Smore is a site where you can create beautiful flyers to share with your friends, family, coworkers, and the public.  Whether you are hosting an event, promoting your business, selling a house, or spreading important information, you can create a beautiful flyer that includes:

After completing your flyer, you can choose to share it many ways:

For the classroom, Smore would be a great alternative to Micosoft Word, PowerPoint, or Publisher.  Students can create flyers on any topic you can imagine and then easily share them with the teacher through email.  What a fantastic way to encourage creativity while also saving some trees!

StoryLines For Schools is a drawing game app with an educational component, creating appeal for kids, parents, and teachers. It is reminiscent of the old school “Telephone” game, and is sure to cause fits of giggles during play.
The game allows for 3, 5, 7, or 9 players. It begins with a player typing in a phrase or choosing an option from four different categories: elementary vocabulary, intermediate vocabulary, SAT words, or quotes. This allows the game to have an educational purpose, as players then have to visualize and draw out the phrase for the next player. The next player types in what they think the phrase is, based on the picture. Then the next player draws a picture of the new phrase, and so on until all players have taken a turn.

StoryLines has two different versions to choose from. The benefits of For Schools are that it has no outside play, so kids can only play with people who are physically sharing an iPad with them, there are no social media links, and educational vocabulary and phrases are built in to the app. It also only requires a WiFi connection on the first use after that, it is not required. The other version allows for random play with strangers and media sharing.

Scribble Press

Scribble Press is a multimedia platform for creating, sharing and publishing stories. Accessible via the web and on the iPad, Scribble Press is an easy, fun and free way to create and publish your stories. In use in thousands of classrooms and hundreds of thousands of homes around the world, Scribble Press is the leading publishing platform for kids.

Wonderopolis

http://wonderopolis.org/

The National Center for Family Literacy has created Wonderopolis, a great learning resource for students to tap into. Each day the site answers a question that kids (and adults) might want to know more about. When you click on the question, the site will take you to a webpage of information with links, videos and resources to explore in depth.

Use this resource as a start for daily journal entries or class discussions. Use the search feature to build on lessons with real life applications. Use the questions and class activities to build on your lesson plans or suggest additional resources for your class.

Want to inspire your students to write?

Why not try Storybird?

Storybird is an online collaborative storyteller. You set up your students' accounts. Your students pull in pictures from a high-quality collection of drawings and add their text to create their own ebooks. The result is a polished, professional-looking ebook they can take pride in and share with their class. With a teacher account, you can access all your student ebooks online under your account to review and share with others.

Want to try it? Go online and sign up for a teacher account to set up your class. If you need any help, ask your local ITRT for their assistance.

Evernote is Very Noteworthy

Do you find that you have too many notes or have a great idea and nowhere to jot it down? I have been using Evernote for about 4 months now and I love it. It is an online application that is free (for a certain amount of monthly usage). You can upload from any computer that has internet access. You can also downloaded it to your computer, so when you are not connected to the internet, you can work and when you connect it synchronizes with your online account and computer. I also have an App on my phone which allows me to enter notes when I am away from my computer. It has really helped me organize all my notes, ideas, and made me a more effective planner.

Lifecards For The Touch

Sixth grade students at SRMS recently took a field trip to the D-Day Memorial. They were asked to pick out their favorite thing about this beautiful outdoor museum. This is an example of a postcard that can be created with the Lifecard app, some digital pictures, and lots of creativity.

Create a Story with Pinky Dinky Doo!

Pinky Dinky Doo is a site where students create stories starring cartoon characters from the animated series of the same name currently airing on Nick Jr.

After selecting a genre of their choice (Silly, Fairy Tale, Mystery, Scary, or Outer Space), they will compose their own story focusing on Beginning, Middle, and End. The text is highlighted and read aloud to the students each time they make an addition to their story providing help with fluency and word recognition.

Once their story is complete, it can be printed onto ONE sheet of paper, folded into a mini-booklet, and taken home for more reading practice!

Realtime Collaboration

This week we found ourselves in need of a way to have all 11 of us collaborate at one time in real time. We ran across the site EtherPad

"EtherPad is the only web-based word processor that allows people to work together in really real-time."
You begin by creating a new pad (document). Then you can invite people via email or share the URL with students. Then the work begins. When changes are made to the document, they are instantly reflected on everyone's screen. Often times you have to either email drafts back and forth, use Google Docs (which take several seconds to see changes) or waste time writing and rewriting documents. EtherPad is a new and productive way to collaborate. The web site offers a free service. You can create your own pad (document) and share with up to 16 people, with some minimal security through a randomized URL. There are no accounts needed and all that you need to remember is the Pad URL. The site offers customized URL's and ideas of how to use it. We used it very successful this morning to write a vision. The downside is that when you export it, it does not export the colors. So if you want to see who contributed what you will need to take a screen shot. There are so many possibilities! It is worth checking out!