Snapify - Quickly Find Definitions and Explanations

Yesterday, during my presentation for the DEN Virtual Conference I included a bunch of my favorite tools. One that I want to highlight again this evening is Snapify. Snapify is a handy little Chrome extension that allows you to highlight any word or phrase on a webpage and quickly find definitions, videos, Tweets, and webpages about that word or phrase. See it in action in the video below.


Applications for Education
Snapify could be a great little tool for students to use when they're reading articles online. Anytime students come to a word or phrase that they don't understand they can simply highlight it and click "snap it" to find definition or explanation.

The 1900 House Living Without Technology Challenge

The 1900 House was a PBS television series that aired a few years ago. The show is no longer on the air (you can purchase it on DVD still), but the companion website is still live and quite useful. The 1900 House website offers virtual tours complete with video clips of a Victorian Era house. To complement the virtual tours of the house, PBS offers two lesson plans designed to get students to compare their lives today with how they would have lived at the turn of the 20th Century.

Applications for Education
 The 1900 House lesson plans are designed for middle school use. Our Town 1900 asks students to search their own towns about where people lived and the type of work they did in their towns at the turn of the 20th Century. The Living Without Technology lesson plan challenges students to live without modern conveniences for 24 hours to experience life as they would have 100 years ago.

Tackk - Quickly Create Simple Webpages

Tackk is a free service that you can use to quickly create simple webpages. Using Tackk you can create a page to announce an important event, to advertise an event, or to show off your best digital works.

To create a Tackk page you do not need to register for an account, but unregistered Tackk pages expire after seven days. If you register for the service your Tackk pages stay up indefinitely. I registered for the service before creating my first Tackk page. Creating my Tackk was a simple matter of uploading an image then adding text in the customizable fields above and below my image. Tackk pages can accommodate videos, audio files,  and maps, but I did not include those items in my first Tackk page.

Applications for Education
Tackk could be a good tool for students to use to quickly create a page to show off some of their digital photography, video creation projects, or audio files. Student groups looking to create a landing page for a fundraising event may want to give Tackk a try too.

H/T to David Kapuler.

College Students Can Now Get 5GB of Free Dropbox Storage

The online storage service Dropbox is giving away an extra 3GB of free storage to college students who sign up for the service between now and December 10, 2012. This means that students who sign up using their university/ college email addresses will get 5GB of total storage for free.

The extra free storage is part of Dropbox's Space Race promotion. To get the free storage students do need to be at an institution that has at least 25 Dropbox users. So if you're a student who wants to make sure that you get the free storage you need to refer classmates to Dropbox.