Group items tagged

Last week Google announced another round of service and product closures. The popular image editing tool Picnik was included in the list of services that they're shutting down. I've had a few people ask me for recommendations for alternatives to Picnik, so here's a short list of alternatives to explore.

Fantastic tool PLN Starter Kit...

Standards for the 21st-Century Learner offer vision for teaching and learning to both guide and beckon our profession as education leaders. They will both shape the library program and serve as a tool for school librarians to use to shape the learning of students in the school.

"Librarians, teachers and parents have told us how hard it is for students to understand web searching. Boolify allows students to visualize and interact with the abstract concept behind the search process--it is intuitive and easy to use with your class or in your library. Search results are presented through Google's "SafeSearch STRICT" technology to prevent objectionable content from appearing in their search results. There are two important caveats: a) no filtering technology is 100% secure, as this blog posting astutely points out and 2) we are unable to control or modify the results that we provide, beyond the filtering settings available through Google."

"What is Pixlr? Pixlr is the creator of online cloud-based image tools and utilities. Today we have three applications in our suite: Pixlr Editor, Pixlr Express and Pixlr-o-matic. They are built in Flash and you need to have the Flash plug-in (get flash) to get it to work, however, 98% of all computers have flash so you are probably set. We also provide screengrabbing tools Pixlr Grabber and one click photo sharing imm.io."

Each is a short presentation, less than 10 minutes.  All are effective and provide an important resources that I integrate into lessons.  I have used these videos here with upper-elementary students, middle school students, and even high school students.  The key is to include enriched content in a short, attention-grabbing way.  You will find that the formats and styles I use work with very wide and diverse age groups.

Dipity is a free digital timeline website. Our mission is to organize the web's content by date and time. Users can create, share, embed and collaborate on interactive, visually engaging timelines that integrate video, audio, images, text, links, social media, location and timestamps.

TriCider allows you to make a poll but then allow others to offers pros & cons & influence the decision

Evernote is a great web service and software application that we can use in education. A lot of ink has been shed on this topic and just one click in a search engine is enough to get hundreds of links to guides and tutorials about Evernote. I have been going through so many of these resources and have collected ideas, videos, notes and many more. If you are a loyal reader to my blog ( I am glad most of you are ) you would clearly notice that guides I write here are different in that they are simple. to the point, address teachers and students direct  need, and most of all written in an easy and simple language. In this regard, I am working on an ebook that will contain all the guides I have posted here so far but will be available for free only to my subscribers. Without any further ado, let us get back to our guide.

Wow, fantastic resource, I'll be using this a LOT in the coming months: Mashpedia: Mashpedia is a thematic content aggregator that integrates a variety of data from online services and applications like Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Google News, Books, and further contextual information into a single interface, presenting an organized outlook of live content feeds for every topic, thus providing a broad spectrum of data and media that eliminate the user's need to visit each service separately.

Interesting book recommendation resource.

From Jen Blair: Have you ever... tried to print up something from the Internet and it ends up being 8 pages long because of all the "extra stuff" around the edges? Or it's a crossword puzzle that ends up covering 3 pages that you would somehow have to tape together? Don't be frustrated! Save paper! Use: http://www.printfriendly.com/ Simply go to the above site, paste in the URL you are wanting to print, and watch the magic as your 3 page printout somehow gets cut down to ONE!

Curate Lists!

Online flyer resource.

Fantastic citation and infographic instructions Lesson plans and rubric for infographic as well.

The next research link...

This was taken as excerpts from Melissa Dalton's post on Libs-Or: Oregon Poetic Voices (OPV) is a comprehensive digital archive of poetry readings that complements existing print collections of poetry across the state and is funded by the Library Services and Technology Act FFY2010. The state of Oregon possesses an unusually high number of nationally recognized writers, a very high proportion of whom are award-winning and otherwise notable poets. Additionally, there are active communities of emerging poets around the state, and poetry is regularly taught in the English curriculum of most Oregon schools. Until Oregon Poetic Voices began in 2010, there was no publicly accessible archive of recorded poetry by Oregon poets that could be used to maintain a record of poetry in performance, which is a vitally important aspect of interpretation and a valuable teaching tool. The Oregon Poetic Voices archive currently publishes over 200 prominent and emerging Oregon poets, including their biographies and poem texts alongside their recordings, and will soon feature historic performances recorded by KBOO, Fishtrap, and the Mountain Writers Series. There are also resources for educators, including curriculum guides and links to information about teaching poetry. http://listsmart.osl.state.or.us/pipermail/libs-or/2011-July/010664.html

Recognizing the need for poetry in our lives, the Oregon Poetic Voices Project (OPV) has begun to create a comprehensive digital archive of poetry readings that will complement existing print collections of poetry across the state.

The website's About Us section states that the "goal was to create a simple to use and easy to learn tool to help people organize their ideas in a way that make sense to them." Click on Help in the top right corner of the homepage for tips on how to use the site.