There’s just one more week to go and I’ve been struggling to figure out what websites would be the most useful to teachers at this time of year. Like our students, it’s hard not to “check out” mentally a little early. It’s so hard, in fact, that I’ve given up trying. This week’s featured website is just for fun. BeFunky.com is a cool online program that enables you ”turn your photos into incredible artwork with one click.”  

Here’s an example of what you can do:

There are some very good educational uses of this application–in our art classes and with any of your students presentations–but mostly it’s just fun!

Sad, powerful, poignant….too many words, too many emotions.

Click here for more pictures.

Found this on TED. It HAS to count as some kind of poetry!

From http://www.wordle.net/

Many of you have expressed your frustration about not being able to access and use YouTube videos to meet your instructional objectives. There are some really nice videos posted there. Unfortunately, there are some very inappropriate videos posted there as well. For that reason, YouTube can never be unblocked by the school district. In a perfect world, teachers would have access while students would still be restricted from the site, but I don’t imagine that will happen in our school district any time soon, if at all.

However, there are many good alternatives to YouTube available that are not blocked. The best I’ve seen is still TeacherTube.com. The videos there are posted by fellow educators and all are screened to make sure they are appropriate. I also recently discovered Edublogs.tv, and of course teachers also have access to the wonderful resources, including video, at Discovery Education (a.k.a. United Streaming – see your ITRT if you are not sure how to create an account).

But let’s say that you’ve found the perfect video for your class, and it’s only on YouTube. How can you use it for instruction? The first thing you have to do is download the video file. The best free online file downloader I’ve used recently is Media Converter. When you download the file, I recommend converting it to .wmv which is the format that will play on our school computers. Once you’ve downloaded the file, you can play it directly from your classroom computer, embed it into a PowerPoint, or upload it to TeacherTube so that you can access it anywhere at anytime from online. And that’s it!

I have only scratched the surface on this one — http://education.animoto.com/– but if you like building digital stories from pictures, Animoto looks like a great tool.