Black-Text Turn Pictures into Text Images

Black-Text is a cool photo editing application. It allows its users to turn any image into a readable text-laden photo within seconds. I am adding this tool to the list I have been compiling here about the Best Free Photo Editing Tools. The reason why my posts often cover photo editing tool here is to give educators the chance to discover great ways they can innovatively use pictures in their classrooms. We all know the importance of visual media in education and to go online and start googling for such tools  would take you some time, That is why this blog and many other ones out there on the net , are trying to aggregate the best free tools and deliver them in a ready to take posts.

Black-Text is free and has a handy editing board where you can carry out many actions like changing the style, colour, text fonts and many more.

How can I get started using Black-Text ?

Just head over to Black-Text main page and upload a photo you want to convert and then enter the text you want to go with it. This text can be just a few sentences , quotes or even long paragraph. Black-Text then turns your image into a desaturated image with your text placed on it. Users can also resize image size, font type, text colour and background colour. When done with the customization then you can either save the image or print it.

A List of Some of The Best Photo Editing Tools

Photos and images are great multimedia tools to incorporate into your classroom teaching. Students attention and  curiosity are easily arisen when graphic content is involved. So to help you prepare teaching visual aids to include in your classroom, Here is a set of useful and free photo editing tools that you can use very easily. With these tools you can add your personal touch to your photos and make them even more engaging. Click on any link to read more about the photo editing tool .

Convert to Cartoon: editing This is a great photo editing tool that allows its users to turn their photos into cartoons.

Anmish : This tools allows its users to add funny effects to their photos.

Picnik  : This is a great photo editing tool. It allows its users to apply several awesome effects on their images using a wide range of editing tools.

GrossOut : This photo editing tool allows its users to add  heinous and scary effects such as “crazy eyes, gnawing teeth, eye patches, bat wings, bloody knives and axes, open gash and wounds, masks, and many many more.”

YourOldPic : It  is a great image editing tool. It allows its users to make their pictures look old.


Image Embellisher :   It allows its users to quickly and easily add special effects to their images.

RoundPic : It allows its users to edit their images and turn them into rounded pictures.

Pixlr-o-matic is one of the easiest tools to help you add that personal touch without being a techno geek.

iPiccy : offers a plethora of editing functions that you can use very easily .


Zoom.it:  It allows its users to view and share high resolution imagery.

Bubblesnaps :  is about adding speech bubbles to a picture.

Visualize.us :  It lets you bookmark all your favourite pictures from different websites and share them with your anyone .

PictureTrail: It offers easy ways to organize your pictures and share them with your family , friends or student .

Subit :  It lets you add explanations to your images or create a personalized slideshow.

Image to Video : This tools  allows you to convert jpg images to videos .

Host-d-oddcast : It is a great image editing tool . It allows its users to embed their pictures and cartonize them into 3d avatar .

Black-Text : It  is a cool photo editing application. It allows its users to turn any image into a readable text-laden photo within seconds.

If you have other suggestions that we can add to this list then feel free to share with us in the comment box below.

Language and The Brain: Intricate Relationship

I love infographics and each time I stumble upon a good one I straightforward share it with you here. Today I want you to read the relationship between the brain and the production and interpretation of languages. There are mazing facts there and You can even share the inforgraphic with your students in the classroom.

Via: Voxy Blog

Alarming Facts about Texting on our Lives

Last week on a visit to Mount Saint University in Halifax, Canada, I was so surprised by the huge influence of mobile technology on the lives of students. I would venture and say 90 percent of the  students I saw there all were in some sort interacting with their mobile devices. Some would listen to music, some would play games and the majority were texting.

Texting has really changed the lives of so many people especially in the United States. I have stumbled upon a great inforgraphic that I m sharing with you here and I want you to meticulously go through the stats and facts about Texting, you will definitely be astounded.


Created by: MBA Online

Why Daylight Saving Time

Last Sunday, we had to change the clock here in Canada and take one hour back. Time has also changed in some other countries especially those that are far from the equator. To be honest I hate this time swap and takes me up to two weeks to get used to the new time and reschedule all my things anew. It is not a time change that happens but a system change, in work , nutritional system, sleep system and everything.

I always wish they would stop doing it but there are sound reasons why they are taking these steps every year. Trying to look for these reasons and understand why this happens I stumbled upon some very good videos that explain it all. The worst thing for us in education is to be asked by your students the next day time changes for the reasons why there is such a change. Would you imagine the embarrassment you be in when you ignore these facts. Anyway it is never too late to learn and here are two videos that will explain this phenomenon. You can share these videos with your students , it will be a great idea if you  schedule  two hours session to play these videos in front of your learners and then  organize an open discussion where each one can participate.

Here is the second video

The Three Effective Ways to Search The Web Educators Must Know

Using websites in the classroom is one of the easiest and less stressful ways of integrating technology into teaching. There is a large and constantly expanding collection of resources and learning materials online. The web with its growing repository of information and knowledge has certainly turned into a window on the wider world outside your class, and is of course, a readily available set of authentic material.
Acessing the content of web sites and using it with students in the classroom is not a task with no risks. There are a set of measures and steps to be taken before one can ensure the usability and appropriateness of what to include within a course book.

