EdTech Avenue

I read about Wordle on another edtech blog last week.  Thought I’d give it a try using EdTech Avenue as a generator.  I’m not sure how this application might be used, but it’s pretty fun to play with!

With Creative Commons licensing, many more photos and images are available to download for educational purposes than ever before. But Pics4Learning (offered by Tech4Learning) screens photos and makes sure they are appropriate for educational venues of all sorts. You can even contribute some of your own images! This is a terrific site for teachers to use when they want a one-stop site for finding images for student projects. They have categories and a search function to find just the photo you want. I would imagine as this site becomes more well-known, we can expect the library to grow and grow.

Do you know of any other good sites for images or audio for education?

I am sending the following in an email to our teachers this week. I want to encourage them to not take off their thinking caps for the entire summer, just as they send out a summer reading list for students with the same intent. My hope is that they return in the fall with some fresh ideas for integrating technology as a means for creative assessment and that they use the time they have in the summer to really delve in and explore some of today’s great technologies and idea-sharing media.

• Find one educational blogger whose posts you consider valid and relevant to your teaching. Read on average at least 1 post a week, and be prepared to share what you have found during workshop week in the fall.
• Go to TeacherTube.com and find one video you could either use in one of your classes or replicate as a student project.
• Come up with one multimedia project you could use to enhance your curriculum in some way. This project could involve digital photos, music, movie clips, slides, clay animation, drawings, podcasts…
• Come up with one project in your class where you could use a blog with students. You post something and have them respond, give comments, reactions, reflections…
• Look into the following educational technology trends and buzz-words and prepare to talk about them and how they might impact not only your teaching but the learning of our students:
  • Wiki
  • Blog
  • Podcast, Webcast
  • Ning
  • Web 2.0, School 2.0
  • RSS, Aggregator, Feed
  • Streaming
  • Skype
  • Twitter, Meebo
  • Chat, Instant Message
  • Del.icio.us
• Complete the following regarding technology:
  • The one thing I wish I had in my classroom is __________.
  • One activity I wish I could do with my students is __________.
  • Technology would be easier to use in my classes if __________.

I may be setting myself up for disappointment here, but I don’t think so. I believe that the incredible staff with whom I work will come through. If just one or two teachers come back with a great idea, that energy will spark a flame that I can feed throughout the year!

And it’s practical, too!

I’ve been feverishly trying to catch up on the blogosphere and finding lots of great tools I’ve missed out on being stuck back in Web 1.0.  Thank you to Scott Elias of Do I Dare Disturb the Universe for recommending Picnik, a web-based photo editing program that I am hoping and praying will take off, stick around, AND remain FREE.

I will be the first to admit, I was skeptical.  I mean really, a WEB-based photo editor?  How can that be decent?  But folks, it is.  I used it for my personal blog just to test it out and see the functionality of the Flickr connection, and I am happy.  It works splendidly.  I held a digital photo training for teachers today and was anxious to recommend it and show it off - they loved it!  It has the features and user-friendliness of iPhoto and then some, with fun advanced creatives (some of the cool ones will be with a paid version only).

Just register for free, open a photo, and basic tools are available to you: crop, resize, rotate, exposure, colors, sharpen, red-eye, etc.  Click the Creative Tools tab to really have some fun!  Then save your file to your computer or directly to a Flickr account, complete with tags, descriptions, private/public settings, and even the ability to add photos to existing sets (can’t create new ones yet).  I can edit photos from my computer or directly from my Flickr account.  And there’s website tools and widgets I haven’t even touched yet.

I can imagine terrific applications for myself - I’m on someone else’s or a library computer that doesn’t have a photo editing program, I just took some photos that I want to upload and blog about… no problem now!  I can see tons of educational applications for this too, and the kicker is the cost - $0.00.  Unbelievable.  Let’s support this software and keep it available!

Below are photos I edited with Picnik in minutes, although I reduced the size of each one equally to display them better (the high quality resolution of my camera makes them too big for this use).  The original is on the left, edited photo on the right: