Entries Tagged 'Resources' ↓

Flickr has partnered with Picnik to let you edit your pictures online. Now you can take pictures, upload them to flickr, describe and tag them and even do minor editing all in one place.

You can click the auto-fix button to have Picnik make adjustments for you or you can choose any of the tools to make changes yourself. The tools include rotate, crop, resize, exposure, colors, sharpen, and red-eye removal.

You can also click the Create button to get a list of special effects like sepia, black and white, vignette and more. You can also add shapes, text, and frames and do a little touch up.

It’s not Photoshop but it lets you do a lot for free and online. You can cancel or undo if you don’t like changes you have made or you can choose to save the changes. Once you save you cannot undo.

Most of the effects are free but there are some that are marked premium which are only available if you upgrade your account. This is a very nice addition to Flickr.

Haven’t had much time to post here but I thought this was such a neat idea. It’s called Lookybook and it lets you preview children’s book, add them to your virtual “bookshelf”, and even purchase them. You can write a review and read other reviews and share the book with someone else.

I started out searching for how writing is taught so that in the future I might be a better commenter. I found some wonderful resources and I’m going to share them here before they disappear into bookmark oblivion.

The first is from the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory and is called 6+ 1 Trait Writing.

The 6+1 Trait Writing framework is a powerful way to learn and use a common language to refer to characteristics of writing as well as create a common vision of what ‘good’ writing looks like. Teachers and students can use the 6+1 Trait model to pinpoint areas of strength and weakness as they continue to focus on improved writing.

There are lesson plans, assessment, prompts and more. There is more on this at The Writing Fix and at eMints which has a huge list of links that even include classroom posters you can print out.

The next treasure is The Scribe Initiative which is a wiki of the San Antonio School system dedicated to digital storytelling. There is an incredible wealth of resources here including links to open source software for editing audio, tutorials for using MovieMaker and PhotoStory, sources for images and sounds and much more. If you want to take your student’s writing digital this is a great place to start.

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say? ”
E. M. Forster

Spending some time cleaning out email entails reading through some newsletters that contain websites. There is so much out there and not enough time to really look at it all but I am going to try to find good links for this post and in the process, shrink my overloaded inbox.

One website that caught my attention was this interactive version of The Raven. This would be a great Halloween lesson! The website is appropriately spooky and they have marked all the alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme in the first half of the poem - just hover over the different colored words! You will also find vocabulary words highlighted and defined. This is found at TeachersFirst which is an educational resource site that has been around since 1998.

Here is a website that lets you upload a photo, choose the month, year and size and then print out a personalized calendar. The Reflection Generator let’s you upload a photo and it creates a new image with a reflection added to the bottom. I used the reflection generator to create a new image that I uploaded to the calendar generator and made a November Calendar with our High School pictured at the top. It is here in PDF form if you would like a copy! November Calendar to print It was fun, easy, and free!

I recently signed up on Twitter. If you haven’t looked at it, it is basically instant messaging but throughout the day online by thousands of people. You can sign up to “follow” people. I have resisted because I lead a pretty boring life for the most part. If I am going through a time that is not boring, chances are I won’t have time to “twitter” it, and will blog about it when things calm down.

I signed up because I thought I would try out the “follow” option and follow some of the educational bloggers that I read. During conferences some interesting conversations take place on twitter. You can have Twitter send notifications to your cell phone too so you can keep up with people that way. I’m not clear on how it works as I am a pay as you go cell phone person and didn’t want to use up phone time having Twitter call me.

If you see a Twitter badge in a blog that you read and think you might want to check it out you can sign up for an account for free. Once you have verified your account via your email you can type an update (just tell what you are doing), then search for people you want to follow. I was interested in what some of the early adopters thought about the new version of the Mac operating system and the “tweets” were pretty informative! If you sign up and search for me prepare to take a nap! I basically work, watch TV, surf the net, and go to church.

My last recommendation is Dy-Dan - and his blog entry on a math lesson that was taught on TaaDaa…How I Met Your Mother (called the Hot/Crazy Curve). There is a clip on YouTube which is blocked at school but if you missed the show last week you can watch the clip at home, wait for re-runs, or read the dialog he has below the embedded video on his webpage.

See, as Barney explains, being crazy is fine so long as you match your neuroses with good looks in a one-to-one correspondence (or better). Which makes sense. In a fantastic hey-mister-scientist moment, Barney terms that line the Vickie Mendoza Diagonal, which, I mean, holy cow, I don’t care who you are, there’s no way to mess that one up.

Of course Mr. Meyer couldn’t leave it at that - he has created an entire lesson in which the students graph the data (which he claims he fabricated from ten ex-girlfriends LOL) and their rank on a ten point scale of looks and craziness. He then has the students graph them and tell him which ones fall below the Vickie Mendoza line. I’m not sure but I think at the end of the day he may have had more fun with this than the students! I want to go back to school and learn math in your class Dan - you ARE the man!

Our Technology Director shared a link with us yesterday and I am passing it on to you. The site is Maps Of War and it has some great animated maps. Most of them deal with the Middle East on the main page. You can also download them as flash files or PowerPoint presentations with the flash files embedded. Here is a screen shot:

It adds color overlays and shows the timeline progression. It has an option to view full screen and code to embed it.

Make sure you check the links on the left side. If you click Library it will take you to more resources - animated maps and resources for other wars.

