Adventures in Teaching and Learning

I am busily trying to produce resources that I can upload to Fronter. Here is a Wordle for Matthew 5:17 – 7:5.

title="Wordle: Matthew 5:17 - 7:5 NIV"> src="http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/701562/Matthew_5%3A17_-_7%3A5_NIV"
alt="Wordle: Matthew 5:17 - 7:5 NIV"
style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd">

As well as producing visual images such as these, I have been using CompFight (bizarre name, great tool) to find Flickr images that are Creative Commons, then I have used SimplyBox to quickly store them so I can access them whenever I want. I have also made some of my own images, which I have saved in my own Flickr resource set. Later, I shall save some of these presentations (which I am making using Keynote) to Slideshare.

IMG_2193, originally uploaded by skambalu.

I’ve been updating my Flickr account with some photos that might help me illustrate my presentations for school. Might use this one for my next War and Peace presentation with my A2 group. These are the Lewis Chessmen, I think made from walrus ivory.

Talk in the papers of primary schools learning Twitter rather than history, or some such nonsense! Must read the reports properly … Anyway, there are many ways we can use Twitter in education, and there are many in this presentation. Thanks to tombarrett and others!

Two of my newest favourite sites to share with you today are …

SimplyBox

and

Free Photo Printing

With SimplyBox, you get a new toolbar on your browser window (Note to self and anyone that can help: I have 8 of these toolbars that are quickly using up too much space at the top of my browser – anyway I can minimise these all the top? Wasting too much space!), then when you see a picture, video or piece of text that you like, you simply box and save it. Then, when you look at your set of boxes on the internet, not only will you see the image that you liked, but it is still linked to the original website, so you can quickly find it and correctly attribute the image you are using. Works great with CompFight.

Free Photo Printing does what it say on the tin. It directs you to photo printing sites along with the codes that you need to get free or reduced photos. Fabulous! (Thanks to Sarah Fox for the tipoff!)

I’ve been trying to keep off the computer a bit more, and do other important things instead. However, while trying to find a great Flickr mashup website that I can’t remember the name of and am having trouble finding, I have found another very interesting site – The Multicolr Search Lab. Click on one or more colours, and this site will find photos from Flickr that contain that colour. I’ve tried a particular gold shade, and simply looking at the choice of images cheers me up! What is also great news is that they have looked at about 10 million Creative Commons images, so I can feel free to use and attribute the images I find. Do have a look!

Also, I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this one before – CompFight – another Flickr mashup tool. It’s fantastic – I’ve been using it loads. I’m trying to make my presentations more visual, and it’s important for me, particularly as an RE teacher!, that I use Creative Commons images. These days, there are so many tools to make it easy to do that that there’s no excuse not to. (Although I do admit, I am struggling to find one or two images that I think would be just right …). Anyway, this is great. Try it. Just remember to set the Creative Commons indicator to “only”, or else you will still need to check if you are allowed to use them.