Wallace and Gromit Avatar Maker
In the past I have written about the various fun tools that are out there for creating fun avatars to use as profile images. If you are blogging with students – it’s recommended that you don’t use real photographs of the students. A fun alternative is to create a cartoon avatar instead.
Thanks to Mark Warner at Teaching Ideas for sharing yet another one to add to the list – the Wallace and Gromit character creator.
It’s the usual kind of thing – choose from a variety of face shapes, eyes, noses etc to create the face.
When you submit, you need to enter your email details to get sent a link to your finished image. Which is something you probably won’t want to do with a class. So before you get to the final stage you might be better to just hit Print Screen and paste the image into an Image Editor program and save it that way.
It’s tied in with Wallace and Gromit appearing on the Xmas stamps this year, so I don’t know if the site will last past the end of the year, so get in quick: https://www.wallaceandgromitstamps.com/
Read MoreBlitz Resources from History Pin
Seventy years ago this month the Blitz began. It started with the bombing of London for 76 consecutive nights, and soon cities and towns across Britain were suffering attacks, from Aberdeen to Coventry, from Birmingham to Hull.
Many homes, high streets and famous landmarks were dramatically altered by the bombings, in some cases beyond recognition. By the end of May 1941, more than a million homes had been destroyed or damaged in London alone.
HistoryPin has a selection of images of the Blitz, many superimposed over modern day streetview images of the area such as this image of bomb damage in Broadgate, Coventry. If you’ve not seen History Pin before, it is one of a series of projects created as part of We Are What We Do’s campaign to get generations talking more, sharing more and coming together more often. It’s an excellent resource bank, and still growing.
This would be a lovely resource for History teachers when teaching about World War 2. You can access the Blitz Collection here.
Essential Digital Resources for your IWB
One of the talks I gave at the Teacher2Teacher conference was on finding useful digital content to use on your Interactive Whiteboard. There’s more to the Internet than YouTube and Google Image search!
Although this presentation was delivered mainly to Smartboard users, and the original presentation produced in Smart Notebook format, the information is very useful to any IWB users. Or even teachers who have a projector and no board.
So I have uploaded the presentation to Slideshare if you would like to take a look.
All of the links from the session can be found here : http://delicious.com/dannynic/t2t. The links in the presentation don’t work I’m afraid…. long story.
One thing that is worth mentioning is that if you now do a Google Image search you can click on Advanced Search to bring up more options. You can then specify what Usage Rights you want – so basically searching for Creative Commons images.
I also like the fact that in the basic Google Image Search you can now also specify the colour of the image you want. So you can narrow down your search for a Flower to yellow flowers, or red flowers. Don’t just search for Elephant – look for Pink Elephants!
Try it out, it’s very cool. Click on the coloured boxes to the left of your image search to change colour.
Read MoreMake your own on-screen jigsaw puzzles
Thanks to Peter Bryenton for his comment on my Big Huge Labs post yesterday for pointing me towards this website that allows you to turn any of your images into a drag and drop jigsaw.
You can embed the code into your blog/VLE or just link direct to the page.
Try it out with one of your own images, and then try and put it back together on your IWB!
Thanks also to Clare Seccombe for sending me this link to another site for creating jigsaws: http://www.jigsawplanet.com/
Read MoreCreative Commons Image Sources for your IWB
You can’t beat a powerful image to add punch to your lesson. Whether you want something to put up to draw questions from the class or just to add extra emphasis to a presentation. I’ve written about this before – and linked to a few good sources of images such as The Big Picture.
To help find creative commons images, there are several tools now which will let you search Flickr for CC images. My Favourite is FlickrCC – enter a tag to search for and it will return a load thumbnails. Click on a thumbnail to see more information and to visit the original page on Flickr.
Other search engines which trawl Flickr include:
Compfight : http://www.compfight.com/
FlickrStorm : http://www.zoo-m.com/flickr-storm/
Simple Flickr CC Search : http://johnjohnston.info/flickrCC/index.php
Flickr Creative Commons Search : http://flickr.com/creativecommons/
Remember to credit the original source of the image when you use it. I usually copy and past the full URL to the source image – you could also give the Flickr user name.
If you can’t find the image on Flickr, it’s well worth checking again in the future. About 5000 images get uploaded to Flickr every minute, so there’s a chance something more suitable will be there next time you check.
Some other sources of images include:
Geograph : A project to take photographs of every map square in the UK. Useful for finding photos of your local environment. And if there’s not many there, would be a good idea for a project to take some! http://www.Geograph.org.uk
PhotoEverywhere : Photos from all around the world. http://photoeverywhere.co.uk/
E2Bn Gallery : A community resource made by the educational community for the educational community. Worth a look. http://gallery.nen.gov.uk/gallery-e2bn.html
Animal photos : Does what it says on the tin. Photos of animals. http://animalphotos.info/a/
The Open Clip Art Library : A good source of clip art resources. Registration required, but it’s free. http://openclipart.org/
You can also use the advanced image search feature of Google Image Search to get it to check for licences and only return images that are covered for reuse, or commercial use. Go to Image Search and look for the “advanced search” button. Or click here.
The creative commons website also lists a stack of other image sites here : but I haven’t checked them all out.
You can also use the search engine provided by Creative Commons.org : http://search.creativecommons.org/
You can also use the Wikimedia Commons, plenty of images there that are covered by a creative commons licence : http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Remember to check the licence of any image you want to use. On Flickr, it’s pretty obvious – look below the tag list and you should see “some rights reserved” or similar. Click on that link and it will tell you the licence that image is covered by.
Of course if you do use Flickr to host your own images, consider changing the licence so that others can use them under a share-alike licence too. You can do this for individual photos, or change the default settings for all your photos. It’s good to share!
I’ve also produced a printable guide to Creative Commons, and some sources of images and sounds.
A quick tip if you are doing an image seach live – on your IWB – in front of a class. Although you might be searching with the best of intentions – sometimes even the most innocuous search can throw up images that you may not want the students to see. Some search engines have a “safe search” filter, and the school filter may block them, but it’s always best to cover yourself just in case. Check your Projector remote for a Blank or a Freeze button (most should have at least one or the other) and freeze/blank the screen while you do the search on the computer. You can see the search on the regular monitor and check that nothing untoward is being displayed.
Happy searching!
Read MoreMake easy screenshots with Aviary
Here’s a new website that will make it easier to take screenshots of other sites to save to your desktop or to embed into your blog or your wiki.
It’s called Aviary. And it’s a neat, free, image editing application. You can create images from scratch, and share them with others online.
But as well as that, it has a screen capture feature.
If you use Firefox you can get “Talon” an Aviary plug in that puts a small button onto your toolbar. Just click that button and select the area you want to grab. You then get the option to save that image to your desktop, copy to the clipboard or have it hosted on Aviary to easily embed online.
Like this:
Which was a pretty painless way of grabbing a section of my Twitter page.
You need to sign up for an Aviary account, but it was free to do so (there are pricing plans for more advanced use of the site)
Aviary also lets you edit and manipulate images online once you’ve captured them – or upload your own images to edit.
As well as the Firefox button, Aviary has just launched it’s easiest feature yet!
You can capture any webpage at all, from any browser, by simply putting Aviary.com/ in front of the URL!
For example, say you want to capture Google’s homepage:
Just change http://www.google.com to Aviary.com/http://google.com.
Very simple.
Edit – if you like this – Lifehacker has just reviewed the Five Best Online Image Editors, and Aviary is on the list, along with Sumo Paint, Photoshop Express, Pixlr and Picnik. I’d probably also add Splashup to the list.
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