Aviary

Aviary is a complete free image editor on the fly. Kind of like a mini Photoshop editor with no hard drive space or buying of software required. Looks really cool and would be good for web pages and more!

Wordle

Wordle Site

This site is great for teaching a Poetry lesson with kids.

You can change the font, layout, colors, etc... There are

a lot of creative uses for this "word cloud" site.

Sketchcast

Sketchcast

The Sketchcast above shows the order of operations.

You can create your own sketchcast or let students

create their own during your lessons and use

them in the lesson or have them available for

students to review a concept.

There are all kinds of uses for this app. Some

other examples I saw were photosynthesis,the

area of a triangle, and exponents and square

roots.You will see more examples if you

visit the site!

Red Laser App for iPhone

At FETC I attended a short workshop all about iPhone Apps by Leslie Fisher. She showed all kinds of cool new apps for the iPhone. One that caught my attention was this Barcode scanner app called Red Laser App Here are some possible uses according to the site:

Scan a book and check for reviews

Scan the milk and add it to your grocery list

Scan movies and beam them to your TiVo

Check online prices for a DVD player.

Check out her site at lesliefisher.com (takes a minute to load) for more exciting apps such as:

VIPER Smart Start: Use your iPhone to start your car

Audioboo.fm: Will post audio files to your webpage

Ocarina: iPhone music creator: flutes/drums/keyboards/guitars

Star Walk: Stargazing in real time

This day in history: lists events of that day in history

iTranslate: translates different languages

RTM (remember the milk) iPhone app To Do lists

Evernote: uploads text and pics

Duck You: a Spelling App

Drop Box: for file syncing

iVideo Camera: can upload to FaceBook

Motion GPX: voice guidance/walking directions

Saisuki: calendar; sinks with Google calendar

NotePad: allows you to group your notes

...and many, many, more.

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Accelerated Reader Widget

Also at FETC I learned about the Accelerated Reader Widget available from the Enterprise addition.
What a cool way to communicate on your web page to parents and students in real time. You can
set it up monthly or for the whole year. Cool!

Math Facts In A Flash with Responders!

Math Facts using Responders

Teachers,

While I was attending FETC I stopped in at the Renaissance Learning booth to see what was new. We already have the Accelerated Reader, Accelerated Math, STAR Reader, and Math Facts in a Flash Software, as well as Accel Test, and 2Know! Software. The good news that I discovered is that now Math Facts in a Flash can be used on the student responders. We already have a set of 24 repsonders and two receivers on campus. We already have the software we need to run the programs. We can purchase extra responders for $39 each and extra receivers for $99 each. Essentially, for about $1000 we could have a set of responders with a receiver for a classroom.

They can be shared between classrooms becuase the software

can be used for ten or fifteen minutes a day. The amount of time you would normally give to practicing math facts. The cool thing about this is that because we have the software on the network, student data can be tracked automatically and you can see student progress immediately.

But math facts is not the only use for the responders. With the Accel Test software

which we already own, you can create tests that are scored automatically using the responders and run score reports immediately. The Accel Test is also used with scanners, which we already have six of that can be used to score with scan cards which we also already own. Follow the link above to find out more about using the RL responders in your classroom. Give me a shout if you have more questions about these products.

Grab on you MAC

While creating this blog I discovered there were some icons I could not drag and drop to include a graphic within a post. While doing a search for a screen copy I found a neat little tool in the MAC Applications folder that is nifty for "grabbing" images you find and can not use the traditional copy/paste in which to make a copy. Once you open the "Grab" application you can choose to copy the whole screen or just a selection. You can do this anywhere on the web or on your computer. To find it on your Mac, go to Applications > Utilities > Grab. Double click to open it and then from the menu above choose "Capture" and then your choice or window, screen, or selection. I am so happy with this tool I have dragged it into my Dock for frequent future use. The images are all saved as Tiffs but I found that if you open the Tiff image and do a "Save As" it will let you re-save as a jpeg, or whatever you choose.

Online Stopwatch

Online Stopwatch

This site has an online stop watch as well as all kinds of timers.

You can make the timer or stop watch full screen for all kinds

of lessons or activities where you need to time the event.

It is online and always available for free. When time runs

out on the stop watch a bell rings to let you know! Click the link

above to go to the site and check it out. Just bookmark it to have

it available for any lesson, any time!

Jam Studio

Jam Studio Link

Tired of the Garage Band choices for student projects? Say hello to Jam Studio. I would not have believed
it if I had not seen for myself just how easy this is. When you go to this site a 30 second tutorial begins
automatically and in less than a minute you are creating your own music including picking your own style
and instruments. The music can be saved and imported into any student project. And best of all...it's Free!
If you are into using Garage Band to create student projects or podcasts you need to check out this site!
Also, on the bottom left of the site page click on "In the Classroom" link to see how some elementary schools
are using Jam Studio.

NewsMaker Software

NewsMaker Free Trial


One of my favorite discoveries from FETC was this cool and easy to use software called NewsMaker.
You can download a free 30 day full version trial from the link above. Click on the PLAY button below to
see it in action!

Simply Box

Simply Box
Here is a site that will let students collaborate information gathered from research projects as well as for teachers to capture while surfing the web and share information that they can share during their lessons. This is definitely the wave of the future.