Prezi is an alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint and is more fluid and visually appealing. It is an online tool to make attractive presentations.
The Prezi interface is interactive and pretty intuitive. But it takes some time to get used to. You can incorporate videos, images and other multimedia in to your presentation and prezi supports almost all formats.
Prezi’s great pan and zoom feature is really amazing, which you will not find in PowerPoint. It helps to emphasize the point.
Copying text from a PDF File is very easy. You can either copy and paste the text or you can save the pdf file as an RTF (Rich Text Format) file and open it in MS Word for further editing.
To select the text just click and drag or press Ctrl+A to select all the text in the file. Press Ctrl+C to copy the text to clipboard and Ctrl+V to paste it into any other file.
One problem with this method is in RTF or the copied text there will be unwanted paragraph/line breaks which you may need to delete manually to format the paragraph properly. Here, you can make use of the special features in Find-Replace of MS Word to quickly remove the unwanted paragraph marks from the copied text.
Click on the Show/Hide Paragraph marks button to show the unwanted paragraph marks in the copied text.
Now select the first paragraph and click Replace Button or Press Ctrl+H.
In the Find What text box type ^p or ^13 (the caret character (^) must be typed and p should be in small letters) and in Replace With text box type a space (press space bar once). See the snapshot below.
Now click Replace All once.
All the paragraph marks will be replaced with a space.
MS Word Find/Replace allows use of special characters for performing special actions. You can see these options by clicking More button.
Copying Images
When you point your mouse to the image to be copied the cursor takes the shape of a cross, just draw a rectangle covering the image. The image will be selected which you can copy and paste by pressing Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V.
The easiest way to take a screenshot of your computer is to press the Print Screen button (PrtScr) on your keyboard. The screenshot will be stored in the clipboard and can be pasted in to any application like the image editing programs like or word document by pressing Ctrl+V or clicking Edit->Paste option.
Holding the Alt key down while pressing Print Screen captures only the active window.
Screenshot Utilities
A number of screen capture/screenshot utilities are available free of cost. You can make use of these small utilities to capture any area of the screen. Some of my favorites (freewares) are the following.
This one is a tiny image editing freeware which will help you in doing almost all common image editing tasks. Cut and crop, resize and re-sample, convert, screen capture, batch conversion, apply effects, scanning images etc. all can be performed easily. It can also play movies and videos.
Snipping tool included in Windows Vista and Windows 7 helps you to capture a screen shot or snip anything on your computer screen. Open Snipping Tool by clicking the Start button – > All Programs – > Accessories – > Snipping Tool.
You can take screen shots and even record onscreen video. The copies images can be shared online via screencast.com where you need to create an account for sharing your captures.
Easy to use snipping tool, just click on the snippy icon on the taskbar and mark the region you want to copy. The captured image is stored in the clipboard which can be pasted in to any application.
This was presented during The Three Day Workshop for Professional Development of Teachers held at ZIET, Mysore from 10-12 July 2012 organised by Oracle Academy and KVS. The presentation explores the possibility of blogs in class room.
Ever wanted to draw a diagram, flowchart, circuit, mind maps or any other drawing digitally for your classroom. Diagram.ly can be of great help to us teachers. Though there are so many tools freely available on the Net, this one is really easy to use and fast.
You can draw almost any kind of rich colorful diagrams online using this free tool. You just need to drag and drop the images/clip arts to the canvas and adjust them according to your requirements. The diagrams can be exported to a variety of formats like jpg, png, gif, pdf etc.
Diagramly – Draw Diagrams Online
Other Similar tools
http://creately.com: Another online diagram creating and sharing tool. Supports 23 diagram types
https://cacoo.com/: online drawing tool that allows you to create a variety of diagrams such as site maps, wire frames, UML and network charts. Cacoo can be used free of charge.
At Right Angles: A resource for School Mathematics published by Azim Premji University with Community Mathematics Centre, Rishi Valley.
Printed version may not be available now.
Visit http://azimpremjifoundation.org/content/right-angles to access digital version
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