Saturday 12 March 2011
Thursday 10 March 2011
Quizinator
https://free.quizinator.com/core/index.aspx
This site promised the ability to create and store questions to be able to quickly create quizzes and exams. I thought it would be useful for my training sessions, as I have several different exercises I have the participants complete for practice on the material, and it would be great to develop a library of questions to use to create different exercises for different groups.
A couple of drawbacks to this site. Number one, it is geared strongly toward primary school teachers. You can attach subjects and categories to your questions to more easily filter your list when creating a document, but they are preset subjects of math, science and history only, with no ability to add other categories. The second major drawback is that all of the exams or quizzes you create are generated as pdf documents to be printed. I would have thought there would be functionality to be able to administer the quizzes online.
All in all, if you are an elementary school teacher, this site may be helpful in creating and administering tests, but for workplace or community educators, it needs a lot more work.
This site promised the ability to create and store questions to be able to quickly create quizzes and exams. I thought it would be useful for my training sessions, as I have several different exercises I have the participants complete for practice on the material, and it would be great to develop a library of questions to use to create different exercises for different groups.
A couple of drawbacks to this site. Number one, it is geared strongly toward primary school teachers. You can attach subjects and categories to your questions to more easily filter your list when creating a document, but they are preset subjects of math, science and history only, with no ability to add other categories. The second major drawback is that all of the exams or quizzes you create are generated as pdf documents to be printed. I would have thought there would be functionality to be able to administer the quizzes online.
All in all, if you are an elementary school teacher, this site may be helpful in creating and administering tests, but for workplace or community educators, it needs a lot more work.
Wednesday 9 March 2011
Shrinking - weight loss tracker
This site was actually pretty neat. You can enter your weight on a daily basis or whenever you want, and you can set weight goals based on a certain date. The dashboard feature charts your progress graphically, and tells you where you are in relation to your goal.
The part of this site I found most interesting was the food diary. You can enter what you eat on a daily and it calculates your total fat, calories, protein, etc. Then you can enter your exercise and activity each day and it calculates calories burned. You can then view your food calories and your activity calories in a calendar, and it calculates your net calories each day so you can see where you went over and where you were under.
The website also includes a journaling feature to write comments, and has functions to easily allow you to connect to your Facebook page or Twitter account if you want to let others know how you are doing.
This site was pretty easy to set up - my computer seemed to freeze a lot at the dashboard screen, but that may be just the age and functionality of my computer. It's very time consuming to enter your daily food as you have to enter each item one at a time, and it uses a built in Search feature to find what you are looking for. It is pretty good with commercial and brand name items, but obviously if you're eating homemade items it gets difficult as you have to enter all of the ingredients and estimate your portion. But I found that there are usually reasonable substitutes and their database is quite large to be able to find the items if you take the time.
I would recommend this website for anyone seriously watching their weight, or if you just want to get an idea of your food intake to activity ratio. I think I will use it for a while longer to further assess the value, but it's worth checking out.
The part of this site I found most interesting was the food diary. You can enter what you eat on a daily and it calculates your total fat, calories, protein, etc. Then you can enter your exercise and activity each day and it calculates calories burned. You can then view your food calories and your activity calories in a calendar, and it calculates your net calories each day so you can see where you went over and where you were under.
The website also includes a journaling feature to write comments, and has functions to easily allow you to connect to your Facebook page or Twitter account if you want to let others know how you are doing.
This site was pretty easy to set up - my computer seemed to freeze a lot at the dashboard screen, but that may be just the age and functionality of my computer. It's very time consuming to enter your daily food as you have to enter each item one at a time, and it uses a built in Search feature to find what you are looking for. It is pretty good with commercial and brand name items, but obviously if you're eating homemade items it gets difficult as you have to enter all of the ingredients and estimate your portion. But I found that there are usually reasonable substitutes and their database is quite large to be able to find the items if you take the time.
I would recommend this website for anyone seriously watching their weight, or if you just want to get an idea of your food intake to activity ratio. I think I will use it for a while longer to further assess the value, but it's worth checking out.
Tuesday 8 March 2011
Mitto password organizer
This Web 2.0 tool caught my interest, as it promised to allow me to securely store and manage my logons and passwords to all of my favourite websites, and access them with the click of a button. My first thought was in regard to security, but after reading through the introductory materials and taking a tour, I am pretty confident of the security. You have to create an account with a specific phrase that will be included in all emails to you from the site, so that you can identify it as authentic. You have to create a user name and password with three security questions, and then once you create the account, you are emailed a confirmation number (email included my security phrase) that you must enter to activate your account.
However, adding websites was not as easy as I thought it would be. Some common websites you can search by name or URL and add easily, like Facebook, Twitter and Ebay. Anything more obscure requires you to install their "bookmarklet" on your toolbar, which you must use from the actual website to add it to your mitto account. In addtion, some websites with more security like a banking website won't allow the one click access even once it is added to your Mitto account, you still have to go through several steps of security.
However, even if you don't use the one click feature, you can display the website and passwords of sites you have added, so it could be used simply as a storage for this information, as opposed to the sticky notes or lists of passwords that some of us maintain (even though you're supposed to have different passwords for all of your sites that are not common names and not write them down for people to find).
So my verdict is as with a lot of things - sounded really good in theory, but in practice I think it's easier for me to keep my written list of passwords and enter them as I go. I would still have to enter logon and password to access Mitto, so unless I am going to several different password websites in one session, doesn't really make sense for me.
However, adding websites was not as easy as I thought it would be. Some common websites you can search by name or URL and add easily, like Facebook, Twitter and Ebay. Anything more obscure requires you to install their "bookmarklet" on your toolbar, which you must use from the actual website to add it to your mitto account. In addtion, some websites with more security like a banking website won't allow the one click access even once it is added to your Mitto account, you still have to go through several steps of security.
However, even if you don't use the one click feature, you can display the website and passwords of sites you have added, so it could be used simply as a storage for this information, as opposed to the sticky notes or lists of passwords that some of us maintain (even though you're supposed to have different passwords for all of your sites that are not common names and not write them down for people to find).
So my verdict is as with a lot of things - sounded really good in theory, but in practice I think it's easier for me to keep my written list of passwords and enter them as I go. I would still have to enter logon and password to access Mitto, so unless I am going to several different password websites in one session, doesn't really make sense for me.
Saturday 5 March 2011
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