"An Online Drawing Tool That Makes Everyone an Artist
AutoDraw.com" t/h to Nick LaFave. AutoDraw turns sketches into more professional looking cartoons. By Google Creativity. Use to illustrate ideas about readings, or one's own storyline.
Kids may be inspired to learn more -- reading, writing, planning, creativity -- when inspired by lessons in how to make games. The site has a weekly "feature" and lots of tutorials.
This is a great creative app for iPhone or Android to create up 1-hr-long videos for YouTube. Your students can make shorter videos on their mobiles, then upload and splice them together.
Stannard's training video on how to use Windows Movie Maker (Windows 7) is very detailed and complete. Subsequent parts give directions for XP and Vista. He first suggests downloading the free classic version, which has more features than WMM for Win 7.
" Mind maps are content- and purpose-agnostic. Use them for anything that requires thinking, planning, organizing, or writing." This is the third of three articles (linked here) ab out using mind-mapping productively. Great article for teaching writing. It's not all about "outlines."
"Collect up gifs related to any vocabulary area you want to teach or revise. Embed them in an html page on your desk top and start a collection. Each time you add new ones send the html page to your students. (They will need to have a live connection on their computer to be able to view the gifs)
Ask them to make notes of any words they relate to the images they see."
This is another neat little tool with notes on how to use it from the very extensive collection by Nik Peachey. I'd suggest having the students make animated vocabulary gifs of words they want to learn/find useful.
R. Byrne: "Wideo is a nice tool for creating Common Craft-style videos. You can create animated videos on Wideo by dragging and dropping clipart and text in storyboard frames. You set the position and animation sequence for each element in each storyboard frame. When you have completed your storyboards Wideo generates a video for you.
"This week Wideo added a new feature that allows you to build interactive buttons into each frame of your video. The buttons can be hyperlinked to any webpage that you like. When people are watching your video they can click the buttons to be taken to the webpage you want them to land on. For example, clicking the buttons in the video embedded below will take you to the website of my favorite animal rescue organizations."
Older students could, of course, create videos themselves to instruct others. The new interactive button might also lead to a quiz on Quizlet or in Google Docs, for example.