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Besides our printed textbooks and digital solutions, we are really proud of our super detailed and fun atlas collection for the subject of Geography. For interactive boards, we have had these maps for a long time in a separate framework program, called mozaMap and you may have already heard about the compact miniMap tool as well. However, it was high time to integrate these maps into our educational presentation software mozaBook to make everything more manageable and smoother in the classroom.
First, simply select the map from your shelf, open it up, and check all the possibilities and map variations you can choose from… five continents, demographic views, populations, the environmental state of the Earth, so literally everything you may need in a Geography lesson is at your fingertips. Let’s select North America and see what we can do with the map:
- zoom in and out without losing any image resolution quality,
- write some comment or place appropriate icons and symbols on the map,
- measure the distance between cities or the size of certain areas and countries,
- or highlight some really significant details with various colors.
Teachers can easily create blank-map exercises by selecting the cities, setting the necessary guidelines and time for the test.
One of the major perks of transferring these atlases directly to mozaBook is that teachers can use these maps alongside their presentations or textbooks with the help of the split view option. There is no need to leave the interface or open any other program, just place your exercise book and the map next to each other and the lesson can begin.
If you are interested in checking out mozaBook powered up with the comprehensive map collection, do not hesitate to download the free version of the software with a 1-month trial period. If you want to learn more about these maps, please visit the relevant page on our website by clicking here.
Do you you have any questions? Drop us a line at office@mozaweb.com and we’ll be happy to get in touch!
Mozaik Education
Started out as a textbook publisher for primary and secondary education almost three decades ago, Mozaik Education has been developing digital educational solutions for 12 years. Localized in 30 languages, today the mozaLearn digital educational system is used in every continent.
Mozaik is continually developing new software, interactive 3D, video and audio content and educational applications to meet the needs of education ministries, K-12 teachers and students, and publishers worldwide. Covering everything from interactive digital textbooks, to complete presentation software for interactive boards, computers and tablets, to school and classroom management, the mozaLearn solution is helping to open a new chapter in the history of education.
mozaBook
- educational presentation software suite developed for interactive touch displays that gives the teachers the resources to create engaging and eye-catching lessons.
- Alongside versatile presentation functions, mozaBook puts an entire library of interactive content at teachers’ and students’ fingertips, including 1200+ 3D models and scenes, 120+ tools and games, along with audio, video and still image content.
- Teachers can also add their own files into presentations, create and assign tests and quizzes, and upload their own textbooks to make them interactive. It’s a great way to get the most out of the technology in today’s blended classrooms!
LabCamera
- webcam-based natural science, exploration and data logging software that allows students and teachers to carry out scientific observations and measurements by using a computer
- It can be easily integrated in classroom teaching in form of group-work and presentation supporting content, but it can enhance individual student involvement and efficient home-learning as well. With the help of built-in sensors, students can test their hypothesis or carry out measurements with everyday objects
- LabCamera includes seven scientific modules (Microscope, Kinematics, Time lapse, Motion cam, Pathfinder, Graph challenge, and Universal Logger) to discover the secrets of nature and our immediate surroundings.
mozaWeb
- A browser-based platform for learning at home, providing users with K-12 interactive content to gain a better understanding of the curriculum including subjects, like History, Geography, Chemistry, or Physics. The Media library contains more than 1200 interactive 3D scenes, subject-related tools and games, and a vast collection of audio visual materials and still images.
- A Free registration provides a restricted access to the content library (viewing max. 5 animations, videos, or tools per week), while a Premium subscription grants an unlimited access to the whole content library and enables students to receive homework assignments and participate in classwork.
- As it is a web-based solution, mozaWeb doesn’t require any installation. With their registered personal accounts, students can login to the platform on their tablet or smartphone as well, and use our freely downloadable Android application, the Mozaik3D app to explore our 1200 3D scenes with a few clicks.
Interactive 3D Smartbooks
The Click n' Learn series of our interactive 3D books offer the benefits of both printed books and mobile devices to acquire more extensive knowledge. The 20 titles cover several age groups and subjects.
