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http://www.storiesinflight.com/flickrpoet/index.php

This cool little web app creates a visualization of your original poetry (or any other text you enter) by fetching Flickr images that match each word and displaying them in a collage with the text floating over each image.

You simply enter the text and click the “Show Story” button. Give it a few seconds and your collage will be built before your eyes. If you don’t like it, click the button again to re-spin your visualization. Here’s a small sample of my original work (I make no claim regarding the quality of the poetry itself):

Once the collage is built, you can click on any individual image to open its Flickr page. Other than that, you can’t do much with it. You can save it as a web page if you want to keep it- and I suppose you could print it to a printer or make a PDF of it.

Now that I think about it, it would be a quick way to search for a collection of images for projects (such as book trailers, slideshows, presentations, etc.).

NOTE: I could never get this to display correctly in the Chrome browser (my default). I used Firefox (on a PC) for the above image. If your web filter blocks Flickr images, this will not work!

http://ifaketext.com

I have always loved image generators like the Tombstone Generator, the Church Sign Generator, and the Newspaper Headline Generator. See all kinds of them listed on my wiki here. For some reason, many districts block these. Yet, they really do have some great curricular purposes. Take this Fake Text Generator as an example. Imagine students creating a series of fake text message images to tell a story like this one, the Boston Massacre:

The site generates a downloadable image, but it will also host your image and provide you the link or embed code you need to display it on your blogs, wikis, websites, etc. And yes, it’s FREE! And no, I don’t know how long they will keep your rendered image on their servers.

Now with great power, comes great responsibility Spider-man- so don’t go faking text messages from your boss, superintendent, school board member, or… well, you get the idea.

http://marvel.com/create_your_own_superhero

Marvel allows you to channel your inner superhero to create a personalized avatar. You first decide which body base you would like to have- male, female or Hulk.

You name your character and then select facial features such as hair, eyes, ears, and then clothing and accessories. You can also select an existing Marvel Comic character to work with like Iron Man, Spiderman, or Electra. Continue reading

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.loonapix.com

Loonapix is a free photo editing online service that is a lot of fun to use to enhance your photographs. It’s easy to use, and has lots of options. Continue reading

http://www.says-it.com/concertticket

Like many other image generators, this handy site will let you create your own concert ticket image. Choose from one of three styles to create something like this:

Yeah, so that’s cool. But how would you ever use this? How about a “ticket” to Open House, a class party, special events, etc. I even used it for my daughter’s birthday party invitations when she wanted a movie theme! Just a couple things you should keep in mind Continue reading

http://bighugelabs.com/deck.php

Big Huge Labs has lots of great “toys” for your images. You’ll just have to go to their main page to check them all out. But for use in the classroom, the Trading Card generator is a great tool. Think of the possibilities of creating your own “Pokemon” or “Magic” type cards. If you don’t know what either of these are, just ask your little nephew or neighborhood kid- or better yet, just Google it.

Here are some sample curriculum uses from our upcoming book…

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