Portland Free School

I've been having fun this Sunday afternoon playing with flickrpoet. It's a swift way to make visual poetry on the fly... It's simple. You type text into the box and click Show Story.

If you don't like the images that come up, click Show Story again for new ones. I settled on this set to illustrate Basho's Frog Haiku:

It's not as fine a result as choosing each individual image, but it's so much quicker! The above collage took a few clicks of the mouse to create. The one below, in which I painstakingly chose & placed the images by hand, took about an hour!

I had a lot of fun. Here are a couple more...

Phoebe's Story

I'm sure there are lots more ways to use flickrpoet to introduce or review vocabulary, my friend David (EFL Classroom 2.0) suggests using flickrpoet to make story domino sets (a series of image prompts for creating stories by yourself or with friends). I'm going to try making some of those next!

* As always, you can click on the images to view larger size : )

This has  been the month for live animal cams! It's the season : ) We now have live streaming cams of horses, chickens, goats, bluebirds, eagles, barn owls, and hummingbirds. Don't forget our archive of the always winsome black bears, Lily & Hope.

All the cams can be accessed through our Science page.

In May I plan to focus on producing an ebook of Art for the Elementary Teacher, which should be ready in June with enough interesting activities to see us through the summer (maybe).

I'd really like your input on what you'd like to see in this blog. What's new on Portland Free School, with an RSS feed so it's easy to keep up? Teaching resources I don't talk about in the main pages? Tips on creating content online? Cute observations about my dogs? (MIght run out of those kind of quick.)

Drop me a line, help a girl out, ok?

Always,

Ellen

PS About that "MORE" button at the end of the top  nave bar... it's a catch-all for pages that I haven't put into another category yet. It's like a box of chocolates... you never know what you are going to get!

Drop off box for any & all comments, questions, suggestions, and random chit chat. Free & easy, just click on the link above!