a picture is worth a thousand words

When presenting information to students, it's important to pay attention to the students' experience. If you have traditionally lectured from slides with lots of words, I encourage you to reconsider. Please take a few minutes to read "NONLINGUISTIC REPRESENTATION: A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS" from TCEA's TechNotes in June.  Read more.

Graphic Organizer Activities

Richard Byrne of Free Tech 4 Teachers recently posted Combine Canva and Google Drawings to Make Graphic Organizer Activities. I recommend you check it out!

Canva's Storyboard/Comic Templates

 

Canva now has storyboard or comic strip templates! Check them out!

Smithsonian Releases 2.8 Million Images into Public Domain

https://youtu.be/B5vC2kweCNk

This is huge! The Smithsonian released 2.8 million images into public domain and is inviting the public to interact with these materials like never before! Read more. 

Canva Pro is free for educators!

I love me some Canva (not to be confused with Canvas; I love that too)! I use it to make graphics, including the TitanTag buttons. Now Canva Pro is free for educators! Read more. 

Science & Math Animated GIFs

Check out these fun sites with animated GIFs to help explain math and science concepts. The science website also has information about how to get your students to create their own animated GIFs over topics covered in your class.
Math: www.mathwarehouse.com/animated-gifs
Science: www.amoebasisters.com/gifs.html 

Copyright Friendly Images

One big area where students and teachers violate copyright law is when selecting images to use. Images found from a Google Image search are often covered by copyright law and using them in your own work could be a violation. Instead, check out this list put together by Richard Byrne. Some of these are blocked on our filter because we cannot filter them as we need to. 

Grab Text from Pictures Using Google Keep

Did you know that Google Keep can grab text from pictures you take? This video (no sound) shows how it works. 

App: PhotoScan by Google

If you're looking for a way to scan old photos without a scanner, check out Google's PhotoScan app (iTunes, Google Play) mentioned in this DMN article. 

Common Sense's Top EdTech Eleven

Common Sense publishes a Top EdTech Eleven list and updates it often. Check it out to see what they say is the best of the best in the world of EdTech.
If you have any questions or want someone to investigate with you, please contact your DLC, Penney Matos!

The Importance of Creative Commons

As a teacher you're always on the look out for resources your students can use legally and responsibly. Learn how Creative Commons licenses can help address some of these challenges. Learn more. 

Finding Fair Use Photos - Teacher Resource

An educator, JFloodEdu, created this Tackk resource for teachers use with students to help explain Fair Use Photos. 

Google Search: Image Reverse Look-up

Did you know you can reverse look-up images in Google? This can be helpful when trying to find sources that your students used for images and content related to the images, among other things. Reverse look-up results include information on where else the image is being used online, a list of visually similar images, and pages that include matching images.

Save the image to your computer. Then drag it to the search box at images.google.com.

More detailed instructions: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/1325808?hl=en

American Panorama: An Atlas of United States History

American Panorama is a FREE historical atlas of the United States for the twenty-first century. It combines cutting-edge research with innovative interactive mapping techniques, designed to appeal to anyone with an interest in American history or a love of maps. 

Common Sense Graphite's review of the website.

Public Domain Collections

It can sometimes be hard to locate quality public domain images. Check out New York Public Library's Public Domain collection. 

170,000 Great Depression photographs released

170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) have been released to the public.

Here’s an article about the pictures: money.cnn.com/gallery/news/economy/2015/10/19/great-depression-170000-photos-yale/index.html

You can look through the 170,000 photos from the Great Depression here: photogrammar.yale.edu

You can view by category or by map. It’s pretty cool!

NASA Released 8,4000 Apollo Mission Images

NASA recently released 8,4000 images of the Apollo Missions. They're housed on Flickr so they may be blocked on the FISD filter but you can check them out at home. They're pretty cool!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/albums

Great Photo Technology

1944-2014  Fascinating

  

Left click and hold on each photo, and then drag your mouse gently from left to right. The original photograph will be become a photo of the exact same location as viewed today - drag it back to the left and you are back in 1944!

It works both directions:

http://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/2014/apr/image-opacity-slider-master/index.html?ww2-dday

PicMonkey: FREE Photo Editor

Check out Amy Mayer's 3-minute tip video on PicMonkey:

http://youtu.be/5w7W4wMfU9s

PicMonkey is a free video editor that is super easy to use! There are some additional paid features but you should be able to clean up your images enough with the free options.