Wordle is an online tool (toy) for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.The Wordle below was created from tags in my delicious account. Wouldn’t this be fun in a Language Arts class? It could also be used in a computer class to demo tag clouds and how the words appear smaller or larger depending on how often they’re used.Try one youself at http://www.wordle.net.

That’s right – free music especially geared for elementary students! Free Kids Music provides downloads of various types of music (vocal and instrumental) that can be used in your classroom. As defined on the web site, Free Kids Music is ”intended to be downloaded and listened to on computers, MP3 players, custom CDs for personal listening, etc. It is NOT intended to be played on your web site, mixed with video or graphics and posted on another web site, played in public as warmup music for a paying audience, burned to CDs intended for resale, used on TV shows, etc.” In other words, you are encouraged to use this resource in your classroom. Check it out!

Photo Credit: , AODDJ. schoolpic.jpg. 1998. Pics4Learning. 10 Sep 2008 <http://pics.tech4learning.com>

Last week at the National Educational Computing Conference in San Antonio, Apple Computer unveiled that newest component of its iTunes Store, iTunes U, providing free access to over 50,000 educational audio and video tracks. This content is available to everyone, not just students, using a Mac or PC and an internet connection.

iTunes U is being populated with podcasts and movies from museums, universities, PBS stations, and educational institutions from across the country. Michigan is one of seven states currently participating in this project to share resources for K-12 educators around the world.

MACUL (Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning) is a proud partner with the Michigan Department of Education in identifying and developing content for Michigan’s MI Learning, a part of the iTunes U site.

There are several ways to explore this new content after clicking on iTunes U from the iTunes Store window:

• Check out the top download
• Choose a category
• Browse New and Noteworthy
• Find an educational provider or featured providers
• Choose specifically from K-12 resources
• Use the Search Feature in the iTunes Store.

Once you locate the content you would like to see or hear, download it into iTunes on your computer. You’re then able to listen to it on your computer or sync your iPod or iPhone and take it with you. Learning is no longer confined by the four walls of the classroom!

Our friends Melinda Kolk and David Wagner from Tech4Learning have a great resource on their web site providing images for educators.

This site at htp://www.pics4learning.com allows users to search from a collection of thousands of images by key word, location, caption, or photographer. Users can also Browse by topic or look at the 100 Most Popular Images.

At the bottom of each image are instructions for downloading it and well as the citation that the user can copy and insert in their document with the picture.

And, if you have images you’d like to share, there are directions on the site to help you upload your images for others to use.

Instead of creating a traditional “book report”, encourage students to create a “book trailer” using the free Photo Story application. Photo Story 3 is a free download from Microsoft that (1) enables you to create short ‘movies’  (animation added to photographs), and (2) add .mp3 files or use a built-in music generator to add music in the background. This article, “Making Book Trailers” with Photo Story 3” written by Mark Geary provides an overview and step-by-step instructions on how to create the book trailer. While the article focuses on students creating the final product, you can also use it to create a short introductions to new units of study.  

Among the numerous online tools for sharing documents is mynoteIT. There are some similarities to Google Documents, but some unique characteristics that make this tool something worth considering. On the front page of the web site, several benefits are listed, including:

• ability to keep track of upcoming assignments (and for teachers, perhaps keep track of what needs to be done in preparation for a class project),

• create classes to keep notes separated,

• create “groups” in which peers can be invited for sharing the notes, and

• upload Word and OpenOffice documents, images and audio notes.

Google Tools for Educators are a great way for students and staff to collaborate on documents, presentations or spreadsheets. And now, there are simple tutorials from Atomic Learning available to help learn how to use Google Tools for Educators. The godo news is, while Atomic Learning usually charges an annual fee to use their tutorials, these are free. Check them out at Google Documents, Google Presentations, and Google Spreadsheets.

If you’re looking for an easy paint program packed with features, ArtRage is your tool. The full version of ArtRage 2.5 is available to download for Windows and OS X for $25, ArtRage 2.5 Plus CD with an 80 page full color manual is $39.95, but a Starter version is FREE!

In the Starter version, you can paint with oils, sketch with pencils, chalk, crayons, and markers. As you move your cursor across your “paper”, you run out of paint and chalk just as you would using real paint or chalk. You can also see the texture of the paint on the paper and can manipulate it with an artist’s palette knife.

In the Full version you can use an airbrush, sprinkle glitter, paint with gold leaf, silver foil and other metallic colors. You can even load in your own photos as Tracing Images to help you recreate them as paintings. The full version also allows you to use stencils and rulers.

Edutopia magazine, published by the George Lucas Education Foundation, publishes  several articles  about education in general as well as articles about the role of technology in education. This article, titled Voice Threads: Extending The Classroom With Multimedia Interactive Albums, gives an excellent overview. Participants in the Muskegon ISD’s Tech Integration Series have been (or will be) trained on this cool resource, but if you want to learn on your own, there are some excellent tutorials on the VoiceThreads web site. It also points out (in the third paragraph and at the end of the article) that there is now a web site where you can find VoiceThreads specific to K12 education.

In order to embed the video you have created into a Power Point presentation, you first need to convert it to a .wmv file. All movies need to be in that format to play well with Power Point.I have created a video tutorial to show how to do that with a program I talked about earlier, VideoLAN.
Assuming you have downloaded that program, click the tutorial link below, there is also a .pdf file of the steps needed to convert a file using VideoLAN.

Video Tutorial

Converting Flash Document

When that step is complete, you can simply go to the page in Power Point you want to embed the video and follow these steps.1. Select “Insert” then “Movies and Sounds” then “Movie From File”
2. Browse to the file you want to embed and select “OK”
3. it will ask if you want it to play automatically or when clicked, I suggest “When Clicked”.
4. Test your slide to make sure everything works!