Educators know that acknowledging a student’s achievements with some form of positive reinforcement can be a powerful motivator to spur further learning.  A personalized certificate is a great way to do that as it provides students (and their parents) with an “official” document making a public recognition of their accomplishment.  Certificates can be somewhat difficult to create quickly and easily, however, unless you make use of specialized certificate-creation software packages.  These dedicated programs can be pricey if certificates are needed only irregularly.  This week’s Web 2.0 Weekly takes a look at a free online tool that allows an educator to quickly and easily create quality certificates.

The SEN Teacher site provides a number of free resources for teachers with special needs students, as well as many that are useful for all teachers.  The Quick Certificate Printer, and its companion tool, Landscape Certificates, are just two of these tools.  The Quick Certificate Printer allows the user to select from a wide variety of borders, fonts, and images to create custom certificates in as little as 30 seconds.

Strengths:

• Extreme ease of use
• Can upload your own images in a wide array of formats for use in the certificate
• High quality of finished product

Weaknesses:

• Lack of built-in means to save finished certificate
• Type size for each font is fixed
• Layout cannot be altered from the basic design

There are only a few disadvantages to using the Quick Certificate Printer instead of a stand-alone award creation program and these “disadvantages”, for the most part, make sense in making the online tool quick and easy to use.  Because the ability to alter the basic layout of the certificate is limited, a user isn’t forced to spend time making decisions about the design of their certificates; they can immediately go to work entering the necessary information and choosing graphics.  The only real limitation to this tool is the lack of a built-in means to save the finished product instead of immediately printing the certificates.  Thankfully, there is a workaround for this.  Most PDF creation programs also install “virtual” printers that create PDF files instead of physical output, but still appear to the computer as an actual printer.  Using one of these programs allows the user to immediately create a PDF version of the certificate that can be emailed to the recipient or saved for later printing.

Quick Certificate Printer is free for educational or home use and requires no registration.  A computer with Internet access and Flash Player 7 or newer is required.