Fun with Christmas Photos

Since Christmas is only six days a way, I thought now would be a good time to introduce you to Befunky.com. This site is a great place to take those Christmas photos and alter them to look more like a cartoon or avatar. I have altered a few pictures with the tool. It is easy to use, nothing to download (other than your finished photo), fast, and it's free.

There is actually a classroom use for such a tool. You know how as teachers we would like to put student photos up on our websites but are afraid of privacy/safety issues? You can take a student photo and alter it using BeFunky to such a point that you can clearly understand what is happening in the photo but would have difficulty identifying the students unless you knew them.

Another great classroom project is to have students create a comic strip with pictures they have taken depicting a scene from a play or book or even a historic event. I believe there is a site out there to create comic strips too...that's another blog entry.

Here's our FBLA Basket Auction Committee:

12 Safety Tips on Blogging for parents and kids

I found these tips from Microsoft. The short article contains some simple tips for parents and kids that use blogging. It can easily transfer to teachers and students.

http://www.microsoft.com/protect/family/activities/blogging.mspx

Quote from the article:
"Recent studies show that teenagers write roughly half of all blogs today, with two out of three providing their age, three out of five revealing their location and contact information, and one in five revealing their full name. It should go without saying that there are potential risks in sharing this type of detailed personal information."

Wetpaint--Wikis in Education

As I was finalizing my web2hotspot wiki for my final presentation in the Web 2.0 grad class, I came across this great resource for wikis.

http://wikisineducation.wetpaint.com/

This site has an abundance of examples for using wikis in the classroom. It does offer free wikis for educators, but I haven't had time to compare it with more popular wikis such as wikispaces and PBWiki. In the next few weeks, I hope to take a closer look at this site.

Google Earth

Google Earth is a great way for students to travel any where in the world to see exciting places or historic landmarks. Many large cities and important landmarks have street-level panoramic views. Google Earth is an easy and very inexpensive class trip.

Here are two really good sites to learn how to use Google Earth and even download a variety of pre-created Google Earth Tours.

Google Earth Lessons: A Free Public Resource - Providing Teachers with the tools needed to enhance their instruction using Google Earth®

Google Touring: This quick tutorial explains how you can create a Google Tour yourself.