Several educators underrate the ability to efficiently and quickly search through Internet content and find suitable resources  thinking that it is a simple task that  any internet user can use with such an ease that no prior search knowledge is needed. This is completely wrong and , as a matter of fact, this is one of the most useful skills that both teachers and learners need to urgently acquire.
There are three basic ways of searching on the net, and I will briefly describe them below hoping that by the end of this post you will have grasped some techniques to effectively and quickly search the web and find  content to use in the classroom.

  Search Engines :

Although there is a variety of search engines, Google is , undisputedly, one of the most well known of them all with billions of indexed web pages in its online database. As you might probably know, a search engine is analogous to a telephone directory , or any other kind of database of stored information. You search for a name or title and the directory gives you back more information about that entry. But with billions of pages to choose from the task gets even much harder to easily and quickly find what you are looking for. So how do you find exactly what you want ?

To answer this question you need to first know what the process of indexing a web page means. When someone first publishes a content into the web , search engines such as google sends out their robots to explore and crawl the content and categorize it. When Google recognizes the existence of such a content it then stores it into its database for a later use, Google uses a very complicated algorithm to carry out all the above mentioned operations and I will not talk about them here because that is not our issue. What Google specifically know about a web page when it indexes it  is its address on the web, its title, when it was last updated and a few keywords associated with the content itself. These keywords are usually provided by the designer of the website and are generally meant to describe what the page talks about. The key to a good and smart searching in Google is the ability to define your keywords accurately.


Among the techniques you can use to refine your search query is the " phrase search technique " which invloves wrapping part of a phrase in inserted commas which will let Google treat those words not as individual entities but will instead look for sentences on the web page which contain those words in that particualr order. Thus, instead of searching for Cheap Flights to Canada , which can search for any or all of these words in any position and order,on a page, try searching for " Cheap Flights to Canada" as part of a phrase you might  expect to find on a web page. This technique is particularly useful when looking for lyrics or specific chunks of a text. The ultimate trick with Google is to try to imagine the web pages you are looking for and then try to visualize the content of these pages which will  help you decide on what key words to use in your search.
To learn more about some other useful tips to effectively search Google, I invite you to read:
Google Search Tutorials Part 1
Use Google to Search and Find Images Easily
Educational Image Search Engine Part1
Educational Image Search Engine Part2




2- Subject Guides:


Not all search engines are keyboard based . Some do not use this algorithm at all. In fact , it is thanks to Google for the introduction of this highly useful technique into web search. With this invention, internet search technology  has been largely revolutionized to the instant that we now talk about instant search, voice search, image search , people search and many more. However as I said earlier not all engines use key word techniques.

 If we look at Yahoo , which existed way before Google, this search engine uses subject guides  and divides its content into subject areas and subdivisions of those areas. So instead of a keyword search from the main page, users browse the section that best reflects their interests and their search. For instance, you want to search for the biography of a certain singer, you have to access the Yahoo directory then click on Entertainment, then Music, then Artists.and finally search for the biographical information you want. This process means that Yahoo will only  search in " Entertainment, Music, Artists rather than in its entire directory.


3- Real Language Search


A real language search such as Ask (www.ask.com) allows users to type simple questions as search queries . This does not mean that Ask will try to analyse and understand the question but rather selects the keywords from the query and construct a search based on them. The final result page a user would get will definitely contain the answer to his/her question at the top ( of course if Ask has been able to find a direct answer ) and links of related websites below that. For instance, if you want to look for a biographical information about someone you better phrase your search query as such: When was xx born ?

 As educators, It is really worth taking the time to explore all the three sites and spend some time simplifying them to your learners. Learners can really benefit from an exposure to all three types as they activate different linguistic and mental processes. Keywords are good for exploring word relationships and lexical areas. Subject searches help define and refine ideas and contexts. Real search can provide useful practice in question formation.

Mobile Learning The next Trend in Education

Mobile learning is the buzz word in education now. No wonder we are living in a digital age that is advancing so quickly and either you keep up with the actual pace or you lag behind and become outdated. Education is just part of this equation, new learning and teaching theories are being forged to cater for the emerging needs of the 21st century instruction. Before, we used to talk about just the integration of technology into education mainly in the form of using internet enabled  computers in the classrooms but now it is time we look for ways to use mobile devices in our teaching and learning. The vast majority of our students and learners have mobile devices of some sort and they spend most of their time interacting with these handheld appliances than you would ever imagine.Could you just imagine the pluses of using these same devices to help our students in their learning ?

This is an open ended question that I will try to answer in my Master thesis this year. But for now let me just share with you a great infographic that I found while I was doing some online research into this topic. The infographic shows clearly how the traditional forms of education are being outdated in an a digitally mobile  connected world.


Via: Voxy Blog