Block Posters

I was immediately impressed with Block Posters.

You can take any of your images and then decide how you’d like it sliced up. Download the pdf file and each of these slices can now be printed out and put together to create a great big poster.

This can be used to create artworks around your home, blow ups of your favourite photos at a fraction of the price, etc. Also, it can be used in the classroom for displaying material to students, or by students to display their ideas and emphasis their points. Extending that idea, when university students have to produce posters this could be an alternative to expensive production via professional printers; I’m all for reducing the cost of education. But for an alternative approach remember Glogster.

Glogster indexing graphically

I came across The Filing Cabinet recently, a resource by Kelly Hines categorizing by child age and subject links to useful educational resources. I don’t want to concentrate on that right now, I’ll cover it in more detail on my SpottyBlueBanana blog.

What I do want to highlight here is the concept of using a Glog as a front end graphical index for content. It’s such a good idea – ingenious Kelly. Each image item on the Glog acts as a link to the specific category. The Glog can then be embedded in the front end of the site as a visual index. You could use icons instead of text as the visual cues, these could then run throughout the site for consistency.

I’ve been a fan of Glogster for some time and have written about it before, but such a use hadn’t occurred to me. I’ll be using the idea in the future.

Wikimedia Commons

Following on from my previous post, Wikimedia Commons is a repository full of (~ 5.5 million) media files; images, audio, and video clips. It acts as a fully searchable database, with a similar feel to Wikipedia.

Google Advanced Image Search – copyright free image search

I’ve previously written about obtaining images you can freely use. I just wanted to make a quick update (though I’ve got more to write about this topic in future) about the use of Google Image Search to locate images that you can freely use. So I put together a 2min 30sec screencast to quickly explain what to do.

Infographics via Spectives

I’ve been looking at infographics; graphic representations of statistical information. I recently came across one of the tools on Smashing Magazine titled Data Visualization and Infographics Resources. Here there’s a list of links to some great infographics sites.

Then today I found Spectives.

What Spectives does is create visual galleries aggregated from other websites of your deciding. Once registered it is relatively simple to create a ‘collection’, adding additional feeds. Note: to add the feed you simply paste in the required site URL and Spectives identifies the feed. If there are multiple available feeds on a page then you are offer the alternatives and just click on the one you want to use; I tend to choose the RSS 2.0 and that always seem to work fine.

I like the way Spectives works, and the way it displays the information. Hover over an image and if there is associated text it is displayed. Clicking on the image loads up the appropriate page. It’s an interesting way of finding information. It’s a nice way for those who tap into visual cues, (I know that isn’t for everyone). Then you can squirt out the feed of your aggregated collection using the RSS link on the right of your page.

Infographics are by definition very visual. What a perfect subject for a Spectives collection. So I thought I’d combine the two and use some of the links from the Data Visualization and Infographics Resources list and put them into the Spectives feeds to create an ‘infographics images’ collection.

Diigo link: My infographic bookmarks