesn't accept iframe code, and even putting line spaces in your post becomes an art form.
5. Google Docs: I'm using this more and more, especially for written work. I hardly use paper if I can avoid it, and how many students do you know file their compositions systematically and refer back to them? Using Google Docs, they can access their past work much more easily, they can quick search for words or expressions, and if teachers use the comments feature to provide feedback, they are there for the students to refer to as and when required.
6. Scoop It: This is my latest 'toy'. I use it as a sort of bookmarking tool. With so much information available, it's hard to keep track of it. You know how it is - you come across something that is interesting, but you either have no time to study it or it isn't something that is of use now, but might be for later, so you want to save it. Bookmark it? Only to forget, months later, that you had it bookmarked? I was never fond of Diigo, and although I have stuff in Livebinders, I find I hardly refer to them. ScoopIt is fast and its layout makes it easier to find what I'm looking for, and, if you share your scoops, you'll help others find what they're looking for, too. The Internet is all about give and take! Have a look at some of my ScoopIts: Why Twitter for Teachers, or Grammar Exercises.
7. PowerPoint: Relatively easy to manage, and it's improved a lot since its inception. I don't like Prezi, to be honest. Sorry!
8. Google Search: How did we find information before Google? Can you imagine life without Google Search? A lifesaver in many occasions. The world at our fingertips, literally.
9. Wikipedia: Encyclopaedia for the masses. Fundamental.
10. Audacity: A basic (and, importantly, free) sound editing tool which I use quite a bit.

      

RSCON3: 3rd Reform Symposium e-Conference 29th - 31st July 2011

The Net is buzzing with excitement at the prospect of the 3rd Reform Symposium e-Conference, organised by teachers for teachers, to be held over 3 days from 29 - 31 July. It's free, naturally. Their last conference, held earlier this year in January, managed to attract over 4,100 teachers from 80 countries. This time, they're hoping to gather 8,000! Are you going to miss out? I've embedded two of their flyers for you to distribute among your friends, colleagues, and schools - the first one is a one-page version, and the other is a comprehensive five-page one.

The main focus this year is on how teachers can create engaging and motivating lessons.

I'll be presenting on Sat 30th July. I hope to see you there!

RSCON Flyer One Page Version

The Reform Symposium Free Online Conference Flyer for Schools

Fantastic new tool for annotating web pages

Scrible (with one 'b') is a fantastic tool for both students and teachers, fantastic if you surf the Net a lot, especially for research. Imagine if you could do to the web page that you're reading what you do to your research material. Well, with Scrible, you can. It's a great piece of online software which allows you to scribble notes onto the web page itself, highlight sections, save the edited page in your library for use later, and share it with your friends. They'd need to sign in first, though. (And, no, I don't get paid for saying all this, in case you're wondering).

Your annotations are automatically added to a table of keys (legends), to which you can add your own descriptions, for example, you could assign red notes as URGENT, blue notes as INTERESTING, yellow highlights as NEEDS CHECKING, etc.

The free version of Scrible, at the moment, gives you 125 megabytes of space for you to save your files.

If you'd like to see an example of an annotated page, I've been testing it on this blog itself, providing instructions on how to navigate around it. You can see it here. (You'll have to sign up first - it's free). You can move the notes around simply by clicking and dragging (in case there are overlapping notes). Be warned that the notes are sometimes moved a little after saving, so they may not be exactly where you had them originally.

To start using it is really easy. No installation is required. Go to https://www.scrible.com/tools. You can add the Scrible toolbar as a "bookmarklet". Just click and drag the button which says "scrible Toolbar" to your bookmarks bar as shown in the image below.

If you have done it successfully, you should now be able to see "scrible Toolbar" on your bookmarks bar. You can click and drag it to wherever you want on the bar.

To begin, click on this, and after a few seconds you'll see a floating Scrible (I wish they'd spelt it with 2 b's!) toolbar.

