Word Clouds!

A picture says a thousand words!

Check out these two great sites for making word clouds:

Web Page students create clouds:

Snowed Inn - a fictitious lodge that provides a framework for Web Page Design class movie making. Students created several types of videos using a variety of applications and tools.

• Movie #1 - "Snow"
  • Application #1 - Power Point 2010
  • Application #2 - Make-A-Flake
  • Application #3 - Aviary

In Power Point, use shapes to draw an outdoor winter snow scene. Shape effects including gradient fills, glows, reflections, and 3-D make the image POP! 

Next, go to Make-A-Flake and use the virtual scissors to create a snowflake. Unique! No two are alike! Do-overs encouraged! Save the snowflake images, insert them in the Power Point, and now the hard part...animate them to fall like a snow storm.

 Finally, go to Aviary Education, make some music, insert it in the Power Point. And, voila! A warm, welcoming movie for your Inn's website. Guests will be lured to stay at Snowed In with these comfy, inviting movies!

Word Gets a Scare...

MSWord gets a bit of a scare when 7th graders take a break from their routine and use a document as a canvas for their Halloween pumpkins.

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Enjoy the vid!  If you care to vote...head on over to Ms Rice's Punkin' Poll and select your favorites!

Pumpkins

7th grade keyboarding students use Draw Tools in MS Word to create a Halloween pumpkin scene.

Draw Tools

7th graders know their draw tools in Word!   Every year, every season, we use Word as a blank canvas to draw a scene.  In October, pumpkins. In November, a turkey or feast.  In December, a snowman or tree.  You get the idea...

And every year, I need to do less instruction on using draw tools.  Years ago, just understanding and identifying the cursor as it hovers over various objects was difficult for 7th graders to understand.  The cross-hair?  The move cursor?  The resize cursor?  The double-headed arrow cursor?  Many students struggled to comprehend the cursor type and function.

But not last week.  These kids had no problem resizing and moving objects to create their pumpkin.  It was awesome to be able to focus on the scene and not the user's skill.  To focus on the color and shadow and 3-D effects.  To focus on the developing character of the pumpkin.  (Pumpkins will be placed in categories and voted on...)

Coming soon - video of "Word" Pumpkins and voting results!

WP Apps

A slice of student newsletters created after visiting commercial, freeware, and online word processing sites.  Sites visited:

• Commercial software: Oracle Open Office, Word Perfect, Atlantis Word Processor, Polaris Doc Master
  
• Free/Open Source software (FOSS): Lotus Symphony, TED Notepad, SoftMaker, Kingsoft Writer, Bean
  
• Online Word Processors (Cloud): Open Office, Adobe Buzzword, Google Docs, Zoho Writer

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Xtranormal!

Jerky, stiff, pauses, delayed emotions.  These avatars created by 7th graders are awesome!  Honestly, I laughed so hard while viewing them that I had to quit!  After studying History of the Typewriter, students were asked to create an avatar (or two) of one of the inventors - be inventive with the script,

Check a few of them out:

• Ninja Mr. McCool
• Williams McCool
• Robot Movie
• Frustrating Typewriters

Unfortunately, after 30 days Xtranormal wanted money...oh well, it was a great end-of-year project!