Group items tagged

"Constraints drive innovation and force focus," according to 37Signals in their popular "Getting Real" book. If that's true, then Copyblogger's Twitter Writing Contest, announced a couple of weeks ago, should have had writers brimming with creativity. The task? Write a short story in 140 characters. Not less than 140 characters, exactly 140 characters. That's no easy task, but the contest still fielded over 300 entries. Today, Copyblogger revealed the winners.

Just to review, the idea behind the Twitter Writing Contest was simple… compose a story in exactly 140 characters and post it on Twitter. I want to thank everyone who participated, because there are a ton of talented writers out there (even at 140 characters)!

"Schools are inherently full of different characters. With a mix of personalities, students and staff can often clash with each other, using different strategies to gain the upper hand, or simply to avoid conflict and live a quiet life. Yet, there are those characters who can be sneaky, back-stabbing, manipulative or darn right confrontational. It's these people who know how to play politics to win friends, influence and possibly to gain the upper hand in climbing the next step on the career ladder."

Some of use the fakebook tool at classtools.net but if you need to be offline, this is a template to make a Facebook page for a famous character. It is a .doc (Microsoft Word) file and you can download it and use it for your activity. These are great for looking at famous characters and students enjoy them.

A superb site for finding, printing and making cubic paper characters. Make well known characters from TV, cartoons, movies and lots more. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Art%2C+Craft+%26+Design

"My StoryMaker lets you control characters and objects - and creates sentences for you! Once you are done with your story, you can print it out. You cannot go back and edit a story once you have ended it but, if you click "yes" when asked to share it with others, you can print it out again by entering the magic number it gives you in the box on the right. Since lack of space forces us to delete story files older than 1 month, please save the .pdf file that prints to your own computer."

"My StoryMaker lets you control characters and objects - and creates sentences for you! Once you are done with your story, you can print it out. You cannot go back and edit a story once you have ended it but, if you click "yes" when asked to share it with others, you can print it out again by entering the magic number it gives you in the box on the right. Since we periodically have to delete the older story files, please save the .pdf file that prints to your own computer."

New app lets you create virtual talking personas of historical characters or even you. Fascinating to see how this will work out.

Virsona is sponsoring a talking history contest in which you create a virtual person that answers questions like the person in history would answer. This could be a great excercise for a history class if you have characters that you investigate deeply. This would be fascinating.

New app lets you create virtual talking personas of historical characters or even you. Fascinating to see how this will work out.

Students write descriptive sentences about their character.

Parodies of the Google Search Stories movies as done by famous characters on Sesame Street. Humorous, and intriguing, it's one way to bring traditional media characters onto the web.

Create historical twitter character then tweet based on history research  Quote from Mark Rounds Web-Ed Tools Paper.li, "Participants choose a historical event, create Twitter accounts for individual characters, pore over primary source documents and think critically about the times, dates, and durations of events to create hundreds of Tweets as they might have been broadcast had Twitter existed before the 21st century. They then submit all those Tweets to the engineers at TwHistory, specifying a start date for their event, and then watch it unfold - over a day, a week, a month or more - reflecting the event's actual duration."

A great checklist to reflect on your social, emotional, and character development work during the past teaching year.

First of two great YouTube Playlists with over 200 explanations of how Chinese characters have evolved over time. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Mandarin+%26+Chinese+culture

Students need to understand that NOTHING, I repeat NOTHING Is private. Great case study about how 140 characters got someone fired before they were even hired.

The kind acts foundation will send you pins to give to your students who have done acts of kindness. This would be good as part of a character education program.

Will give you a pin to honor students who do acts of kindness. Great w/ a character education program.

character codes alt+ commands

Free-OCR.com is a free online OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tool. You can use this to perform OCR on any image you supply. This service is free, no registration necessary. We also do not need your email address. Just upload your image files. Free-OCR takes either PDF, JPG, GIF, TIFF or BMP format. The only restriction is that the images must not be larger than 2MB, no wider or higher than 5000 pixels and there is a limit of 10 image uploads per hour.

So, someone gives you a massive document and can't find it to email it to you and you have to retype whole pieces. This free OCR (optical character recognition) is a great tool to try to keep from having to do all that typing. I wish Evernote added OCR export but as of yet, does not. (just for searching)

teaching character education and virtues K-12

lesson plans for K-12 on good character, virtues etc

Got a note that if you want to go to the 140 character conference for education and are an educator you can attend for $1.40. Here is the application, it is coming up August 2/3rd. "Your readers / subscribers may join us for a special price of $1.40 (seriously) if they apply here and prove they are part of the education community. Otherwise, participation is $140.00 for the two-day event. "

"The team at Night Zookeeper is delighted to be giving primary school children across the UK a unique opportunity to use a new (and free!) website to create characters for a soon-to-launch animated TV series in a world first."