Create Your Own Comic Strip

I've been playing with this cool comic strip creator MAKE BELIEFS COMIX. This is a site kid would love to use to illustrate a vocabulary word or a concept. PIKI KIDS COMICS CREATOR is another tool students could use to create comics. On this site users upload pictures from their computer or online source and then create the comic around them.

If students didn't want to use photos, they could use Microsoft Clip Art. The easiest way to get clip art into another program is to open PowerPoint, choose clip art and then scroll through the images. Insert the chosen image into the slide and then right-click on it. It will allow you to "save as picture" and you can choose the destination folder.

Possible uses for the comics creators? Book reports, explain processes in math or science, "quotes" from great figures in history. Let your students come up with ideas, too.

Do You Have an LCD Projector?

If you have an LCD projector in your classroom you may want to download ZoomIt. It's a useful tool that allows you to zoom in and out on your screen and it lets you draw on the screen to provide annotations. It's a free download and quick to install.

How the Internet Is Transforming Marketing

Thanksgiving was last week and I admit that I searched for a few recipes online. One, for sweet potatoes cooked with coconut milk and cilantro, was a real winner. I heard about it on NPR's On Point one day and looked it up. I was like a growing number of Americans. A fascinating article from the NY Times, Butterballs or Cheese Balls, an Online Barometer, describes how the major food websites tracked their traffic during the Thanksgiving countdown--and what folks were searching for.

Great Use of Kidspiration

Kidspiration can be used as a reading aid for students, particularly when they are doing research and finding only sources of information that are too difficult to read easily. Here's how to do it: Highlight a section of the text to be read aloud and copy it. Open up Kidspiration and choose picture view. Click the main idea oval, erase main idea, and paste in the copied text. Click the ear in the top toolbar and click the oval (now greatly expanded). The program will "read" the words. You may have to play around a little bit with the clicking to get it to play, but it seems to play when you've inserted the text, clicked the ear, and then clicked the oval to highlight it.

For Your Holiday List

Thinking and connecting globally is part of being a 21st century teacher and learner. Get ready to connect your classroom to others and ask Santa for a webcam this year. For about $30 and 30 seconds, you can buy a webcam and install it in the classroom. Then when you want to really connect with others, you're set.

If you don't yet have a good memory stick (thumb drive), now is the time to ask for one as a stocking stuffer. There are specials on them this time of year from Rite-Aid to Best Buy. Mention to your students that they make great gifts for them, too. With the occasional issues with Netstorage, the thumb drive eliminates one more homework hurdle.

FETC 09

I got these tips from Tammy Worcester, one of the presenters at the FECT 09 conference in Orlando. They are some cool little web tools:

Random Name Picker
Coin Flipper
Newspaper Clipping Generator
Online Stopwatch

Photostory tutorial

Here is a link to a good, step-by-step tutorial for Photostory from Jake Luddington.
Here's a link to another source of music creation--JamStudio.
Some copyright free music from www.freemusic.com
And here is a very large collection of copyright friendly music and images from a high school librarian in Pennsylvania.

Another historical photostory example

From the other side of the world, Dear Librarian

If you like trying fun stuff, here's a blog, Dear Librarian,  that will give you some great ideas. This is from Ann Krembs, a librarian at the American School in Bombay, India. This blog gives all sorts of cool things to try. 

The New Year--with math

Some of us are thinking about creating some mathcasts. In preparation for doing this, I came across some math sites that look interesting. Thinking Blocks is an interactive math tool developed by classroom teachers to help students learn how to solve multistep word problems. There are model problems (and video tutorials to explain them), and a place for teachers and students to create their own problems. Also created by Colleen King is Math Playground, a math activity site for elementary and middle school students. It has computation practice, math games, manipulatives, worksheets, and mathcasts in an attractive arrangement. To find out more about mathcasts,, visit Math247 on their PBwiki homepage.