Educational Mashup: Tuxpaint with Preschoolers

Classroom Website

Welcome to Mrs. Fetterman's Great Start Readiness Program's website. Here you will find a wealth of knowledge to better familiarize yourself with myself and the classroom. This is a great resource for families to use to stay in touch with what is happening in the classroom, especially if one of the millions of papers that get sent home gets misplaced. I have included contact information, homework assignements, list of sight words (along with interactive slideshow), link to Creative Curriculum, photo page (that I plan to upload pics of centers), educational websites, and printable forms. Furthermore, I have BIG plans for the future. It just takes time! Feel free to provide and suggestions as this is always a work in progress.

Zoho Show Review

Similiar to Microsoft Office Powerpoint, Zoho Show is your online powerpoint app. With Zoho Show, you can create a slideshow presentation. I like how it categorizes by all, shared, and public. Yes, I said public. With just a click of the mouse, you can view other online presentations. Miraculously, you can also import your Microsoft powerpoints! Woohoo! The number of themes (if desired) to choose from is over 40. Anything from Bubbles to Newton Rings and beyond. Now, you may be thinking it's very basic and limited because it's free, but no, you can change the color of bullets, add shapes, cutouts, arrows, charts, and clipart. Most of all, just like the Zoho Writer, you can pull up earlier saved versions if needed. Lastly, you can host a presentation online, and chat with viewers. Notes that are added are only seen by you and if your desktop needs to be viewed just click on desktop viewer. So what are you waiting for, put on a show!

FotoFlexer Review

Please read Picnik review first! FotoFlexer is quite similiar to Picnik, however, I did not run into any features that required an upgrade. FotoFlexer offered features that would otherwise costs money through Picnik. There were numerous collage templates, effects and even animations. In addition to the ease of accessing pics from other sources like facebook, twitter and myspace, FotoFlexer allows you to tag your family and friends and upon upload asks for approval. Some may dislike this extra step but I liked having the final notice. Did you notice I didn't say limited once?

Picnik Review

I have spent the last 1 1/2 playing with some photos on Picnik. I quickly became frustrated with the number of features that were limited to the free version. However, I continued to edit some pictures and liked how easy it was to pull pictures from the computer and facebook. It was even a bonus to be able to pull pictures from family or friends facebook without pulling up the webpage. I could just scroll through the various grouping of pictures along the bottom of the screen. I fiddled around with cropping, correcting red eye, and adding text. After editing a few pictures, I preceded to make a collage. Again I became frustrated, because the templates were limited, stickers were limited, and effects were limited! If you want the unlimited access you are looking at $4.95/mth, $19.95/6mths, or $24.95/yr.

Zoho Writer Review

Well, what can I say about Zoho Writer? I was rather impressed and wish I knew about this last year when I was trying to find my mother in law a free or inexpensive word processing software. This will definetly save me the task of saving to a flash drive at home, to pull up a document at work. Instead, I can access the internet and choose to work online or offline. With the ease of access from outside the home, you are able to share your documents easily through the chat screen and make inline comments to the document. Furthermore, you can add tags and easily post documents to your blog. With one click, you can access other Zoho apps like sheet, show, wiki, notebook, meeting, planner, chat and creator. Most of all, I enjoyed being able to access earlier versions of my documents and having the capabablity to revert back to one if needed.

Screencasting-Adding Clipart

Third grade students will practice their typing skills in a letter to next years class. After completion of letter, students will be given a tutorial on how to add clipart to their document. Discussion will be led on how pictures, borders, etc. can be appealing to the eye and get a person motivated to read.