Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Apps for Writing Encouragement

At ISTE in June, I focused on how to encourage students in writing with digital storytelling.  Here are two apps I plan to use with 2nd graders:
30hands Mobile is a free app that allows teachers and students to write about and record impressions from photos.

The other is Write About This Free, which also uses photos to jumpstart writing.  We can use a photo with accompanying sentence stem to write about, or take our own photo and start from scratch.  The sentence stems can also be read aloud to the students.And the prompts can be differentiated!

I can't wait to use these.

Now I just need more iPads!  And kids!

Do You Love Fun Fonts?

Way back when, I had to make huge poster sized hand lettered fonts for graphics design class.  It was so peaceful to work for days on drawing letters...and now it is so unnecessary.

I get lost admiring different fonts, and here Google has just what we need.  When looking through fonts, we can sort by trending fonts or date added, etc.  I love that!


About Google Fonts

Google Fonts makes it quick and easy for everyone to use web fonts, including professional designers and developers. We believe that everyone should be able to bring quality typography to their web pages and applications.
Our goal is to create a directory of web fonts for the world to use. Our API service makes it easy to add Google Fonts to a website in seconds. The service runs on Google's servers which are fast, reliable and tested. Google provides this service free of charge.