Group items tagged

Really, there are so many apps available it can be hard to know where to begin and once you find something that looks useful, it's difficult to assess it properly until you've download and installed it on your iPad. iPad music apps that are free can take away the risk of choosing a dud and they can be useful when book-listing apps for students on a tight budget.

Recently I have gotten a lot of feedback on my previous PBL posts, mainly asking me how I develop my PBL ideas.  So, I thought it might be a good idea to let everyone take a peek at the process I use to write my PBLs.  Just be warned that I haven't yet perfected the art of crafting a PBL yet, but hopefully some of this will help you in any PBL writing you may do.

"An application that turns mouse movements into a modern art. The idea is that you just run it and do your usual day stuff at the computer. Go back to IOGraph after a while and grab a nice picture of what you've done!"

"Brain Pickings is your LEGO treasure chest, full of pieces across art, design, science, technology, philosophy, history, politics, psychology, sociology, ecology, anthropology, you-name-itology. Pieces that enrich your mental pool of resources and empower you to combine them into original concepts that are stronger, smarter, richer, deeper and more impactful. Please enjoy."

Creative commons clip art

Based on a simple concept, powerful technology, and a highly intuitive interface, SpicyNodes is easy to author. In a few minutes you can make an interactive site map, or repurpose your existing content into an inviting portal with unique visual appeal. With a few clicks, you can customize your nodemap's appearance and share it with others or embed it into your web site or blog. It's also a fresh way to display information for various creative and educational uses, from concept maps, to poetry and art, to new user interfaces and visualizations.

Free online creative art application - great fun and save your creations

Scratch is a programming language for young people to create their own interactive stories, games, music, and art. Scratch was created by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. You can find more information and download Scratch for free at scratch.mit.edu

Helping to make New Zealand digital content easy to find, share, and use. We aim to make New Zealand digital content more useful. This includes helping people use digital material from libraries, museums, government departments, publicly funded organisations, the private sector, and community groups. Use this site to: Find NZ digital material that is hidden or buried on the internet Search across more than 20 million digital items to discover New Zealand treasures such as amazing aerial photos, old posters and memorabilia, newspaper clippings, artworks, and publications. Items are contributed from partners including Te Papa, the Alexander Turnbull Library, Auckland Art Gallery, Te Ara, NZ On Screen and many many more.

For 10 months, Carolyn Abbott waited for the other shoe to drop. In April 2011, Abbott, who teaches mathematics to seventh- and eighth-graders at the Anderson School, a citywide gifted-and-talented school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, received some startling news. Her score on the Teacher Data Report, the New York City Department of Education's effort to isolate a teacher's contribution to her students' performance on New York State's math and English Language Arts (ELA) tests in grades four through eight, said that 32 percent of seventh-grade math teachers and 0 percent of eighth-grade math teachers scored below her. She was, according to this report, the worst eighth-grade math teacher in New York City, where she has taught since 2007.

These useful tools give students the right tools to narrate, animate, and dictate. The post will explains them to teachers by giving some examples of how to incorporate art and design lesson plans into their existing courses.

This tool allows users to create their own clip art by changing the letters in photos of signs. The tool provides over 500 templates or a user can upload a photo of a sign and change the letters around.

""Literacy from Scratch" is a response to the United Kingdom (UK) government's initiative to develop computer programming skills in both the Primary phase of education (pupils aged 5 to 11) and the Secondary phase (aged 11 to 18). Explore the website to find out how postgraduate students from London and Prague and schools in the UK and the Czech Republic have risen to this challenge. The site also contains a variety of pupil work using IT in cross-curricular sessions in the UK and other countries, including Stories for Children, and the STAR (Science Through Arts) project."

"Canva is another web tool you can use with your students to create mini-posters for your class. Canva is easy to use and has user friendly interface. The process of creating a visual through Canva is as simple as drag and drop. Canva provides you with a wide variety of images and clip arts that you can modify to suit your purposes. You can even upload your own images to use as background in your graphics."

"What happens when you take a comic book artist, an inventor, and a toy designer? You get Howtoons. Our mission is to provide engaging content that teaches kids how to build things, combining instructions with storytelling. Howtoons has a foundation of science and engineering education, inspiring creativity through art and imagination."

Quite a few things listed in this post. "Open Educational Resources are learning tools like textbooks, lesson plans, and other media that are in the public domain or openly licensed, meaning that use you can freely use and adapt them. Unlike online resources that are free but not openly licensed, you can adapt OERs as much as you like to your own needs, which makes them an infinitely flexible tool. For example, you could take a geography textbook and add examples and landmarks from your own region. Or you could take a storybook and translate it, as a class, into another language. Or your art class could create new illustrations for an existing story."

Khan Academy has just launched this new project designed to engage maths, science and media teachers, as well as young filmmakers. "Pixar In A Box" is an new online curriculum that "analyzes how the studio fuses art, tech, science, engineering, and math to develop top-shelf animated cinema. Created with middle and high school students in mind but available to everyone, Pixar In A Box's interactive exercises, in-depth video lessons, and hands-on activities are an informative addition to Khan Academy's extensive educational resources. The curriculum spans the pipeline of the production process.

Their Youtube channel has some excellent videos *especially* the RSA Animate ones - incredible! "The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has been a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress. Our approach is multi-disciplinary, politically independent and combines cutting edge research and policy development with practical action."

"This is a continuing article in my series "The Googal In Google" This posting will focus on the art of searching using the basic Google search engine. I have tried to include the obvious and the not so obvious techniques. As you look through, I am almost certain you will learn something new. Please share this article with other educators and students. Just understanding these ten concepts will assist anyone into being a more productive researcher. As always, please feel free to follow me on twitter at (@mjgormans), I will do the same. Also, please take a moment to subscribe to this blog by email or RSS. I am always finding useful information to share! Let's begin our search. - Mike"

"What is BeFunky? BeFunky simplifies photo editing and effects for everyday people. Marvelous Photo Effects Choose from our constantly growing library of photo effects to turn your ordinary photos into extraordinary art with virtually no effort. Smart Photo Enhancement Photo editing made smart. Fix your common photo problems like bad lighting, digital noise, fuzzy colors and details with one click. Design Goodies Give your digital creations a whole lot of character with BeFunky Goodies. Add speech bubbles, frames and more..."