Thing 21 - podcasts and photo story

This was a tough one for me. I had to go out and buy a mic and figure out the settings to make it record properly, download audacity, download the lame encoder from audacity, think of what to say, learn how to use the software, and me without even an ipod to my name! Now comes the hard part, exporting it to this blog post. Here goes... This will be used for a Texas trivia contest over the course of the year for our fourth graders. Book trailers, audio reminders for directory paths, student storytelling, lots of cool things...

The next task is easier for me as I have already explored Photo Story this summer for my twin boys' high school graduation retrospective. I had lots of fun playing with the music and old photos. I didn't have a mic at the time, and it would have been fun to add my comments to some of the pictures. Unfortunately, it is very long and would not load so I tried a shortened version below. I may have to play with the file size some more (still 2M) to get it to load. It was the highlight of the day for my family members. I can see this in place of biography reports, author studies, history events, U.S. state reports, almost anything ....

Thing 10 - images

I created the stop making excuses sign on sidebar using Imagechef. It's my little reminder that I CAN DO THIS! I am a lifelong learner. I found it very easy to use and to upload photos for home use. For school purposes, it would be a great idea to create fun new signs for the kindergarten community sign unit, to have kids create motivational buttons, to introduce authors.



After about 1 hour of playing around with all the different possibilities, I felt like this from Comic Strip Generator.

The site was friendly and I'm sure students could use it to introduce creative writing assignments, write thank you notes to speakers, and just for fun practice typing.

For most flexibility, I still prefer the BigHugeLab site we explored in thing 7 which has losts of cool project templates and is the easiest by far to use.

Thing 6 - mashups

I created a stamp in Big Huge Labs using the framer tool and a photo we took in Hawaii. I plan to have our 3rd grade students create stamps for their state reports. There are so many tools that would be useful to me professionally and personally. This is the site I've been looking for! Our kids don't have access to professional photo editing tools and they are too young to use most of the ones I've looked at. If I can do it they can too. Posters for teachers to make, badges for our bookfair volunteers, biography trading cards, science fair demos, staff trading cards, scavenger hunt type trading cards, writing prompt photos -- too many things to count. Thank you 23 1/2 things!

Thing 5 - photos

This photo was taken by Darren Hesten and found on the Flickr site in the Creative Commons/Attributions section. I liked it because it is the perfect "apple for the teacher" picture with a twist - the colors seem to be the reverse of the stereotypical red apple. The flickr site looks very useful, especially the creative commons section. I especially like the link to the Creative Commons photos from the Library of Congress which will come in handy when we need to have primary source photos in history, art, science, etc... I can also see accessing the pictures for 5th grade world geography projects, 2nd grade animal reports, signs unit in Kindergarten, really too many places to count. But really interesting to me since we are FINALLY getting class sets of digital cameras and this will help us manage.