Thursday, June 4, 2009

Thing 36: Comic Relief -- Generate Some Fun


Whew! When I took a quick look at this I thought that I would have to be doing comic strips. I am only slowly being converted to the joys of graphic novels. My students are running way ahead of me on this one and I am feeding their addiction and encouraging them to recommend to each other. I have only read a couple.

I was pleased to note, when I looked more closely, that it was about other kinds of fun generators and some very useful ones. I use CutePDF to convert my files to PDFs when such conversion is necessary. It was a free download and appears automatically as a choice when I go to print anything. It has been useful when I want to post documents on my school webpage and don't want anything changed.

Citation Machine in my citation maker of choice. We have a link to it on our school website and I teach the 6th graders how to use it to cite their sources in the research they do for me. For younger students, I direct them to websites for their research that will make the citation for them. World Book Online does and is a good starting point for research if the topic is something that would appear in an encyclopedia. Some of the ELM databases also have citations for the students to copy and paste. We also use the website Answers.com which also gives citations for the students to copy and paste. I wait until 6th grade to talk about citation machine mainly because the students need to use it to make citations for webpages. I think those are the hardest citations to make. For some reason, web page creators don't think of some future readers need to cite the page and make information hard to find or don't include it at all. I wonder what they are thinking?

I have used a number of the things at BigHugeLabs and had fun with them. I am looking forward to using Wordle. I like the idea that it is not just about art but is a way of seeing what you are really talking about.

Wordle: Web2.0

A Wordle of my Delicious bookmarks.

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