On a high

Well, tripping in fact. Here is website which allows you to plan, review, remember, invent a trip and add photos and comments to the adventure. Sign in with your facebook account is the easiest.

This could be interesting as a class exercise on the IWB and then students could plan their own trips, online or on good old pen and paper.

http://www.tripline.net/

Flipping out

In many posts I have mentioned online tools which could be interesting as a means of setting students homework, creating online cartoons, recordings etc which can later be looked at and discussed in class. Here is another idea which is in vogue but which takes the whole concept of what happens at home / in class to a different level.

Try flipping your class. Forget those up-front presentations. Record them (powerpoint, video, audio, slide presentation etc) and put them online, on your blog for example. Let the students work through the presentation at home. That frees you up in class for much more interesting work be it practice or student feedback on the work they did at home.

Have yet to put it into practice but love the idea and how it could help make classroom time all the more useful and rich. Follow these two links for a little more on the area:

http://flipped-learning.com/

http://marynabadenhorst.global2.vic.edu.au/2010/04/01/to-flip-or-not-to-flip/

A graphic for your thoughts

Here is a fun site for mind-mapping your ideas. You do have to sign up to save them but worth a look. http://www.exploratree.org.uk/

Imaging this

We use images all the time in our classrooms and technology makes it increasingly easy to find pictures / flashcards etc. and also to manipulate them and create customized material. You and your students may be familiar with http://www.flickr.com/ where you can store your photo sets online. I have just found, however, http://bighugelabs.com/ which offers a series of tools for manipulating photos, creating a jigsaw for example or a mosaic or poster from files you can upload or import directly from facebook or flickr. Great fun and very useful for creating stimulating images for use in class: try getting students to do their own and bring them in for discussion.

If you want to use pre-selected photos there is nowhere better to start than with http://www.flickr.com/photos/eltpics/sets/ the great ELT picture project. Have a look at the photos already available and well done to those involved! As a continuation follow the great new blog with ideas on how to creatively use photos in your classes http://takeaphotoand.wordpress.com/

Great work by all involved!