I have used tinyurl.com for years in order to shorten URLs that I send in my parent and student e-newsletters, so I decided to try these other URL shorteners to see if I like them any better. Since I am not allowed to publicly share my class site because it has student work samples and comments on it, I decided just try the shorteners with pages for our program that are public.
They all worked about the same as tinyurl except that Ow.ly and Goo.gl required me to prove that I was human using a CAPTCHA. Bit.ly was visually appealing and if you signup for a free account, it will create a library of your shortened URLs. I think that I still like tinyurl the best though. It allows me to create a custom shortened URL which is easier for me to, identify, share and remember.
Here are some examples of shortened URLs:
http://www.thebridgecm.org/about-the-bridge/what-we-do/special-education shortened on Ow.ly to http://ow.ly/f83qt
http://www.thebridgecm.org/images/stories/GSHS/school_house_Newsletter_June2012.pdf shortened on Bit.ly to http://bit.ly/SPcJlQ
http://www.thebridgecm.org/about-the-bridge/what-we-do/child-a-adolescent-residential-services shortened on Goo.gl to http://goo.gl/V2Hqx
And http://www.thebridgecm.org/images/stories/GSHS/school_house_Newsletter_June2012.pdf shortened on Tinyurl to http://tinyurl.com/SHNews6-2012.
I have seen QR codes popping up around my community, and have seen retailers using them for coupons, but I had not really considered their use in education. After reading a few articles, I downloaded Scan, a free QR reader app for my iPhone, and scanned some of the QR codes I found on education websites. Here’s a QR code I made using Delivr for one of the resources that I found.
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| QR Codes in Education |
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| QR Codes made with Delivr Placed in Daily Schedule |
There were many great ideas for embedding QR codes in student projects, on bulletin boards, and on worksheets. If my students had iPads or access to smartphones in the classroom, I would use them in student learning centers or in project descriptions in order to take them to specific videos or web-sources for information. I often use SurveyMonkey for my QCQ’s (Quick Check Quizzes) at the end of small units of study. I could use a QR so that my students could access the link and take the quiz from their iPad or smartphones. Unfortunately, in the self-contained classroom that I presently teach, my middle school students are not allowed to use any personal devices to access the Internet. We have enough laptop and desk top computers for each student to use, and so for now I use bookmarks, but I can see that in other settings and maybe even in this setting in the future, how QR codes could be a faster and easier solution. If we could use mobile devices like smartphones or iPads, one easy way for me to use the QR Codes would be to place the codes on the daily schedule that I post each day on the board.
The two bookmarklets that I tried were Quietube and Printliminator. Quietube was an instant hit. It allows me the chance to be a bit more spontaneous in sharing a YouTube video with my students. I can just click the Quietube bookmarklet in the bookmarks bar and instantly the video that I want to show my students is displayed on a less distracting and safer page. Usually, I have to take the time to embed the video into my wikispace to show it without sidebars and ads. Keepit was supposed to allow me to download and save YouTube videos, but I could not get it to work on my personal computer.
I could see Printliminator being something that I would use pretty regularly too. Every now and then, there’s something valuable on a web page that I want to print or show that has too many extra graphics or ads cluttering the page and potentially wasting ink. Before The Printliminator bookmarklet, I would have used Grab or Jing to capture the selection, or selections, and then saved it as a tiff or a jpeg. I may even have had to insert the image, images, into a document to resize it, or just reconstruct the page without the extra clutter in order to make it more suitable for printing. This process requires many more steps then the Printliminator bookmarklet. Clicking The Printliminator bookmarklet in the bookmarks bar instantly gives a drop down of tools that allow the user to eliminate graphics or select portions of the page to delete. There are also buttons for undoing, or restoring what you have just deleted, and a button that sends the page directly to a printer.
I think that I am going to need a bigger toolbox in order to hold all my new cool tools!
Dar 20-21 GoogleDoc http://tinyurl.com/Dar2021
Early Man Quiz http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WN87M8J
Printlimator http://css-tricks.com/examples/ThePrintliminator/
Quietube http://quietube.com/
QR Codes in Education http://www.livebinders.com/play/play_or_edit?id=51894
Hello! If you want to scan the QR Codes on the Daily Schedule to see where they will take you, you might need to have a larger image. If you're using a Mac, hold down the Command key while you click on the picture. This should open a larger version of the picture in a new tab. Or you can always use the Control key and click on the picture. Then you would select Open in a New Window. It's probably a "right-click" command on a PC. You still might have to zoom in a little, but doing it this way should keep the codes from getting too distorted.
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