Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

I have a class of third graders who has invited me help them with their Black History digital sensory figures next month and I am excited to try it. After meeting with teacher we came up with a game plan. Since this is supposed to be a fairly quick project (not taking weeks) so we decide to use the Itty Bitty Bios in Epic as their research tool. The books are quick reads and "should" give students enough information to fill out their graphic organizer . Epic is an online digital library which has a FREE component for teachers and media specialists. You (and students) are able to use the online library as long as it is at school or in the library. It is not to be used at home unless students have a paid account. For more information about their FREE educator account CLICK HERE . I put together an Epic collection of biographies for the project. This is the link to the collection that the teacher will assign to her Epic class - https://www.getepic.com/app/user-co...

Sensory figures is an interactive notebook assignment that I have seen used in Social Studies notebooks  in the past.  They recently popped back up in my thoughts after having a conversation with another teacher about digitally presenting research that wouldn't take a long time to complete. The idea hit at the perfect time for me because I am taking a Tony Vincent online course this winter. For our first week assignment we had to use some of the highlighted tools in Week 1 to make any graphic we wanted. I decided to flesh out the idea of a digital sensory figure, created in Google Drawings, to showcase student Black History research projects. I used Google Drawings as the canvas, changing the dimensions to a printable format. I used Google search tools to find royalty free images. The pictures were uploaded to the site remove.bg to remove the backgrounds.The speech bubbles were created using the Google drawings shape tool and the curved font, around...

A school asked if I could help them duplicate the cover of a book for a project they are doing with teachers. The basics were pretty easy but I needed to find free graffiti font. I initially tried the dafont website , which is my go to for most fonts, but nothing really matched. I did a Google and YouTube search and came across this free, super cool,  online graffiti tool . Honestly I just started playing around to try and figure stuff out but what I couldn't figure out was how to download it. So I went back to YouTube and found this  VERY HELPFUL video ...which would have saved me a lot of time in the design process (so definitely watch it first). I used the site remove.bg to remove the background of my picture and the background of my words, after I went through the saving steps. TIP: make sure to set the background of your words to white first. Normally I use Google Chrome to access the remove.bg site but I couldn't get it to take any of my jpeg images this morn...