3 Free Music Sites for Teachers and Students Part of empowering students to create content requires providing them with copyright-friendly sources of media to use in their work. While many sites provide free images for use in student work, it can be difficult to find free music that students can use in their projects. The… Read more
Make Image Backgrounds Transparent with Background Burner The ability to remove the background from an image, and make it transparent, is a handy skill when creating content. I recently saw some nicely designed web page buttons, but the impact of all the hard work put into making that button was diminished by it being surrounded by a background that… Read more
Spice Up Your Lessons with More Than 30,000 Free Fonts Are Your Fonts Sucking the Life out of Your Lessons? You’ve come up with an engaging and innovative new lesson and typed up the directions. But if your assignment’s directions are presented with the same level of excitement as a medical form, you’ve already lost… Read more
Trading Card Creator – Increase Engagement & Demonstrate Understanding Trading Card Creator Asking students to create trading cards is a great way to increase engagement or allow students to demonstrate an understanding of nearly any topic. Trading Card Creator has done all of the work for teachers by providing an online platform and app (iOS,… Read more
Free Halloween Music, Images, Videos, and Clipart for School Projects From Monster Math activities to reading The Telltale Heart, teachers have a number of ways to incorporate a little Halloween into their lessons. Whether you’re creating a lesson or need resources for students to use in multimedia projects, you’ll want to check out this collection… Read more
Take Collaborative Brainstorming and Sticky Dot Voting Online with Dotstorming Dotstorming.com Dotmocracy Teachers love having students vote with stickers. Dotmocracy – that strategy of giving students little dot stickers to place next to choices they prefer is a quick, visual way for classes to collaboratively make decisions. Several EdCamps that I’ve attended have started with… Read more
Three Ways to Search for Copyright-Friendly Images 1. Creative Commons Search http://search.creativecommons.org/ 2. Google Images Usage Rights Filter images.google.com Noncommercial choices will return more results. This is typically what you will use unless you’re using the images in a format that you will earn money from, or use in advertising. Noncommercial Reuse with Modification – If… Read more
Free Stock Music for Student Projects FreeStockMusic.com Teaching Students About Copyright Beyond good digital citizenship, teaching about copyright is becoming increasingly important as students become producers and publishers of content. It’s time that we stop letting students simply copy and paste from Google Image Search, or upload their favorite songs to a video project. That’s why I’ve made… Read more
The Easiest Online Poster Maker PosterGen PosterGen.com/poster-generators Short on time, but looking for a visual way for students to express ideas? Checkout PosterGen. Many poster makers allow students to really explore their creativity with a wide variety of editing options. PosterGen’s minimalist interface makes it stand out as a simpler option – perfect for quickly… Read more
Word Clouds in Any Browser – WordItOut www.WordItOut.com If your favorite word cloud generator no longer seems to work, give WordItOut a try. I recently ran into a couple of problems while using Chrome: Tagxedo requires that you install a Silverlight plug-in, and Wordle requires Java. Neither of these popular options seem to play well with… Read more
