Puzzle Maker

Flash-gear offers a truly simple way to make a puzzle, then either post it to your own site/blog/wiki or put a link to their own site to house the puzzle. What a great way for youngsters to master their mouse-skills. Maybe you could puzzle the cover of a book, or a picture of a character in one of your books. Be careful with the copyright, though. Children's drawings would be great puzzles. All you'd need is a digital photo of the picture.
Check out my puzzle by clicking here.

A Quick Bit of Fun

This album is powered by BubbleShare - Add to my blog

At www.bubbleshare.com you can upload pictures, create a slideshow like the one above, grab the appropriate html and paste it into your blog. Or you can just create the album and view it online in your bubbleshare account. Nice, very easy, very quick.

Great News

At last! A file converter at Zamzar that will let you download videos from online sites, convert them to common formats like .avi (QuickTime) or .mov (Windows Video Player) and play them directly from your computer. Or put them on a CD and bring them to your school computer. Why the excitement? Many schools are blocking the most common video sites, including YouTube, dispite the vast number of excellent, educational videos available on those sites. With this excellent, free service, the problem is solved. (Unfortunately, when you embed the videos into your blog or wiki, they actually link back to the original site...doesn't look that way, but that's how it works.) To check this out, try this how-to video on the Zamzar site.

Zamzar will also enable you to convert other files to new formats. Among the most useful is its ability to convert .pdf files to other formats, including to .doc (Word document). Once a .pdf is converted to .doc, you can edit it. Whew...the big drawback of .pdf is now much less of a drawback. Sometimes the formatting is a little wacky, but it's usually manageable. Thanks, Zamzar!

The Invisible Web and a Principal's Blog and Copyright Fun

There is so much more on the Internet than most of us ever find. And often, what we don't see is vastly better information than what we do see. Robert Lackie has posted an excellent list of tips and resources for exploring the "Invisible Web". It's well worth the time it takes to check out some of these tools.

Now for a real treat...take a look at Dr. Williams' (the Principal of Hewitt-Trussville Middle School located somewhere in Alabama) blog entitled The Principal's Blog. More to the point, look at the comments to his blog entries. Wow....kids are creating a dialogue with their Principal. What a treat.

Finally, it's hard, sometimes, to make Copyright Law interesting. But it is always important. We educators hang our copyright hats on the hook of "Fair Use". Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University provides this humorous, yet informative, review of copyright principles delivered through the words of the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms.

WikiMindMap and Quintura for Kids

WikiMindMap is interesting...and fun. This site creates a mind map for you from information in Wikipedia. All you do is enter the subject you are interested in, then choose the appropriate Wiki. The English speaking world would choose en.wikipedia.org from the list of possibilities. Ta daaa....the mind map appears. From the map, you can link to the articles or websites cited in the Wikipedia article. The only drawback here is that you cannot capture the mindmap for other uses. (You can do a screen print, but that's not very useful.) Take a look at this site. For writers who are stumped, it's an instant brainstorm!

For the youngest Internet searchers, Quintura for Kids is an excellent portal. In my opinion, it is a much better choice than Yahooligans. You'll need to play with it for a couple of minutes to get used to its interface. But once you do, I think you'll find that it is very friendly indeed. Let me know what you think.

Nifty Freebie

Answers.com has a free download for both PC's and Mac's. The download and installation take less than 5 minutes. Once the program is installed, you can point to any word in any program (or at least in all programs I've tried), hold the Alt key down and click on the word. When you release the Alt key, a little window pops up with the definition and/or additional information about the word. For example, I clicked on "Oneida" and was given information about the town of Oneida, including its current weather. When I clicked on the "More" button, I was shown information from a variety of encyclopedias covering the Oneida Community and the Oneida Indians. In addition, there is always a sound icon that allows you to check pronounciation.

Think of the uses you and your students might make of this. I can imagine all kinds of "lists" a teacher might make for students, with the pronounciation and basic info available through Answers. In any case, give it a try. You can certainly uninstall this gizzmo easily, but 'til you test it you can't really envision it!

While you're at it, explore the answers.com home page. I haven't spent much time there, but it seems intriguing.

Sources for Templates

Hope these sites are useful to lots of folks. They are posted particularly for workshop participants at HF-L on August 1st. We'll be looking at interesting ways to use MS Office, and some of the templates are sure to tempt teachers.

MicroSoft Office Templates: These templates are arranged by category. Not all of them are for teachers, of course, but many, many are useful in your practice. Check out the awards category, and the calendars.

TeacherTools: This site has a great many documents which you can save as templates and use. Click on the “Forms and Letters” category on the left hand menu.

BrainyBetty: A great assortment of PowerPoint background templates, and a relief from the over-used templates available from MicroSoft!

Georgia Educational Technology Training Center: Templates for Word and PowerPoint, along with other resources, are available here. It’s worth a look.

Lexington School District 1: Templates for Excel and PowerPoint…and good ones!

Automate Excel: Wow…some of these templates are highly unusual, interesting, fun. Check ‘em out!

Mark Damon’s Games: The best, the VERY best. Try these first!

Zoho Notebook

Here's an interesting program: http://notebook.zoho.com

It looks like it has real possibilities for educators, though I haven't played with it enough to have thought it through. If you come up with ideas, please add them in the comments area. I'll be thinking too.

Skype fun

Wow, my resolve to blog more often sure did fall apart. I've been having too much fun on Skype, connecting with my beautiful new granddaughter. (Okay, I do have to enlist her parents in this effort, but they are most cooperative!)

Meantime, I can't help but think of how useful Skype could be for educators. (Skype allows you to easily use your webcam and microphone to connect with others via the Internet.) Since it's free and extraordinarily simple to use, classes could talk to each other. Better still, classes could talk with "experts" in almost any field. It would just be a matter of teachers making the arrangements. Kids would certainly take to Skyping in a heartbeat. What a great summer project for educators...to set up Skype, experiment with it a bit, then plan to incorporate it into their September lessons.

In Skype, you locate people using their email addresses. Mine is: gailgri@gmail.com Feel free to use me as part of your learning curve. I'd be delighted to see and hear you online!

Back to Blogging

I've been enjoying myself in so many ways, and can prove it with these holiday pictures. But I've missed my blog and have left it on its own for too long. Thanks to those of you who were in the NYSCATE workshop and who emailed me afterwards. I love to hear of the good instructional use you are making of the online tools we tried together!

Here's a new and nifty way to have your students respond to the books they are reading. At LibraryThing you can create a "library" for your students. Signing in is free and you can enter up to 200 books for free...after that it is either $10 for a year or $25 for a lifetime membership. If your class reads more than 200 books, it is worth every cent of $10 to keep track! It won't take you more than a few minutes to master the intricacies of this site. Your students can enter their books, read other reviews of their books, then write a review of their own. And what fun it will be to watch the list of books grow.

I ran across references to a teriffic little video called Web2.0...The Machine Is Us/ing Us. It's well worth the few minutes it takes to watch it.