Quick fun Tech

The middle school students where I teach get to choose an "exploratory" or elective type class once a week. It can vary from sign language to drama. They go to this class for one quarter and then get to pick another class. I usually do a Tech Tools for School topic. I try to pick fun, easy tools the kids can pick up quickly since our class time is only 30 minutes. Sometimes we find a way to use them for school work and sometimes they are just for fun. I thought I would share some of their favorite fun links.

GeoGreeting

It's amazing how they could spend 30 minutes looking at every letter of the alphabet. The cool thing is that it tells you the location of the building (city) and then they want to either try and find it themselves or they go off and do some independent research on the place where the building is. Well look at that- self motivated learning at it's finest!

Spell with Flickr 
Another fun site, although today the letter N was not working on my computer. I tried all the browsers but nothing. When things like that happen with my students I remind them that it is a web based tool and sometimes things don't work perfectly. So we go to plan B! What I really like about this one is there are different letters to choose from. When you click on a letter it cycles through about 5 or so letters and you can pick the one you like. You are not stuck with one choice as in GeoGreeting.

CoolText

Another pretty cool text creator with some really neat fonts. You have many controls like color, size, gradient, the list is long. Some you can download the image in a variety of formats. One word of caution- this site does have ads so use it carefully.

So there you have it- Three fun tools to create your headings, use on powerpoints, anywhere you can use an image.