Digital Tools for Teaching and Learning in PBS LearningMedia

In these short video tutorials from KQED learn the basics for how to use free online tools for teaching and learning. The following tools can be incorporated into the classroom to convey information visually, make  persuasive arguments and allow for a variety of collaborative opportunities.

How to Create an Interactive Image with Thinglink
In this short video learn how to create annotated images with Thinglink. Thinglink is an online tool that lets you annotate images with text and media. It’s a simple, easy to use tool that can help you transform a single still image into a rich source of information. There’s a million different ways you could use this, but this video will overview the basic authoring techniques and then leave it up to you to find great ways of putting it to use for your own needs and goals!

Collaborative Website Building With Tumblr
Tumblr is a hugely popular, highly social blogging platform with an emphasis on images.  It is a great tool because it’s free, easy to use and a lot of fun.  Many Tumblr sites are dedicated to gathering and sharing images on a particular theme.  Lots of individual users use them for social networking, and it is also common for groups and businesses to use them as part of their online identity and for social marketing outreach.  With a little bit of extra know-how, Tumblr can be a powerful tool for collaborative website building.
To get started, head over to www.tumblr.com, click the ‘sign up’ button and then follow along with this video tutorial.

How to Make an Infographic with Easel.ly
Infographics can be useful tools whenever you are trying to convey information with a strong visual approach. Infographics are especially good at making numerical data easy to see and understand. By creating an infographic, your information can take on a life, tell a story, and make a more persuasive argument, which is why you encounter infographics in all kinds of situations from advertising and marketing to educational presentations and publications. Learn how to create an infographic with this video.

Using Google Forms and Spreadsheets
Google has a whole host of online document creation tools that are browser based and free to use.  You may already be familiar with Google docs for word processing, and if so, you probably know that it can be a powerful tool for collaboration and cloud-based document creation. This video explores the less well known, but equally powerful set of Google tools – Google forms and spreadsheets let you setup powerful tools for collecting, organizing and visualizing data.

How to Make an Animated GIF
Learn how to make an animated GIF with this video. Animated gifs (also pronounced jiffs) are a type of file that have been around for a long time but have seen a recent resurgence in popularity.  GIFs can be treated like still images in the way that they are uploaded and shared, but they are animated, so they can behave like tiny little looping videos or slideshows.

How to Make a Quick Video with MixBit
In this video learn how to make and share short videos with MixBit, an app and platform. MixBit, along with Vine and Instagram video, it is one of a number of new platforms that aims to make video sharing faster and easier within a social media context. What’s interesting about Mixbit is it’s emphasis on video editing and the fact that it lets users create remixes and edits from each others content.

How to Make a Popplet, a Collaborative Mind Mapping Tool
In this video learn how to use Popplet, an online tool for visually organizing your ideas and projects. This process is also referred to as ‘mind mapping.’ Popplet is available as a browser-based web tool or as an app for mobile devices and tablets. create connections and clusters between ideas or tasks on a virtual whiteboard. Popplet could be used to present research on a particular subject.

How to Make a Prezi
Prezi is an online tool for creating presentations that break free of the standard linear slideshow style of presentation that we often encounter. Instead of slides, Prezi presents you with a wide open canvas where you can organize and arrange your visual elements and then create a pathway for playback that then zooms from one element to the next, creating a unique dynamic experience. Prezi offers a very robust authoring environment representing limitless possibilities for your creativity. In this video, we’re just going to cover the basic tools to get you started.

How to Make an Interactive Timeline with Timetoast
Use this short video to create an interactive timeline using Timetoast.  Interactive timelines are a great way to create dynamic projects exploring topics that lend themselves to a chronological presentation – topics could include a wide variety of content areas including history, of course, but also cultural and creative trends, personal timelines and more. The basic idea of an interactive timeline is that you organize information along a timeline based on dates, and that the elements you include are clickable, so that you can create entries on the timeline that expand and can be explored in more depth, and that can include dynamic media in addition to text.

How to Make Dynamic Video Experiences with Mozilla’s Popcorn Maker
Popcorn Maker is a free online tool for creating enhanced web-based video experiences. It allows for simple edits, remixes and mashups of online videos, and to enhance them with images, text, popups, links and info from Wikipedia and Google Maps.

How to Save Streaming Videos for Offline Use Using Dirpy Studio
This video demonstrates how to use Dirpy Studio, a free web-based tool that allows you to save online streaming videos as offline files.