Aspire - astrophysics science project

The ASPIRE Lab is now one of the most innovative and interactive science education websites available on the Internet. You will find not only fun interactive labs, but well designed and produced curriculum content, created by teachers for teachers. The powerful combination of inquiry-based content, along with interactive, hands-on labs provides a powerful visualization tool for you and your students to use. Best of all, the ASPIRE Lab is free!

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Go on a virtual field trip!

a tour of the microscope including views and checklist.

I can’t leave out some blogs!

Sandwalk - the blog of Larry Moran, a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto

Useful Chemistry - lots of links here and a wiki

Molecule Of The Day - “This site is by a chemist who enjoys rambling about the relationship between chemistry and real life to non-chemists.”

Okay so I don’t look like a scientist! I just thought this needed a picture and so here I am “Simpsonized!” (Thanks Comp Day for the idea)Have a great week everyone!

This school year is flying by. I can’t believe it is already October! I have been so busy I haven’t had time to write. I have been learning new things and making notes to blog about but I am going to have to make a quick entry so I don’t forget these wonderful things!

This was fun - go to BeFunky.com and apply for an invite - it only took a day before I received mine. Upload a photo of yourself and turn it into a cartoon. I’m not sure what the limit is for how many pictures you can “cartoonize” but it would be fun for students and younger students might be amused at you - the cartoon professor in your own presentations! there were more techniques - this was a quick example. Please don’t judge the website by the picture - they had to work with what I uploaded!

Yahoo has several trailers for the movie “The Kingdom” and the first one would be great to show in a history/social studies class. It shows some of the history of United States involvement in Saudi Arabia.

I have started learning Excel 2003 online via LearnKey. So far I am very impressed. Excel has 5 sessions and I have completed one along with taking the test for that section. It is very detailed. The lessons are presented by video with an instructor lecturing and using screencasts. There are documents and links to extra tips and a “lab” area. I chose to do Excel first because I use if on a regular basis and while I want to fill in the holes in my knowledge I also wanted something I had some familiarity with the first time so I wouldn’t be completely lost in the material while I got used to the teaching interface. I’ll blog some more about LearnKey as I get closer to completing the course.

A great article on writing blunders  at Bohemian Word Werks.  The site is hosted on LiveJournal so it could be blocked if you are trying to get there at school but it is definitely worth  checking out.

It will be here any minute!! well pre-conference starts October 8

3 Reasons Meme

three reasons to participate based on my experience from last year!

1. It is staff development the way I like it - at home, in my jammies, with a cup of decaf latte.

2. No Crowds! No driving! No hotels! No airports! (yes I know - technically that’s four - so sue me)

3. You can go back and review the sessions at anytime (unlike virtual conferences where you have to get everything you can right then because when its over, it’s over)

Ya’ll come!

I have made use of Google tools for several years now and I have used Google Calendar and GMail more than anything else but I have been using Google Docs more and Google Docs now has a presentation piece! If you aren’t familiar with Google docs they are a word processor and a spreadsheet. They are fairly compatible with Microsoft products but their real power lies in the ability to make them public or share between specific users which makes is easy to collaborate with people in the next office or people on the other side of the world.

The wonderful folks at Common Craft have a new video out - Google Docs in Plain English. There are other great videos out there if you are able to access YouTube just search on Google presentation or Google Docs and you can find plenty of support and tutorials.

Merlin Man on 43Folders uses Google Docs as a collaboration/communication tool.

My favorite use right now is to use a single shared document as a common space that 4 or 5 people have access to and that they can use to give each other to-dos, ask questions, etc.

Vinnie Vrotny from Illinois over at Multifaceted Refractions got messages from several colleagues to go on over to Google Docs where he talks about how 6 - 15 people were collaboratively learning Google Presentation. They were learning and posting their findings as they learned.

For an example of collaboration visit this unique presentation that has been created and edited by a group of educators on using Google Presentation. You can go view the presentation, chat in real-time if any of the presenters are online, even add your own tips to the presentation.

There is also a revisions button that allows you to track changes and revert to older versions.

I created a short presentation to play with called BrandNew - it includes a link to a text doc which contains a link back to show you how you can integrate the two apps. To make the link in the document work you must click preview.

As I write this post I am listening to a podcast found at LearningOutLoud.com. There are sections on biographies, great speeches in history, Literary summaries, founding documents in audio form, free audio book of the month, art history, all categorized and subscribeable.

There is a section on test taking. You can wander through a very large online catalog of subjects to integrated podcasts into your classroom.

Here is an article with an interesting way to talk about internet safety with students. Instead of giving them a list of “don’ts” here you can find a list of questions to open up a discussion with them. One of my favorite questions was:

If people were to Google you, what conclusions would they make?

Students can take online quizzes that look more like games but are tagged according to quiz subject matter at PurposeGames. Creating an account is optional but if you do you can see your score history. You can also create quizzes if there are none that fit your needs.

Another link for today is VoiceThread. You can upload pictures, record audio and create a multimedia show and tell online presentation. There are plenty of examples and instructions to make the process pretty painless. Even if you are not planning on creating one of your own it is very interesting to play some of the examples!

I finish with another podcast link - I’m listening to Thomas Friedman lecturing at the Sydney Institute after dinner on The Flat World. This podcast is nearly an hour long so I would plan on listening to it on a car trip or load it on your mp3 player and exercise your brain while you are at the walking track exercising your body!

I had to add one more link. Thanks to Dan Meyer for this one - the site is called Mango and you can sign up for free to learn languages. I spent a short time today learn a little Japanese. It was fun and painless! The site includes Chinese, Japanese, Russian, German, Englich for Spanish speakers and more! Arigatou (Thank you!)