Besides having the high-quality printed version, readers can open and watch related interactive 3D animations on their smart devices with the help of QR codes. In the 3D scenes readers can
• rotate, zoom, see cutaway views
• watch narrated animations
• walk around with the built-in VR feature
These fun non-fiction / educational books cover all age groups and subjects, like Science, Engineering, History, Biology or Geography and they can support home-learning as well.
For more information about mozaBook and other products from Mozaik Education, visit www.mozaweb.com
For kids, summer is not only a perfect time to do, let’s say, absolutely nothing, but also a great opportunity to work on their “craft”, practice and deepen their knowledge in areas in which they’re really interested or improve their skill-set where they feel a little bit stuck.
If you think about it, that is almost the case for professional athletes as well. After a long, grinding season they still need to prepare for the next challenge both mentally and physically, which makes it essential to improve every aspect of their game as much as they can during the “off-season”. This is even more true of this year as the best football players in the world are currently playing on the biggest stage in their career thanks to the FIFA World Cup, so their well-deserved break is yet to be taken.
That being said, let me give you some ideas and recommend a couple of randomly selected tools from mozaWeb that you can pass along to your children in order to get them ready for the next season at school or just to pass the time on rainy days during the vacation period!
1) Translators and interpreters of the future - Lan(g)ame
What is the most important when learning a foreign language?
“Words, words, words”, says Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and rightfully so.
Learning a new language is really cool and fun, especially if you get enough positive feedback to make you feel that learning comes easy. However, if we’re not using the language every day, it’s equally easy to get out of rhythm and forget most of the expressions we picked up previously. Any language teacher can tell you that active and passive vocabulary are not the same at all so we have to make sure that we keep our “database” as up-to-date as possible.
In Lan(g)ame, just select the language pair you wish to practice and try to score as many points as you can by determining the meaning of words.
Kids will surely enjoy it, because it’s quick and truly fascinating. What’s more, the wide array of available languages in the app may give them some extra motivation to start learning something new as well!
2) Euler would be proud - Maths games for the Summer
“Counting and multiplication? Can’t think of a better way of spending the afternoon.”
Well, sometimes it’s more than difficult to make our children feel that way, but combining something so... let’s put it nicely, theoretical with a cool game might just be the right solution.
Oh, and if we’re talking about Maths, we have to mention the all-time favourite, the one and only Number Hero, which is also a sneaky way to get the kids to practice mathematical operations.
In this game, the rule is pretty simple: if your answer is correct, you are free to jump to the next island. If not, well… you’ll be eaten by a weirdly satisfied shark who is gentleman enough to wear a handkerchief in the water. Tough luck.
3) Hobby historians and skilled experts of human history - Time Machine
The good news is that there is a whole variety of ways to expand your knowledge in the subject of history outside of the classroom, such as visiting museums, historical buildings, going on a sightseeing tour or talking to your grandparents to learn more about local and contemporary history.
Besides that, we can offer the Time Machine tool which is basically an interactive timeline where you can search for any historical individual and put them in the center of a diagram. Around the selected person a whole bunch of similarly significant people will appear, but you have the option to manage the results as the profession, nationality, or time period can be also set.
Once you have the whole crew on your plate (for example, William Shakespeare with his contemporaries and fellow writers), you can generate an exercise with one click . The goal is to match the names with the images on the tray which is an exceptionally good way to refresh the memories about important historical dates and figures.
What else can be done for an active summer?
- Spending 15-20 minutes with these apps each day,
- going out into nature,
- reading for fun,
- taking up a sport as a new hobby.
The possibilities are of course endless...but let this be a motto: learning can and does take place everywhere. Not only for us, adults, but also for our children, two and a half months are just too long and too much precious time is wasted on being completely off.
On behalf of the whole Mozaik Team, let me wish all of you a wonderful summer full of memories and adventures... see you in September!