You're now ready to start using it.

To add notes, just click on the notes icon, and you'll see the icon following your mouse. You'll find that Scrible starts to highlight the texts where your mouse moves to. Click again when the text you want your notes to refer to is highlighted. A text box should appear near your selection. Write your notes, and repeat process to add more notes.

The other features, such as highlighting, changing fonts, etc. work the same way. Your files are saved automatically, but you can save it under a different name - just click on the floppy drive icon as shown in the image below. To share the annotated file with your friends, click on the envelope icon.

Since Scrible saves your work automatically, check your library often to make sure there are only stuff that you want, and delete the rest.

Scrible is in public beta stage, so if you find problems, or have any suggestions for improvement, just let them know.

What do you think of Scrible? Please leave your comments below.

Related posts:

Is this the best interactive multilingual dictionary?

How to organise your bookmarks

Creating interactive mind maps

Transcribing texts to phonetic symbols

Photos + Mind Map = Ideas on a Silver Platter

A few weeks ago, I suggested some ideas for a lesson based on a close-up image - if you've missed it, I suggest you read that first. Click here to read it.

I snapped this shot today, and I thought I'd share some more ideas with you all. Between this and the previous article, I think you'll get an idea how you can start your students speaking on any picture. Ask them to share a picture from their mobile phones, and build a lesson from that. If you use these photos & my ideas for a lesson, don't just stop at the end. Ask your class to bring a photo, preferably one they took, and invent a story around it. This can be done in groups. You can re-distribute the photos at random. When they've finished, they can tell the whole class their story, and, in the end, they can decide which group has invented the best story.

If you prefer to use photos taken by others, you can find more like these in our group ELTPics in Flickr. You can join us in Twitter. Upload your photos with the hash tag #eltpics, and one of the lovely lady moderators will add them to the sets.

I've decided to relay my ideas in the form of a mind map this time. In fact, you can, if you wish, do the mind-mapping activity from scratch with the whole class. Just use my prompts whenever you're stuck. To use this mind-mapping tool, see here.

Photo 1

To zoom in on the map, use your scroll dial, or click on the '+' or '-' sign on the top left. You can then drag the image left and right. If you prefer, click here to see the full version.

Photo 2

Photo 3

Photo 4

If you've used these photos/ideas, please share your experience with others. Perhaps, you even get your students to share their thoughts and feelings.

Related posts:

How to create an interactive mind map for use in the classroom

Speaking lesson using close-ups

Ideas for practising dialogues

Comic strips for dialogue

Using Geocam for speaking

Is this the best interactive multilingual dictionary?

When Russell Stannard says Lingro is the best site he's discovered this year, then one can't help but to sit up and take notice. And took notice was what I did and duly put it through its paces. Russell, as usual, has done a fantastic training video on it, and you can watch it here.

Lingro is basically a dictionary, but a dictionary with a difference. It's almost like having a dictionary beside you while you surf the web, except searching is almost instant. Here are its features:

• It allows you to load a web page, or a document (.txt, .doc or .pdf)  and it makes all words of the page clickable.
• It claims to have 8 million translations in 11 languages.
• If you just want a plain old dictionary, it claims to be the fastest multilingual dictionary on the web. Definitions appear as you type.
• It remembers all the words you look up, allowing you to review and study them
• It also keeps the sentences in which the word you looked for appeared
• You can also play games with your stored words
• You can organise your words into different lists
• If a word isn't in the dictionary, you can collaborate by adding the meaning. I've already added some.

