digitalgoonies.com

www.compfight.com

OK, Flickr is one of our favorite sites simply because the number of images that are available, tagged, described, and shared. We highly recommend Flickr’s Creative Commons section for educators and students. If you don’t know about Creative Commons or have just had a case of amnesia, be sure to check out our previous post about finding copyright friendly images.

One of the down sides of Flickr is that it’s not the easiest interface to navigate and search for images. Enter today’s web application- Compfight. Seriously, I’m not sold on the name (was that compfight or compflight, Susan?). It’s supposed to have something to do with finding “comps” (comparable images) for your project or whatever. Anyway, just enter a search term and select whether or not you want to look only in the Creative Commons of Flickr and whether or not you want the safe search turned on. Here’s my search for dolphin:

For most of the thumbnail images you can simply hover your mouse over the image and it will give you the size of the available image (in pixels). Click on a thumbnail to open the Flickr page where the original can be downloaded.

It’s easy, it’s free, it’s fun!

www.meegenius.com

I came across this really cool site recently. It allows you to select a storybook and either have it read to you, read it yourself, or best of all- customize it!

That was my favorite feature. After you select a book, you can select the personalize button and it will ask for the name of the main characters.

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www.plurk.com

Plurk is like Twitter with a timeline.

But before you go off and say you already use Twitter or have no use for Twitter, hear me out. Plurk is the perfect place to build your PLN. Oh, yes, another acronym in education. But this is far beyond the realm of education! PLN stands for Personal Learning Network. In short, it’s a group of professional colleagues around the world that have similar interests and expertise. My PLN is invaluable! This is where I go when I need the wisdom of experience and experts that are in the trenches and on the cutting edge.

140 character posts with links, images, and videos can change the way you learn- because none of us are as smart as all of us! Continue reading

OK, so most of you already know about this- and many of us have used this for years. But I just realized I have never mentioned it in our blog or link directory- what great injustice! So what is it? It’s easier to show you than to try to explain. So take a quick look here or take a look at it over at the Glogster website:

It’s sort of a multimedia online poster of sorts. Remember the Daily Prophet newspaper in the Harry Potter movies? Yeah, it’s kinda like that! You can put together a poster with text, images, stamps, backgrounds, videos, and more.

As you can tell, this is a poster about a cool book series called The Shadow Children. As an aside- it’s a great book series and fun to read! Can you imagine the possibilities with any curriculum? Consider these…

Instead of labeling a pre-printed worksheet on the water cycle, create a water cycle glog!
Instead of writing a book report, create a glog with a book trailer!
Instead of writing a report on a historical figure, create a glog with images, videos, and quotes!

What category of web apps do you put this in? I’m not sure, so I include it in “Website Generators,” though it’s much more than that.

And one more thing… there are lots of glogs out there that may be inappropriate for students. Enter Glogster.edu- a safe and private platform for students to create their media-rich blogs! It’s also a great site to find examples of what others are doing. If you already have a Glogster account, you can migrate it to edu.glogster by sending an email to edu@glogster.com.

www.280slides.com

I was trying to find a good online presentation maker, and came across 280slides.com. It allows you to create a presentation that looks and acts very similar to PowerPoint, and best of all… it’s online, easy and free!

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www.google.com/squared

Have you ever needed a quick set of facts, but didn’t want to search through a million different websites to pull the facts together? That’s where Google Squared comes in. Google Squared (sponsored by Google of course) is a “smarter search” for facts. For example, if I needed facts about the different rain forests of the world, I could do a regular search which would probably give me what I need, but I’d have to compile the results from a few websites, or I could do a Google Squared search.

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http://www.openclipart.org/

Finally! A great source for free, that’s right, free clip art! The Microsoft Clip Art gallery is OK at best- and that only suffices for your Office documents. But if you, like most educators, are in need of other clip art that you are free to use without worrying about violating copyright, then this site is for you! The site currently features over 30,000 pieces of searchable and browsable clip art graphics. Every one of these graphics are in the public domain, having been put there by the authors/designers. Here are a few examples (images that remind me of summer):

Each of the graphics can be downloaded in either the SVG format or the PNG format. For those of you unfamiliar with SVG, it stands for scalable vector graphics. If you don’t know the difference between a vector and a bitmapped/raster graphic, you should click here to find out more about these. Essentially, vector graphics can be scaled to any size without any loss of quality since they are drawn on your screen according to mathematical algorithms.

So there you have it- another great free resource for your projects.

http://metaatem.net/words/

As we’ve mentioned before, Flickr is our friend! Not just because you can find almost any picture you need there- but because it also plays well with other websites. This cool website allows you to make a banner spelled out with Flickr pictures. Take a look at this example:

The cool thing about this is that you don’t even need to save the resulting image- you can just embed the provided code to display it on your site (I chose to screen capture it here)! The letters are randomly drawn from a pool, but if you don’t like one of the letters, simply click on it and it will be replaced by a different image. In this way, you can come up with thousands of combinations for the same word. See, here it is again:

Pretty cool, huh? Now, I just want to know who these people are that feel compelled to go around taking pictures of letters everywhere and posting them to Flickr. Seems to me like that would be a strange group of people- but I’m thankful they do it! Enjoy!

www.pixlr.com

I know I’ve written about a Photoshop substitute in the past, but I recently came across a Web 2.0 tool that I like even better than what I found before- Pixlr.com. For big photo editing jobs, Pixlr does a really good job filling in for Photoshop. It looks and acts similar to Photoshop Elements, and is really easy to use. The best part of Pixlr is that is is 3 tools in one…

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Susan and I are both avid readers- and our interests vary greatly. Finding a new good book to read is like finding a treasure- and a double bonus if it’s in stock at Half Price Books! Shelfari is a place where you can showcase the books you have read, are reading, or planning to read! You can start your own book group and see what your friends are reading, make recommendations, write reviews, and all kinds of things. Take a look at my bookshelf…

Does that interface look familiar? Seems like the Apple bookstore isn’t so original in its design after all.

So as an educator, think of these implications:

• Showcase what you are reading as an example of lifelong learning to students
• Create an account for your own personal books that students can borrow (yes, you can keep track of your lent books in Shelfari)
• Display a class bookshelf to show what students in your class have read or are reading- complete with their own reviews
• And on and on

Oh, did I mention it’s free?