Making Teachers Nerdy

Those special events where everyone seems to have a camera flashing such as field day, classroom performances, and field trips offer a special opportunity for teachers and parents.  It gives everyone a chance to grab those candid shots and capture great moments on film, but often there is difficulty sharing all those photos and videos in one place.  Email works to a point, but often this is cumbersome and has limitations with file sizes.  Worry no more.  Today’s post will make video and photo sharing easy while keeping those treasures private and safe.

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Now that more and more classrooms are publishing student work for digital storytelling, podcasting, or through wikis and blogs it is becoming increasingly critical students follow the copyright and fair use guidelines.   To help you and your students, I’ve created another freebie post – free images and sounds for student projects.  Yes, there are multiple websites out there for public domain images and sounds, but I tried to pull those that are safe for student searching.  You will find glorious photo landscapes, character illustrations of fairy tale characters, tornado sound effects, and more. 

In addition, the links do have suggested curriculum units that could be supported through the use of the websites.  Hopefully, that will guide your search.

I encourage you to place your favorite resource links on your own classroom website for students to access easily.

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One of my favorite units to teach is poetry.  The playing with words, the cleverness of students, and the discovering of new ways to describe a simple object always gives me a thrill.  I mean really.  How often does one get to use words like hanker after to replace want or quick on the uptake for clever?  I love it, but yes, that’s the English teacher in me along with a dozen word games on my iPod Touch.

Today’s post is another freebie to help you with your own poetry units.  I’ve pulled a list of poetry generators online along with a few ideas that might help spark a little creativity in you. 

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Yes, Mother’s Day is right around the corner, so it’s time to decide what project or craft idea your students will create this year to commemorate this annual event.  First, let’s think of the criteria.  It should be cute, sentimental, and perhaps even a little touching.  In any case, it should include student writing and creativity.  Actually, my favorite gifts are those that bring just a sweet tear to a Mommy’s eye when she opens it.  Can you tell I’m a mommy, too?

Today’s post will feature some technology infused Mother’s Day projects and links to help you come up with the best gift idea possible.  Most of these can be done in Photo Shop if you are familiar with the program, but I’m sharing how to many of these with Picasa, Picnik, and Microsoft Office.

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Now that you and/or your students are using wikis and blogs, are you curious what could be added to them?  From animated slideshows to collaborative documents to interactive review games, many great (and free) tools are available.  As a follow up to my previous post “What Teachers Should and Should Not Be Posting on their Classroom Webpages”, I’ve pulled a master list of embedding options that will hopefully spark your imagination. 

As you browse the list consider how you will use these embeds.  While some of these work perfectly for classroom blog posts, others tend to be more effective wiki tools.  Do you want students to view a video clip and then leave comments below?  That’s a perfect blog scenario.  Or do you want students to collect data in a form?  Yep, that’s a wiki tool.  I know your wheels will be turning to come up with great new ways to use the tools. 

One note of warning, however.  If any of these sites are blocked at your school, the embeds will also be blocked.

Good luck and again if you have any other suggestions please post them in the comments section.  The more tools available, the nerdier we all can be.

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