When static slideshows are just too lame and boring, there are other options! Holy Cow! That’s PowerPoint blasphemy! Oh, get over it! There are better options that give a much more impressive look and feel. And the good news is that you don’t have to be a genius to look like one!
Take a look at this great Water Cycle video I created with this great tool…
Want to make your own? No problem!
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…
Recently I worked with a group of teachers who were writing lesson plans and was introduced to a really fun website for teaching animal adaptations. It is Switcheroo Zoo and it located at www.switchzoo.com
I have had so much fun creating new animals and putting them into new habitats. My favorite part (at least so far, I haven’t explored every single part of the website yet!) is the Make and Play section. Continue reading
At Digital Goonies, we use Google Docs a lot to organize our book outlines, our workshop proposals, calendars, and a whole lot more! I can’t image how we got along before we started using Google Docs. Recently I needed a template for a spreadsheet that I was setting up, and decided to see if there was something available already that would keep me from recreating the wheel. I browsed through the template area of Google Docs.
Wow! There are so many templates there from financial spreadsheets to presentation templates to calendars. Continue reading
I’ve been up way late too many nights already this week finishing our new book to write, but thought I should throw this out there!
OK, so this one is not earth-shattering, but I ran across this handy website a few days ago. If you need to post something to the web real quick and don’t want to hassle with logging in to your wiki or blog, then this may come in handy. It’s real simple- you build a quick, free, ad-free website by using their simple editor, or if you prefer, use their HTML editor. This is great for testing code and posting content to the web in a quick way.
And yes, the site allows javascript so you can embed widgets here!
Try it out! And, oh yeah, one more thing… there is no logging in which means there’s no going back to “fix” a posting.
With a book deadline coming up for the Digital Goonies, I am reminded of how procrastination really causes stress. But in the world of education, you can’t help but to put things off until a more convenient time- after the students have gone home, the bells have stopped ringing, and the rest of the world goes home to relax.
I have used this great tool called “Later This” for some time now. It’s not so much of a Web 2.0 tool I suppose as it is just a great utility. It’s a bookmarklet. If you don’t know what that is, look here. Here’s how it works…
Continue reading
