It’s not often that I write a specific post on a specific app but I am today. I’ve been using the app ‘Grafio’ for some time now. I found it because I was looking for an app that I could use to create my own infographics (a diagram that plots information in an often stylish way as a graphical object – if you’re looking for some classy examples, check the amazing site www.informationisbeautiful.net – it’s amazing!) and this was the best recommendation I received.
So why am I writing about it? What is so good about it? Well for me, the first thing really that makes it so powerful is that everything you create within it, is vector. This means that the quality of the items put on to the page are lossless. You can scale up a vector image to whatever size you want without it pixelating. This means that you can make really classy pieces of work which can be also saved in to a vector format (in this case PDF) which can then be printed A4, A3, A2 etc. In fact, the app even gives you a canvas up to A2 in size to work with. It is an exceedingly powerful tool.
So what could you use it for? Well, it allows you to:
- Draw and sketch freely
- Communicate ideas
- Make flowcharts (great for Computing & Maths & DT), graphs etc
- Great for organisation charts (Business Studies / Economics)
- Mindmaps, brainstorming ideas – learning tool
- Taking notes
- Record audio on each shape added to the graphic
- Make a presentation
- Create a design
- Play with typography
- Autoshape / smoothing from freehand shapes
- Insert images from Camera roll (bear in mind these would not be vector)
- Export as PDF, PNG or JPG or even export as a video showing the different stages of the process
- Connectivity with dropbox and box.net
Want some examples of what you can do? Here’s some I made earlier, which, while small now will if you click on them grow quite large. In the vein of sharing too, I have embedded the classroom rules poster at the end of this blog post as a PDF so you can print that A2 should you so desire.
So, you might not believe me that Grafio is any good. That’s fine, but I’d urge you to give it a go. The proper full version is normally circa £5.99 (I paid £2.99 for it one weekend when they’d reduced the price) but to have a go with it, why not just get the Grafio Lite version and have a play around. It’s free, so the only thing that’s going to take a hit is your pleasure and unleashing some of your creativity. Grab the lite version here: https://itunes.apple.com/tr/app/grafio-lite-diagrams-ideas/id393111242?mt=8
The developers have also created some video tutorials to support your use of the app here: http://bit.ly/grafiovideo
It just leaves me to say, I hope you have some cracking fun using it I’d just ask if you do like it, use it already, that you share some of your creations with me? After all, information is beautiful!
Original image at top of post taken from Deviant Art.
Here is the downloadable PDF version of the Classroom rules poster:
Classroom rules
From a guest post by Penny Russell @digitaldaisies
Here are some more ways of using Google Advanced Search for smarter searching.
Advanced Search
Advanced search is helpful if you have a number of parameters you want to limit your search by, and can’t find Mark’s handy searching post. Advanced search becomes available once you’ve typed in your search term. You can access it either by clicking on the gear top right of the page and choosing Advanced Search, or by looking at the bottom of the page and choosing the link.
You can also access many of the advanced search tools by clicking on ‘search tools’ directly underneath the search bar and choosing from the drop down menus. Most useful are probably the date range filter and the reading level filter. Have a play with the other options to see what helps reduce your search results to the useful ones.
Dates
The date range will return pages updated or posted within the range you’ve chosen. This could be really useful where you want to find out up to date information, and eliminate all those confusing ‘don’t know when it was posted’ results you get with a more unfocused search.
Reading Levels
The reading levels filter can also be useful. Roughly speaking, “Basic” is secondary school level texts, while “Intermediate” is anything above that level up to technical and scholarly articles. They are a bit hit and miss, but can help weed out those articles that are definitely out of the range of your students. ‘Annotate results with reading levels’ is probably most useful initially. Click on the reading level to filter the results once you can see how many of each there are. This filter is also available in the ‘All Results’ drop down menu.
Regions
You can also use Advanced Search to filter by region – useful if you want UK only results for example. You can choose any region from the Advanced Search page, or the drop down menu will give you UK results only as a choice.
Sites with images
It’s not entirely clear what this does, apart from if you select it you get a different selection of websites from an ordinary search and one with more pictures on. I’m going to try it with my weaker readers and see if it returns results which are less ‘wordy’.
Some handy keyboard shortcuts to help with searching
As well as these Google search tips here are a couple of related shortcuts which can help your online searching. Here they are for PC, but generally work the same on a Mac clicking command instead of ctrl.
Ctrl and +/- allows you to zoom in or out on the webpage.
Ctrl and L selects the address bar and everything in it – very useful.
Ctrl and Tab cycles through all of the web pages you have open. (command + ` on a Mac)
And finally…. Using the search bar for quick conversions
Mark has already explained how you can use the search bar to get definitions + do calculations. You can also use it to do:
Conversions of measurements – x in y + enter in the search bar – gives the conversion. E.g. 10 kg in pounds gives 22.0462lbs. There are drop down menus next to each of the choices once you have performed one conversion which allow you to change all of the elements. So you can complete temperature conversions, distance, and even work out how many nanoseconds in an hour (although that depends on the meeting you’re in!)
You can also complete currency conversions – x currency in y + enter in the search bar gives the currency conversion. E.g £20 in USD gives $32.51 – also useful on holiday if you have an overseas dataplan.
Hope that helps. Leave a comment if you have any other tips, or you’re clear what ‘sites with images’ does exactly!
By Penny Russell @digitaldaisies
So this coming Thursday, TeachMeet Clevedon is taking place (if you hadn’t noticed! One application I’ve been looking to examine for some time is ‘CoverItLive’ – I’ve heard great things about it from the likes of @CheriseDuxbury and @JamiePortman on his great post on the app/topic here with some fab ideas. I thought I had to try it out for TeachMeet this coming week. This is my trial and as you can see it works really well! You can put images and posts up yourself either using the online client software or one of the different mobile apps they provide. It will also pick up hashtags in the timeframe that the event is happening too and drop them in. There are options galore.
I’m definitely going to be using it for #TMClevedon on Thursday.
An updated version of the ‘CoverItLive’ below will appear both on my blog and on the http://bit.ly/clevedonteachmeet wiki.
Videos of the various presentations will appear shortly after they have occurred here: http://youtube.com/tmclevedon
Popplet is a great tool which you can use for free online for a number of different reasons:
- A revision tool
- A presentation tool
- A mindmapping tool
- An idea collation tool
- A collaborative tool (you can connect with other Popplet users to collate ideas / work collaboratively)
There are lots of different reasons why you might want to use Popplet in your classroom. If you’ve got some great ideas, please drop me a comment below.
You can get to an iPad app version too. There’s a free ‘lite’ version and the full version (which is £2.99)
The short screencast below shows you how to set up a Popplet, arrange your Popples, link them up, turn it in to a presentation, view them offline and more.
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