I had heard about mashups, but I didn't realize that I had already used one. This past spring, my PGP class and I worked on Trading Card Maker. We all loved it. It was a great series of lessons that involved research (had to find information to put on the card), importing photos from the internet, saving the information in their files on our district server, and putting it all together at the end of the project. One warning-if you don't complete the entire card in one sitting (which is hard for little ones), it will not let you go back and edit after you have saved it. That started a new series of lessons for these 1st and 2nd graders--how to create, edit, copy, and paste from a Word document. This way they could type all of their information correctly before they pasted it into the bottom part of the trading card. It was a lot of fun and they learned many new research and technology skills.
There were several things I enjoyed today. I particularly liked Flickrvision, Flickr Color Picker, and many of the projects on Big Huge Labs. Flickrvision is a great way to see what is going on in the world at this very moment. It combines maps and photos and I felt like I was getting to peek into what was happening all over the world. Within one minute it took me sailing in Italy, to a train ride in Brazil, a view of downtown Houston, a boat ride on a river in Hong Kong, and to someone's desk in Indiana. It was amazing!
Flickr Color Picker surprised me because I didn't think it would be any big deal--photos that match colors--I didn't think I would be that interested. But, when I clicked on the Color Fields Experiment, I got lost in all of the photos and colors. They were incredible and this would be a great tool for an Art teacher or anyone doing lessons on colors or digital photography. I had to force myself to move on.
Big Huge Labs has been a favorite of mine since the Trading Card project, and I didn't realize how many more projects they added to their list. I loved the Jigsaw, Captioner, and Magazine Cover. I can see great lessons being planned around famous people or events and Magazine Cover.
1 comment:
You were ahead of all of us, I think. I don't remember that anyone else had used the trading card site before using it during 23Things. I used to make trading cards for science when I had elem. students, but I didn't know about this site. Wish I had!
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