Online tools

By Mike Johnson • October 25th, 2012

Google Docs is now known as Google Drive and gives you a single place to store, access, create, edit, and share documents, files, and folders of all types.
Google Docs is the web-based editors to create, edit, and share Google documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, and forms. These will all continue to work as they always have.
The [...]

PicMonkey is an easy to use online photo editing site that allows you to resize, recolor, adjust lighting, add stamps, add borders, add text, fix red-eye, etc.

Unlike many interactive sites, PicMonkey does not require students to register or login to use the service. They can simply drag an image file into the window to [...]

Every weather website will  help you figure out if it’s raining outside right now and how hot it is.  WeatherSpark.com gives you that information but also has historical weather data and averages dating back to the late 1940s, laid out in charts, graphs, and averages.  WeatherSpark is a website dedicated to making in-depth weather information [...]

Jeff Rhodus, Elsanor eMINTS teacher, had been discussing with his sixth-grade class the recent natural disasters in Japan.
Students wanted to know how the U.S. is helping the recovery efforts.  ”We could ask my dad,” offered one student, 12-year-old student. “He’s stationed there.”
And so began the effort to set up a video teleconference March 25 between Tech. Sgt. Jason [...]

One challenge of developing media-rich classroom projects is helping students find appropriate sound and music files that they can use as they complete assignments.   Copyright issues and inappropriate songs cause many websites offering audio downloads to be blocked by our content filter.  These sites provide royalty free music, sound effect clips and editing tools [...]

Picnik.com – Upload your image and then edit it: resize, recolor, adjust lighting, add stamps, add borders, add text, fix red-eye, etc.
Rsizr.com – Seam carving technology – This site will analyze rows of pixels in your image to keep the parts that are richer in detail.  It’s hard to explain so you’ll just have to [...]

Create and Convert PDF Files

PDF Creator – installs as a printer.  Open your document and print it.  Choose PDF Creator as your printer and you’ll be prompted for a location to save the PDF file.  Download PDF Creator installation file
Create a PDF with Google Docs – Create (or upload) your file into Google Docs (you’re [...]

One of the coolest features of SMART Notebook and Promethean ActivStudio/Inspire is the ability to add multimedia. I see a lot of teachers add clips from places like United Steaming without much issue, but when it comes to just adding sounds I rarely see anyone using multimedia features. The main reason is the difficulty in [...]