Russell was right, Lingro is indeed fantastic. However, perfection doesn't exist, so expect the odd problem here and there, such as occasional sluggish response (especially in Chrome - the problem Chrome has with Flash is quite well-known). Here are a few other reservations I have:

• Although you can browse around a website within Lingro, you'll have to remember that to follow a link, you'll need to click the little green button which appears above the link you hover over, and which says 'Click here to open link', because, if you click on the original link, it will presume you're looking for the meaning of the word you happen to click on!
• It is only capable of looking up single words, not phrases, nor even phrasal verbs.
• Each time you look up a word, it's stored on your word history, even if you'd already looked it up before. Allow me to explain. Imagine you looked up the word 'consigna'. Maybe you clicked on it twice. You go to your word lists page, and you'll see 'consigna' in your word history list. You drag it to your 'Spanish' list. Then, maybe you click it again, just to check. Now, you drag the word from the history to the bin as you've already kept it on your 'Spanish' list. But, you'll find that the word is still on the history list! That's because since you've clicked on it a total of 3 times, you'll have to drag it to the bin 3 times! Somewhat of a pain, really.
• The sentence history is on a separate page. It would make more sense to be able to see the sentences together with the word list.

Remember that to be able to save your words, you would need to log in. I had trouble finding where to do it! It's placed (misplaced, more like it) at the bottom right.

Thanks to Russell Stannard for discovering this site. To try Lingro, click here. I think learners would love this site!

       

How to create an interactive mind map for use in the classroom, Mark II

When I published this the first time, Blogger had a crash, which lasted for two days. They had to delete some posts (including mine), but subsequently restored them. I'm not sure if the restored version is trustworthy, so I'm re-publishing this article. I also decided to add more ideas on how to use mind-maps as I know a lot of teachers just want all their stuff served on a silver platter! ;-)

I have just discovered this nifty mind-mapping tool, so I decided to put it to a quick test. It's called Bubbl.us.There are lots of things you can do with it and it's user-friendly, so it's quite easy to use. In any case, if you're in doubt, they have a comprehensive help page. If you still have problems, just write a comment below or email me.

You don't need to have an account with them to start using it. Click start, and begin clicking and typing! Among the things you can do are undo (but not redo), copy & paste, drag, change colours and size of bubbles, and linking manually.

When you've finished, you can print it.

However, if you have an account - it's free and easy as pie to set up - you can save your mind map, and share it by linking or embedding it on your own site.

I won't go into all the details as they do it better on their help page. As an example, I did a map on Asking Questions, first seen on Teaching students to ask questions, and embedded it here. To enlarge, click on the + sign on the top left, or try the scroll knob on your mouse.

There's just a slight niggle I have about it, though. When you start the tool, you may get, like I did, Adobe Flash Player asking permission to store information on your PC. I'm not sure why, so I refused it permission, but, as you can see, it didn't prevent me from creating a mind map.

So, what do you think? Do you like it?

Here are some ideas on how you can use mind-maps:

• Use it to teach pronunciation: you can do phonetics (see example of partial mind-map below), rhyming words, etc.
• Pronunciation of the ending of regular past simple
• Spelling rules, for example, plurals (see my post on plurals)
• Irregular past tenses (group similar verbs, e.g., grew-grown, flew-flown, knew-known)
• Get to know each other by doing a personal mind map (hobbies & interests - past & present, family, places travelled, etc.). Students can do it at home, then in class, beam it up and have them guess who the map belongs to.
• Group tasks. You can also map the tasks first, and the students decide themselves which tasks they prefer.
• Phrasal verbs
• Idioms
• and the most common usage - vocabulary. Encourage them to do their own at home. You can review them at random in class, and brainstorm additions to their lists.

Some people will say that digital mind maps defeat their original purpose, that each map is individualised: each one does it in their own way, the crazier it is, the better they will remember what was written. Well, if they prefer, they can print it out, and then add their own illustrations, for example.

If you only have 1 computer in class, you can make the mind-mapping a whole-class activity, but if there are more, do it in groups. Then, you can compare them and get the students to bounce ideas off each other.

 If you have other ideas on how to use mind maps in class, why don't you share it with us?

Related posts:

Pronunciation of regular past simple

Plurals Spelling Rules

Make or do

Idioms with nuts

Bathroom objects