Easily manageable, cost-effective, and up-to-date… let’s be honest, it can be a real struggle sometimes to find the perfect tool for the great scientist of the future. That’s why I’d like to explore our newest application, LabCamera (available within the mozaBook software or as a stand-alone solution) and quickly introduce its main modules.
LabCamera is an exploration and data logging laboratory which makes it easy for students and teachers to carry out scientific observations and measurements. You only need a computer, the software, and yes, as the name suggests, a standard webcam. The main strength of the software lies within its simplicity as you can build the best technology ever, if no school can afford or implement it, it will not be much help to students in the long run. That being said, let’s take a closer look at some LabCamera features!
1.) Kinematics
To put it simply, graphs are cool and kids love them in Physic lessons, especially if they can get them in real-time. First, take the footage of your webcam or a pre-recorded video, select a couple of objects (colorful balls, toy cars, etc.), then let the Kinematics module track the movement of the object for you. In the final graph that can be exported with one click, students can analyze all the details about the speed or acceleration of the selected object.
Be prepared for future conversations at home, like:
“How was school, honey?”
“Nothing special… we just analyzed a horizontal and vertical graph of displacement, velocity and acceleration of some balloons.”
2.) Time lapse
Some processes in nature, such as ice melting, can be difficult to observe and even more difficult to successfully track, so the time lapse function can be a lifesaver here. The software takes still shots and stitches these images into a coherent stream of video, while your task is simply to set the playback speed of the video.
Of course, time lapse also comes in handy during joyful moments in the kitchen, such as baking the perfect muffin.
3.) Motion cam
With the Motion cam function, students are able to capture intimate moments in nature. The trick is quite simple, yet incredibly effective: the camera records only when it detects movement in front of the device.
The benefit? You don’t have to wait endless hours in the garden or in the forest for your best hummingbird pal to show up; it spares a lot of time for you and makes it easier to edit and manage your videos for class.
4.) Microscope
Did you know that you can take macro photos with your webcam? This is exactly the feature that the Microscope module was built for, but as always, it’s possible to analyze 3rd party images as well. Once you’ve turned yourself into a professional photographer / scientist, you can learn more about proportions, sizes, and even measurement methodology.
In this case, I’ve just measured the length and area of a sugar molecule in two steps.
5.) Universal logger
The most valuable asset of the Universal logger is that it’s possible to log any type of measurement instruments in school or at home. Whether a digital or fluid-based display, the software picks up on the signals of, let’s say, a thermometer with the help of the built-in camera and connects it to your computer.
The real fun comes in when you decide to track not one, but three devices at the same time and carry out comparative experiments. All in all, it’s definitely a super versatile and helpful tool.
6.) Pathfinder
Your starting lineup is the same as in the previous cases. The webcam is doing the background work, while you’re analyzing the results of the experiment. Have you ever tried to see through the European flight radar or the chaos created by a bunch of ants?
Here you go, the heat map might just be the perfect solution for class.
7.) Graph challenge
It’s an old, but universal truth that kids learn the fastest and the most efficient when they don’t even realize they are actually learning. This tool is a great opportunity for students to channel their inner imitation artists as the main rule is to follow the predefined curve, while the software is following your moves.
For exciting presentation videos and further information on the different modules, please visit the LabCamera website or the product info site on mozaWeb where you can find a super helpful user manual as well.
Want to try it for free? Download the installer file from here and enjoy!
It’s not hard to make a case for the interactive 3D models being the most eye-catching content mozaBook has to offer, so it would be a waste not to take all the additional advantages they can provide for teachers and students. Among the Tools and games, one can find two brand new applications, the 3D puzzle and the Rotating game, with the help of which skill development has never been more fun!
Every kid loves puzzles and the benefits of playing with puzzles has been well documented over the years. Puzzles significantly improve not only the cognitive skills of children in the early stages, but also the fine motor skills, and, of course, memory. Focusing on these aspects, at Mozaik we aimed to take this one step further by developing the 3D puzzle in mozaBook. Our 3D puzzle can effectively improve and develop spatial perception and consciousness, which are extremely important in every walk of life (as a basic example, just think of riding a bicycle).
