Image Generation-FD Toys

My creation
Originally uploaded by spoondog_7

I used FD Toys to add a caption to this picture of FDR. You can do many other things with this image generator to manipulate and add things to pictures. I thought that maybe a good application of this would be creating gaze material to put up in your classroom.

Google Docs

Google Docs is a great program that allows you to upload word processing or spreadsheet files to Google. This not only provides you with a back-up file in case you lose your computer file, but it also allows you to share it with others. In this way, you could use Google Docs to collaborate with others on a project. In teaching, I could use Google Docs to collaborate on creating projects, assignments, and lessons with other teachers, without ever meeting with them to work together.

YouTube

I am sure that we have all used YouTube at some point in our lives. They literally have millions of videos. There are videos for just about anything, and this includes education. Many teachers use YouTube to demonstrate something that cannot be done in class, or to show a documentary, or even to show history. Being a history teacher, I can use YouTube videos to show historical speeches or short documentaries. I even learned how to embed a video into my blog. I added a video that I used in my micro-teaching lesson about Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

Del.icio.us

This is a tool that we have used in this class already. You can bookmark any webpage that you might want to use later. Many of us bookmark our favorite pages or pages that we might want to refer back to later to do a project or paper. However, if you only bookmark on your computer, you will only be able to recall those bookmarks from that computer. The point of Del.icio.us is that you can bookmark the websites on your own account that can be accessed from any computer. It is very handy if you start research in the library and then come home later that night and want to continue where you left off. You can also add buttons to your browser toolbar so that bookmarking to Del.icio.us is as easy as bookmarking to your own computer.

RSS Feeds

I signed up for RSS Feeds from Bloglines. RSS Feeds are neat because they give you current stories from the sites that you say interest you. I checked a bunch of news networks as well as sports. When you click on the feed, it gives you several of the headlines that are on the site. You can quickly find stories that interest you because it is on a simple layout without advertisements. I could use this in my teaching by staying up on current events in the news, which are always relevant in social studies classrooms. I even added an RSS Feed to my blog in the upper right-hand corner of this page.

Mappr

This tool is a fun Flickr mashup that allows you to mark out on a map where a picture was taken. So, you can take a picture, upload it, and paste it to the map. Others can look at your picture and then see where it's from. I thought this would be especially helpful in a geography class. Looking at a map does not really give students a sense of what the country looks like. However, with Mappr, students can look at pictures from those areas and have a better idea of what the area is like.

Flickr

Washington's Uniform
Originally uploaded by beck photog

I searched around on Flickr for a while and looked for pictures of something I could use in my classroom. I found a picture of General George Washington's uniform on display in one of the Smithsonian Museums in Washington D.C. Seeing as I probably will not be teaching anywhere close to Washington D.C. where my students could go see it for themselves, I could use pictures that other people have taken. I posted this photo into my blog so you can take a look for yourself.