Magnetic Poetry with Google Drawings

Halloween is just around the corner and your kids are getting a little scary.  Take advantage of that extra energy and try a little magnetic poetry using Google Drawings to get your kids to show their spooky creativeness.  

Thanks to the Shake Up Learning blog, who created this awesome Google Drawing template, you can spark your little monsters' creativity with magnetic poetry.  There are almost 100 tiles in this template, but of course, you can delete tiles or add tiles using text boxes in order to adjust to student vocabulary levels. Simply drag a tile onto the page to create a poem. You can either use this as a collaborative activity or an independent activity.  You could also use it as a writing prompt.  Regardless, how you decide to implement it in your classroom, I would love to see their creations.  Feel free to tag me on Twitter @rfluegel.  I'm sure their creativeness will be spooktacular.
~Rosie Fluegel

Quick & Easy Videos with Biteable.com

As teachers, we love to see beautiful multimedia projects from our students.  However, there are times when we would love to see what our students can create without spending too much of our time working on a more complicated app.  In comes Biteable.com, the world's simplest video maker.  In just a few simple steps you can have your own animated video ready to go. Simply pick your favorite scenes from their selection, add text, pick a theme color and choose music. Then, you're done.  Watch the video below to learn how to create your first video using biteable.com. 

What I like about biteable.com is that students are forced to a use a limited amount of text depending on their chosen scene.  This forces students to be concise with their thoughts or ideas.  I do have to note that the final product cannot be downloaded to your computer and there will be a watermark in the corner of your video. However, you can link to your video or embed it on another site.  You can create a free account by using your Google account, so getting started is even easier.  It's definitely worth looking into if you or your students are looking for a video creation tool that is new, quick and easy.  Give it a try and let me know what you think.

~Rosie F.