Lino

Lino is an interactive bulletin board website. It allows you to create wonderful presentations that resemble a bulletin board when finished. You are able to post words, pictures, and videos throughout the board. It is a free website and you do not have to sign up to create one. However, if you would like to save it so others can view it, then you do need to sign up.

To figure out how to use this website is not a hard task. In the top right hand corner is your main toolbar. There are four different post-it notes to choose from (they are all the same and you can change the color of them when in editing) for which you can type your words into. You can easily change the size and font of your writing. Then you just click okay and it is put into your bulletin board. You can just click and grab and move it anywhere are your board hassle free.You do the same thing with inserting pictures and videos. You just click on the icon for each and open the picture that was saved on your computer. For videos, you are able to just copy and paste the URL into the box and it will upload your video. After posting what you want on your lino, if you move your mouse to the middle top of your post, you will see a pushpin appear. If you click on that pushpin, it will lock your post into place so it cannot be moved. Just click it again to remove the pushpin and move your post somewhere else.

How I had used lino was to do a country project. Every student was assigned a specific country to research. They would then put the things they researched about onto their bulletin boards. These could be things like food, dress, music, sports, and so on. Then they would pull it up on a smart board or projector screen and talk about their country to the class. This way all of the information is in a neat and fun way for the class to look at.
Another way to use this in your classroom is the teacher can make a board that is "open." When creating a board you have the decision of making it closed (no one else can add to it they can only look) or you can make it open (other people can log on and post their stuff on your board). An example of using this would be to pick one country for the entire class. The teacher would create a board and each student would be responsible for a part of information to go ahead and put on the class board. At the end, the teacher could bring it up and the class and see what they found and learned about their country.

Here is an example of the one I created about the country Germany.

If you would like to try out lino, click hhttp://en.linoit.com/