Zingabee

If you don’t have a mac with iPhoto, or you’re  looking for programs to create slideshow in your classroom, use good ‘ol PowerPoint.  Yeah, teachers do overuse it, and it’s been around forever, but you might not have noticed the little feature that lets you import pics in one shot – with a slideshow created for you!  Go to Insert>Photo Album then locate your pictures on the computer and hit create.

With the ease of this program, elementary students can take pictures for a project and put them in independently.  There are options for inserting text to make it more instructional, and you can even make all photos B&W with one click.

Students are using multimedia more and more, and as they do, their projects depend a great deal on the quality of images; that is,  a small picture with only a few pixels have to be stretched or zoomed in and would look blurry and unprofessional.  Teach your students how to find and filter images by size.  After they search, they can click SHOW OPTIONS at the top to filter only medium or large pictures!  Remember, pics can always be resized smaller and still look good but they can’t be made larger without pix elating.   By the way, you can also filter images this way to find only clip art or faces related to your search.

Some of our teachers discovered a way to save time using Explore Learning with their classes.  Instead of typing in all your student names to get user accounts, create one account and give it to ALL the students.  Of course, no assessment can be done but if your goal is to allow students immediate access until you find time to enter all their names, then create a teacher account and give the name and PW to all of your classes.

If you’ve been using Word 07, you might have discovered that we can now save copies of our documents as a PDF file.  If you like the feature (because PDFs can be opened by anyone, reduce the file size of a large file, and cannot be edited), note that this has always been available on macs — but often not seen because of its location.  In order to save a Word doc as a PDF on a Mac, hit Print.  At the bottom of the screen, you’ll see a drop down menu that says PDF.  Choose Save as PDF.

A great way to help your students improve reading skills and fluency is to use the overlooked CC button in the lower right corner of the movie screen.  This Closed Caption feature displays the dialogue through the entire movie, which is also a useful tool for helping those students who have difficulty hearing.

google, search tips and modifiers

organize yourself.  collaborate on projects

youtube, teacher tube, discovery education

organize yourself

organize yourself