My Best of series | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...

Great Blog Post FOR ALL SUBJECTS...highly recommend you spend some time checking these out.

My Best of series | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...

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Math Prezi Presentation

A teacher at my school created a Prezi over Series and Sequence for his Algebra II class.  Przei would be a great way for teachers to break away from the Power Point driven lecture.

Document Camera Forum Post

My original blog post that I created about using the Avermedia Docucam CP130 was posted on the forum at Avermedia's website. Good to know that the information cam in handy.

Nice comments from a teacher using a CP130!

PicLits

Came across this interesting site for English teachers or any teacher interested in Free Writing for their students.  It provides you different pictures for which to inspire your students to type a story or poem relating to the picture.  It is an excellent source of freewriting for your students.

You can either darg-N-drop different words into the picture that you think are of importance to your story or poem, or you can freewrite on top of the picture as well.  In the gallery you can see what other people have produced as well.

You can search through their gallery until you find a picture that suits your writing desire.  Once finished, you can save it to the gallery, post it on social networking sites and blogs, or email it to yourself or someone who might be interested in reading your picture interpretation.

For students to use the site they will need to create an account.  So they need an email address, provide a username, and create a password.  We had several students at our school use the site for poems they had created.  Poems would need to be limited to 12 lines, or short stanzas on both sides of the picture.  It worked well in our experience with the site.  Some of the students had comments on their poems from readers outside the school that offered constructive criticism as well as praise.

Sreenshot

Here is a sample from the website

See the full PicLit at PicLits.com

Comics and Cartoons

One of the newest ways for students to incorporate technology into a project for their class is to create a comic strip online.  There are at least half a dozen comic strip websites that students can choose from.  I will be discussing three of those, while providing links to the other comic strip websites.  Every place I have looked online discusses one or two of them, but never provides you an option for viewing the others.  I will provide you with links to the ones that I do not discuss.

 
GoAnimate - Cartoon and Animation Creator
The neat thing about GoAnimate is that you are not creating a comic strip, but you are creating a cartoon.  With GoAnimate you can create your own character, or select one of the many already created for you.  You can select from a wide variety of backgrounds as well as artifacts.  Since it is animated you can select from a number of actions for all your characters as well as emotions.  You can also move your characters from one scene to another without any interuption.  The most amazing thing is how easy it is to learn how to use the software to create the cartoon.  See the video below for a short tutorial.


 
Pixton - Comic Book Page Creator
Pixton is less detailed in terms of options than GoAnimate, but it still offers tons of options for creating your comic book type page.  You have the ability choose your characters, backgounds, artifacts, and different thought/word bubbles.  For quicker projects, this would be a more ideal software to use.  Although Pixton does allow animation, it is not near as detailed as GoAnimate. 

Toondoo - Comic Strip Creation


Toondoo I think is the best Comic Strip Creation tool.  You create a comic strip just like you see in the Sunday paper.  It provides you with a lot of the characters and backgrounds, you provide the text.  Several students at my school have used them.  They created some as part of an assignment on parables.  You can view them here.  I highly suggest you visit and play around with the site before showing it to your students.  It is very user friendly as well.  Students will need to create an account though.

Other Comic Strip Creation Websites

       

HOW COULD YOU USE COMIC/CARTOON CREATION IN CLASS?

• Create a comics to portray a message/symbol/image from a poem
• Create a comic about a science experiment in class
• Create a funny comic about solving a math problem
• Create a Math Word Problem in comic strip form
• Recreate historical events
• Create a Short Story in Comic Form
• Portray scenes from a novel
• Have students create a comic in a foreign language

You get the idea!  Do you know of any others?  Please share them.