Five on Friday

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and Christmas Break is just around the corner.  I don't know about you but I am looking forward to this much needed vacation.  Before break though, the ITRTs are heading up to Virginia Beach this weekend for the annual VSTE conference.  I hope to share lots of new ideas in next week's Five on Friday.  In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this week's.

1.  New Webquest with a TWIST can be done with Google Sites.  Have you heard of the new faze of Escape Rooms?  If not, what happens is that you are locked in a room and you have to find clues to help you locate the key which will unlock the door and you have a small time frame to do so.  Well, this has now gone digital!  By combining other Google Apps with Google Sites you can create your own Breakouts-digitized!  Here is a link to one I created on Christmas trivia.  Stay tuned as another will be released on Monday that is meant to keep up the spirits as we count down to Christmas.

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2.  ABCya’s Word Clouds iPad app makes it easy to quickly create word clouds on your iPad. To create a word cloud with Word Clouds by ABCya just type or paste text into the text field. After entering your text Word Clouds by ABCya will generate a visual representation of the most common words in your passage of text. You can customize the generated word cloud by choosing different fonts, different color schemes, and by excluding words from the word cloud. Your word clouds can be saved directly to your iPad’s camera roll.

This is also great on a desktop or laptop as well!

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3.  Classtools.net is one of my favorite "go-to" sites. It was created by the man on the left, Russel Tarr.  Here you can create a random name picker, games, see 3D images, and much more..  

There is an SMS generator on the site.  I thiink it would be a really cool idea to create a simulated text conversation between George Washington and Benedict Arnold!  

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4.  Flippity.net is another of my favorite place to find templates for creating really cool things using Google Sheets.

I recently noticed a MadLibs story generator. Flippity's MadLibs template lets you create a series of MadLibs-style stories for your students to complete online.  

Each template is accompanied by a video which walks you through how to use the template.  This would be a great site for teachers of 4th grade and up to check out for those one day mini project ideas!

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5.  Friday at the Movies- I have an ulterior motive for sharing this.  Stay tuned to Monday to find out why.

I wanted to remind you all of the items Gail sent out at the beginning of the week.

First of all, You can now play tic-tac-toe and solitaire just by doing a Google search. Also, if you've ever wanted to hear what a raccoon or zebra sounded like, Google will tell you.  Just type in what you want to know.

Secondly, you can access the power of Wolfram Alpha’s computational knowledge in Google Sheets and get instant facts, data, and calculations, all without leaving the window.  

​Let me know if you need help with anything posted on this blog!

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