20 Cool Creativity Apps for Tech-Minded Teachers Tech-savvy teachers incorporate apps into their teaching practices with ease, and creativity apps are a favorite for students who want to do something special for a class project. Here’s a list of 20 different creativity apps for the tech-minded educator to utilize in a range of creative classroom learning adventures. We often speak about Creativity Fluency and its role in shaping holistic modern learners. It refers to using artistic proficiency to add meaning to something through design, art, and storytelling. It is about using innovative design to add value to the function of a product through the form. The process of Creativity Fluency is defined by the 5Is: Identify, Inspire, Interpolate, Imagine, and Inspect. Enjoy this list of creativity apps for using with your students’ next big projects.
Noun Project - Icons for Everything 20 Websites To Find Free High-Quality Images Chances are you’re pretty tired of seeing traditional stock photos of people in suits shaking hands. Not only are they bland and uninteresting, but they also cost money. The good news is that there has been a rise in great stock photo sites that you can use for free – yes, for both personal and commercial use. In this showcase I put together a collection of 20 sites with beautiful free stock photos that you can choose from. Recommended Reading: 30 More Websites To Download Stock Photos & Royalty-Free Images Compfight Compfight is an image search engine. Life of Pix Life of Pix lets you grab free high resolution images with no copyright restrictions. Superfamous Superfamous provides you with free stock photos available for download in high resolution. IM Creator Free IM Free is a new feature of IM Creator. Getrefe If you’re looking for pictures with a different point of view, you can give this one a go. Snapographic Lock & Stock Photos Snapwire Snaps New Old Stock Jeshoots Cupcake Kaboompics Raumrot
3,900 Pages of Paul Klee's Personal Notebooks Are Now Online, Presenting His Bauhaus Teachings (1921-1931) Paul Klee led an artistic life that spanned the 19th and 20th centuries, but he kept his aesthetic sensibility tuned to the future. Because of that, much of the Swiss-German Bauhaus-associated painter's work, which at its most distinctive defines its own category of abstraction, still exudes a vitality today. And he left behind not just those 9,000 pieces of art (not counting the hand puppets he made for his son), but plenty of writings as well, the best known of which came out in English as Paul Klee Notebooks, two volumes (The Thinking Eye and The Nature of Nature) collecting the artist's essays on modern art and the lectures he gave at the Bauhaus schools in the 1920s. "These works are considered so important for understanding modern art that they are compared to the importance that Leonardo’s A Treatise on Painting had for Renaissance," says Monoskop. Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? via Monoskop Related Content:
Legal Music For Videos Many musicians choose to release their songs under Creative Commons licenses, which give you the legal right to do things like use their music in your videos. What is Creative Commons? Creative Commons is a system that allows you to legally use “some rights reserved” music, movies, images, and other content — all for free. Where can I find CC-licensed music? Several sites offer music published under Creative Commons’ flexible copyright licenses. Can I use any song with a CC license on it? Almost — you need to make sure that what you want to do with the music is OK under the terms of the particular Creative Commons license it’s under. Most importantly, you need to use music that is not licensed under a No Derivative Works license. Also, make sure to properly credit the musician and the track, as well as express the CC license the track is under. This video features the song “Desaprendere (Treatment)” by fourstones, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
Cube Creator Summarizing information is an important postreading and prewriting activity that helps students synthesize what they have learned. The interactive Cube Creator offers four options: Bio Cube: This option allows students to develop an outline of a person whose biography or autobiography they have just read; it can also be used before students write their own autobiography. Mystery Cube: Use this option to help your students sort out the clues in their favorite mysteries or develop outlines for their own stories. Story Cube: In this cube option, students can summarize the key elements in a story, including character, setting, conflict, resolution, and theme. Create-Your-Own Cube: Working on a science unit? Students can save their draft cubes to revise later. For ideas of how to use this tool outside the classroom, see Bio Cube and Mystery Cube in the Parent & Afterschool Resources section. Related Classroom & Professional Development Resources back to top Story Map Celebrate Halloween! Bio Cube
Favorite Sites for Free Clipart and Photos I use a lot of visuals in my work. I prefer to use my own photographs and to draw my own illustrations. When it's not practical or possible to use my own work, I rely on a handful of websites that provide copyright friendly images. Those images are licensed as public domain or Creative Commons Attribution. Images that are licensed as public domain do not require any citation. When a creator gives his or her image a public domain license, he or she waives all rights to the image, including the right to attribution. Images with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license can be shared and reused as long as attribution is given.
BibliOdyssey Old Book Illustrations: Free Archive Lets You Download Beautiful Images From the Golden Age of Book Illustration Needless to say, before the development and widespread use of photography in mass publications, illustrations provided the only visual accompaniment to religious texts, novels, books of poetry, scientific studies, and magazines literary, lifestyle, and otherwise. The development of techniques like etching, engraving, and lithography enabled artists and printers to better collaborate on more detailed and colorful plates. But whatever the media, behind each of the millions of illustrations to appear in manuscript and print---before and after Gutenberg---there was an artist. And many of those artists’ names are now well known to us as exemplars of graphic art styles. It was in the 19th century that book and magazine illustration began its golden age. Old Book Illustrations allows you to download high resolution images of its hundreds of featured scans, “though it appears,” writes Boing Boing, “the scans are sometimes worse-for-wear.” via Boing Boing Related Content:
Content Curation Tools What is Content Curation? As instructors, we are all information curators. How do you collect and share currently relevant content with your students? How do your students research and share information that they find with the rest of class? Modern web tools make it easy for both students and instructors to contribute online discoveries to class conversations. How can I use Content Curation in My Class? Instructors are using online content curation tools in the classroom to: The following are some real-life examples of how content curation tools are being used in education. Pinterest is a pinboard-styled social photo sharing website. Storify is a way to tell stories using social media such as tweets, photos and videos. Scoop.it allows users to create and share their own themed magazines designed around a given topic. Pearltrees is a content curation site that forms communities through sharing links through a visually striking interface. Get Started Using Content Curation Tools
Pic4Carto - Find Creative Commons Images Based on Location There are plenty of places to find public domain and Creative Commons licensed pictures on the web. Some of my favorite places were featured in this post on Practical Ed Tech. Pic4Carto is an interesting site that I will probably add to that list in the future. Pic4Carto is a site that lets you browse for street level images (don't call them Streetview because that is specific to Google Maps) all over the world. To find images on Pic4Carto you simply have to zoom-in on a location until you see a grid appear over the map. Applications for Education Pic4Carto could be a good tool for students to use to find images specific to a place that they are studying in a geography or history lesson. H/T to Maps Mania.
Mary Evans Picture Library. Historical images. Historical archive. Images of history. Images. Pictures. History. ILN. Stock. Photos Fine Art. Illustrations. The British Library’s albums | Flickr Creating and publishing a collaborative ebook Librarian Karin Hallett takes us through the step-by-step process her students went through to create history ebooks. Karin Schreier Hallett has been a librarian for 15 years, most recently as School Librarian and Instructional Coach at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School in Jacksonville, Florida. She is a keen user of Book Creator and has used the app within her classroom for several successful projects, publishing students’ work on her blog Liquid Literacy. About the project My 4th and 5th grade students finished creating ebooks on Fort Caroline, the first French settlement attempt in the New World, and the Lost Colony of Roanoke, respectively. Step 1. Drawing on their subject knowledge, students began by brainstorming possible chapter topics and then putting them in an order. Step 2. Once topics were distributed, students began the pre-writing stage by selecting relevant websites, reading the information, and taking notes to organise their ideas. Step 3. Step 4. Step 5. Step 6. Reflection