Sunday, June 21, 2015

Open Teacher



It is a small program which helps teacher revise some concepts, ideas, vocabulary or past lessons done with students. It helps students to revise their lessons too! It could be used by both of them. The questions could be asked in a random manner so it would discourage anybody from knowing beforehand the following question!

If you want to download a copy just click here, for tutorials to overcome the initial fear of trying a new program, click here. FAQ (Frequently asked questions) section, just click here. If you're interested to see how others view the program than go here. Another opinion is found here.

The advantages of the program are several. It can read several formats of files (29). One can create a topography or media lesson. One can create a lesson from a picture, any other file or from the internet! There is typing tutor where both teachers and students could improve their speed of writing in a computer file. It could be installed on windows, mac and linux operating systems. 

 

Sunday, June 7, 2015

Calibre : Reading, writing and changing ebooks



Teachers and students have a common tool: books. Does it mean that although we use computers/tablets/mobile phones we are going to throw away books? Surely NOT. Today we are lucky to have a bigger choice. No one is against reading books the old way (ie tangible one where one flips pages with his own hands).

Nowadays we have more choice in the sense we can download books unto our electronic gadget without the need to go outside to a library or shop to buy it. Some students coming from poor families or families who don't wish to spend their money on educational books, now can download some books for free! One can visit the guthenberg site in order to find around 48,000 FREE e-books. No student can claim that all books are boring. Having such a big online library, there is at least one good book for everybody!

We can change the format of the letters (for dyslesic, or students with a poor eye sight). We can change the format to fit our electronic gadget (mobile phone, pc or tablet). One can write on the book. In fact some teachers use it to let students comment when reading a book. At the end the teacher has the comments of all students on one book! This was not possible on physical books as it was heavily prohibited to write on books. Students can see comments made by other students. Peer to peer learning is another wonderful tool for students made possible by electronic books.

Another hidden advantage is that teachers nowadays can have a proof if students have opened or not the books because each comment will have a time date! This was surely not possible with the old system!

The biggest advantage is surely the fact that when we read educational books we meet new, strange or undecipherable words. In the old times, we had either to guess the meaning from the general sense of the sentence or else go for another book....dictionary. Now one needs to press the word and up comes the definition!! It's that simple. Now books have become easier.

Our aim today is to introduce another wonderful free source program which can be used in windows, mac, android or linux! It's called calibre. It has all the features mentioned above and more.

As usual we are providing some tutorials in case our readers have some teething problems.

Tutorial 1 (FAQ)
Tutorial 2 (video)
Tutorial (for android)
Tutorial 3 (news feeds)