Spatial perception can be defined as being aware of our relationships with the environment around us. Therefore, when our spatial perception functions ideally, it allows us to make sense of our surroundings, as well as situate and orient ourselves in them.
That being said, your task with the 3D puzzle is to place the colorful objects in the right place with the help of the shadows on the walls and on the floor. The rule is rather simple, however, completing the task is far from easy.
The game helps you interpret the environment more effectively and make the necessary adjustments. Thanks to the interactive interface, the kids are able to zoom in, rotate, and move the screen in order to use the shadows as helping guides.
Rotating game is another skill development tool in mozaBook where the main goal is to assemble fragments of broken 3D models by rotating them.
At first glance, it might seem almost impossible to rotate the fragment panels (looking nothing like a meaningful object) into the right place to copy the target object, however, as while working on the task, we’re getting closer and closer until we eventually find the right balance and the image starts to come together.
Certain advantages need to be mentioned in the case of both games. First of all, they can provide the children with a specific goal during playtime, and accomplishing this goal brings instant satisfaction and a sense of pride to the little ones (and speaking from personal experience, yes... to the big ones as well). Moreover, both the 3D puzzle and the Rotating game require special skills that are rather important nowadays, namely creative thinking and problem-solving skill.
The children have to make decisions: which object goes where.
Analyze the situation: which way should I continue rotating.
Finally, they have to come up with new strategies to solve the exercise when they feel stuck.
Create a mozaWeb account to try all the Tools and games for free!
Summer is officially over (I’d better not kid myself, it’s almost mid-autumn) and this means that the students and teachers around the world are anxious to continue their exciting collaboration in the classroom. The sleepy mornings with yawning faces, fully packed backpacks, and noisy buses are back so I’m more than happy to present you some of the mozaBook developments and features we were working on in the past few months. I know this is a busy period for all of us in the education sector, but please make sure you enjoy the ride in the meantime.
Magic pencils… for real magicians in the classroom
Teachers get a whole set of new and exciting drawing options this semester, but, in my opinion, the three absolute greats from the new pencil collection are the “fade-out”, the “shape-” and the “text recognition” pens.
For instance, in case you’d like to highlight or emphasize some very important detail on the screen, but don’t want to mess up your nicely designed and well-structured presentation, the fade-out pencil is an ideal choice.
My other favourites are totally state-of-the-art features, namely the text- and the shape recognition pens. By selecting these options we can write something, or draw any shape on the screen with our own hand, and it becomes a formatted text or, let’s say, a perfectly shaped circle on the display as the system recognizes our “occasionally-a-bit-messy” handwriting or drawing. Do I have to tell you how neat it looks on the board?
The shape recognition pencil:
Table… for thorough understanding
Teaching some really complex part of the curriculum can come with serious challenges when our main aim is to make pupils fully understand the logic behind the scenes. For many of us, visual learners, it’s much easier to realize and catch the differences, as well as the similarities via systematized comparison so a table always comes handy for a teacher to summarize the lesson or illustrate their point. With mozaBook, drawing up a perfectly customized table from scratch couldn’t be easier!
Simplified toolbar and icons.... for those who know exactly what they need on the screen and where
It can be really frustrating when something we really need is nowhere to be seen. Wait, isn’t that tiny hammer icon… no, it must be in the corner somewhere... oh, of course it’s on the tray. One of the main goals of mozaBook is appealing to all learning styles and taking into consideration the needs of the students. However, at the same time, we focus heavily on the teachers’ requirements as well to ensure their comfortable work in the classroom. Now, they are able to select the tools they use a lot (e.g. Media library, Games, Classwork) and lock these icons on the screen wherever they wish.
The selected icons along with the adjustable simple interface suit the educators’ needs: nothing more, nothing less.