Friday, August 7, 2009

Thing #10

This is an image I generated with ImageChef. http://www.imagechef.com/ It matches the name of my blog, so I thought that was cool. It was very easy to do. I'm not sure I would want my students getting on ImageChef in my classroom, though. Some of the options are not school appropriate, and I'm not sure what the academic connection would be here.

I looked at Wordle and thought it had some possibilities for use in the classroom, but I was unable to get it to work. I actually designed an image in Comic Strip generator and in Happy Face generator, but I couldn't figure out how to upload them without having to pay money. Kid-Friendly did not seem like it had much to offer. Dumpr was cool but I didn't create anything because it didn't seem to have an academic purpose that I could see.

Here's one I designed from Trading Cards: http://bighugelabs.com/deck.php

I designed a trading card for Kino from The Pearl which is a book we read in my class. I thought students could design trading cards for a main character in a book they are reading independently. The only problem with Trading Cards is when you import the image, it doesn't always fit the way you'd like it to. I can see 8th graders losing patience with that part. I'd have to experiment with that a little more to see if anything can be done to improve the situation.

Overall, playing with these images is fun but a little bit of a time sucker. I want technology to be fun for my students, but I need it to connect to what we're doing academically. If it doesn't improve their reading or writing skills, then I really don't have time to use it. I'd be curious to see how other teachers use Image generators in their classes.

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