Oct
31
Yesterday our ELA teacher introduced me to the wonder of Mad Libs. These are exercises where you create a list of words that include nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs and then you plug them into a story that was previously written by someone else. As our teacher patiently explained to me, these are great exercises for the kids to work with adjectives, adverbs, etc and recognize their place in a sentence since, if they fill a noun in where they should fill in a verb, the story won’t make sense.
At her urging, I dug up a number of Mad Lib sites that seem to have decent clean stories for the kids to use. There’s plenty of sites out there with tacky and really questionable stories that you’ll want to avoid with your class, but these seem to be okay. Of course, double check what I’ve found. I’ve been known to make mistakes.
Oct
29
You need Audacity to do a podcast
Filed Under General | Leave a Comment
I’ve been working on creating podcasts with my Canadian social studies students. They’re supposed to research a late, great Canadian and then “interview” him or her. We’re recording the interviews using cheap microphones picked up at The Source and a cool piece of free software called Audacity.
Audacity is a sound recorder and editor. You can record audio on it, as well as importing other audio tracks into it from outside sources. (One great source for free sound and musical effects is Sound Snap.) You can amplify soft students, reduce loud ones, and disguise the voices of anyone you like so two students doing a project can sound like several. The possibilities are almost endless as there are a ton of built in ways of modifying your sounds. You can fade out, change the tempo, reverse the sound, or add “wahwah” to it as well as about a dozen more.
Audacity is a nifty piece of open source freeware that you can download in two different flavors. One - with Windows, Mac, and Linux variants - is meant to be installed on your computer. The other - which seems to be only in a Windows version - can be run directly from your Flash Drive. This can be really useful if you don’t have permission to install programs to your school’s computer network. It’s also neat because your students, if they get fired up about the project, can take it all home and work on it there.
The only problems we’ve discovered are that the program is not 100% stable so save frequently. (In fairness, MS Word is not exactly 100% stable either.) As well, if you find the program does crash, we’ve noticed that when you run the program a second time your computer will probably reboot. The problems are annoying but considering you’ve got a sound editor with a great range for absolutely nothing down, well, you can’t complain too much.
Now all I need is a place to host the completed podcasts.
Oct
26
Cartoons making online
Filed Under Art, English, General, Social Studies | Leave a Comment
Couresty of the K-12 Online Conference, I discovered two really cool cartoon making sites.
The Comic Creator at ReadWriteThink is a neat little tool that creates black and white line drawings in anywhere from one to six panels. It works easily with a drag and drop system. It doesn’t require registration, which is nice, but it also doesn’t let you export your cartoon as anything other than a printed copy. That’ s right, you can’t save it as a jpeg, gif, bmp, or whatever. To me, that’s a serious drawback.
Toondoo, while it has a weirder name, is a superior site. You need to register for it (and provide an e-mail address which might be an issue if you use this with students) but the payoff is that you can save your cartoons, export them, embed them in your website, or whatever you want. That makes your ‘toons far more useful. Additionally, Toondoo offers more characters for you to use in your cartoons, more backgrounds to put behind your characters, and more objects for your characters to manipulate. You can even create your own characters (and save them for later use) by mixing and matching face parts and bodies from a stock collection Toondoo provides.
Either of these sites provide a neat way to make quick cartoons about politics, history, literature, or whatever you want your students to show they understand. Both sites work well for their purpose, but, for me, I think Toodoo is the superior choice.
Oct
17
An Internet map gallery
Filed Under Geography, Social Studies | Leave a Comment
What could be finer than outline maps of most of the countries of the world? These maps on FreeMaps.jp include the major political divisions (provinces and states) of most countries. All the folks want running this site is a credit line (maybe at the bottom of your worksheet) and they’d appreciate a link back if you use the map on your website. That’s an affordable map.
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