Showing posts with label flickr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label flickr. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Friday (Wednesday) Tech Tip for Teachers

Since we have a long weekend (wahoo) and don't have school on Thursday or Friday, I thought I'd post my tech tip today.  Today's tech tip will point you in the direction of an image creation site I default to often.  Big Huge Labs has many different photo editing options including, but not limited to:
  • Magazine Cover Creation
    • Create your very own magazine to feature:
      • a famous person for a biography assignment
      • a current events topic
      • an animal research assignment
      • just about anything...
  • Movie Poster
    • Fourth graders created movie posters last year to "advertise" our author visit with Debbie Dadey.
  • Captioner
    • Want to add speech or thought bubbles to a picture?  The captioner will let you do just that.
    • Students can create a cartoon speech bubble to show character's conversation from a book
    • Dialogue between two famous individuals from history
  • Billboard
    • Ever wanted to convey a BIG idea?  Why not do so on a billboard?
  • Framer
    • Put a fun frame around your photo.
  • Trading Cards
    • Again, great for a biography to sum up the traits of a character.
  • Badge Maker
    • If you need an official "press pass", this is the place to put it together.  Fun for students as part of a news team or any nametag-worthy event.
  • And others that are just plain fun!
Check out Big Huge Labs today!

Friday, July 23, 2010

Con-tech-ted

ontheshelf4kids is con-tech-ted in many different ways.

Image courtesy of www.flickr.com/photos/qthomasbower 

Twitter
Through twitter, a professional learning network has been established.  Furthermore, parents can follow ontheshelf4kids on twitter as we tweet about our daily do-ings in the library.


del.icio.us
Delicious is a bookmarking site where we have begun to collect a variety of websites sorted by tags for use in the library, by teachers, students, and parents as well.


diigo
Diigo serves essentially the same function as Delicious but has further capabilities such as adding highlighted areas to text on webpages, sticky notes to annotate, and more - both Delicious and Diigo have the function of creating groups as well which will serve well for connecting our library to other libraries which might benefit from sharing in our list of links to resources.



flickr
Flickr is a site to collect photos.  I became inspired when searching for creative commons licensed photos using a search for library.  I came across a colleagues' collection of photos of school library displays and decided I would like to share display ideas as well.  I have to check into sharing photos including students as to our photo release form, or I can edit the photos so that students are not discernible in the photos.  But I can definitely see the applications for using flickr and also for teaching students about using creative commons licensed images through this site.


Facebook
ontheshelf4kids also has a facebook presence.  I plan to utilize this as one more tool to reach out to families, students, teachers, and others to publicize the great happenings in our school library.




Library Thing 
Library Thing is a site to showcase the books in your library.  Using this site we can create widgets to create flash files of book covers for the side bar of the blog.  You can also write reviews and interact with the collection in other ways.  I'm still thinking about how to best use this tool and decide if Follett Destiny might have some of the same features.


Blogger
Clearly, we are here on blogger.  I haven't even conceptualized the entire scope of this blog just yet.  I plan to use my school website blog as well and may reserve this blog for professional sharing.  It may also be a jumping off point for student project blogs that may appear separate from this title.  I plan to use our school website blog to share about specific happenings with classes and offer students the opportunity to blog about their experiences during library lessons.  I'd like for this blog to have a specific format, but don't want to limit myself to just sharing book reviews, or technology integration ideas.  I want this blog to be VERY open ended, but I'd like it to be organized and reliable as well.  Any feedback is welcome.  I was thinking there may be a rhyme and reason to daily posts, like Tech Tuesdays, or Fiction Fridays.  This is still a brainstorm in its infancy, but hopefully it will flesh out quite nicely.

Time Ticks On
July is almost done and August will be here much too quickly.  Summer reading is in full swing here (a post I plan to share shortly).  I am attending many professional learning opportunities in August and plan to post more about each as well as the preparations that will be happening in our library.  The first day of school will be here before you know it!

Image courtesy of www.flickr.com/brenda-starr