Story Builder

This morning, while waiting for a conference to begin, I took a look at my Feedly. I've been super busy lately, both at work and home, so I had not explored my RSS feed in quite some time. I Evernoted several strategies/apps, but one blog post immediately caught my eye. iLearnTechnology has a great, indepth post all about Google Story Builder. I immediately thought of several ways that my faculty could use this in the classroom for quick assessments.

Here's a quick video tutorial:


Here's a sample one I created to share with my faculty: http://goo.gl/FlftoD

I do wish that Story Builder had the option for an embed code as well as a link to the finished video, but it's still a nifty little site! Best of all, it's iPad friendly!

How could you use this in the classroom?

Smore: A Fabulous Online Flyer-Creation Tool!

Have you checked out www.smore.com yet? It's a great website to use for creating engaging flyers. It's free to use and allows you to create dynamic flyers, rather than just a static PDF file. You can easily add videos, websites, pictures, and even surveys just by dragging and dropping each type of item onto your flyer. If you want to delete a section of your flyer, simply drag it off the screen and then it's gone! Here's a quick video from smore that tells a little more about it.


A Cupcake Story from Smore on Vimeo.

How could you use this in your classroom? This would be a great communication tool to use for parent flyers, extracurricular clubs, school newsletters, etcetera. I used Smore to create the flyer below, to share a few apps with my teachers as a continuation of my professional development session that week. I've also used it to create flyers for my gym, to let members know about our holiday hours and to share some healthy holiday recipes.

What are you waiting for? Go to www.smore.com and sign up for your own free account. Be creative and start sharing!

Tools for Teachers - BigHugeLabs

This week I was introduced to a great free online tool in my tech tools and instructional strategies class.  Bighugelabsis a website that has many applications in the classroom. I was in a room full of middle school, elementary, and high school educators and all of us came up with ideas of how to use it in our content area. The website actually has several different areas that could be used in a classroom setting. Badge Maker, Magazine Cover, Map Maker, and Motivator were my favorites.

Also, you can use all of these without registering for the site, but they do have the option of signing up for a free educator account. The educator account would give you the capabilities to download your students' creations, pre-register them without email addresses, and gives you ad-free access to the site. I applied for my educator account today - I'll update later to let you know when I get confirmation.

• Badge Maker - Students can create badges with pictures and short descriptions. This could be used for many subjects - historic figure studies, character studies, math, science, foreign language, etcetera. The badge maker gives you the option of including a large chunk of text, which some of the others do not.

• Motivator - I thought this would be a good source for short, simple statements/descriptions.

• Magazine Cover - this is similar to Badge Maker, but has small text boxes that could be used to short facts or adjectives describing the topic.

 If you haven't used it, I highly recommend you check it out. I'm looking forward to using it with my students soon. I think the BadgeMaker would be great for studying the historic figures of the Renaissance!