Create Motivational Posters and Cards on Big Huge Labs

Big Huge Labs offers a great collection of free tools for creating digital products with your pictures. Some of the tools that they offer include motivational poster creators, magazine cover creators, and trading card templates.

The Trading Card generator that allows you to create trading cards about people, places, and events both real and fictional. To create your card you simply upload a picture or import one from Flickr, Instagram, or Facebook then add some text details about the person featured in the card.

Applications for Education
There are a lot of ways that educators and students could use the free products offered by Big Huge Labs. The magazine cover generator could be used by students as the cover page to a biography or autobiography writing assignment. The poster templates could be used to create posters about classroom rules. The badge template could be useful for the first days of school for students and teachers to learn each other's names and express some personality at the same time.

The Big Huge Labs Trading Card generator could be used by students is to create a set of trading cards about characters in a novel, to create a set of cards about people of historical significance, or to create cards about places that they're studying in their geography lessons.

The Week in Review - The Most Popular Posts on Free Technology for Teachers

Good morning from Maine where I'm starting to prepare for Thanksgiving by going to the grocery store for the cranberry sauce and ingredients to bake the rolls that my sister-in-law has requested I bring this year. In this week-in-review I want to say thank you to everyone who has followed and shared my blog over the years. Next week will be the seventh anniversary of Free Technology for Teachers. I couldn't have kept it going without all of you. Thank you.

Here are this week's most popular posts:
1. 5 Good Typing Instruction and Practice Sites for Kids
2. 10 Good Resources for Geography Awareness Week
3. Three Good Ways to Use All Those Pictures Students Take
4. Padlet iPhone App Now Available - 5 Ways to Use Padlet in School
5. Three Activities for Geography Awareness Week
6. Frequently Overlooked Google Search Tools and Strategies
7. Tools for Creating Animations in Your Browser or On Your Tablet

There are still some seats available in my popular online course Getting Going With GAFE. The course starts on November 24th and runs for five weeks. There is an option to earn three graduate credits for completing the course. Click here to learn more.

Would you like to have me speak at your school or conference?

Click here to learn about my professional development services. 

Please visit the official advertisers that help keep this blog going.

Practical Ed Tech is the brand through which I offer PD webinars.

BoomWriter provides a fantastic tool for creating writing lessons. 

Storyboard That is my go-to tool for creating storyboards and cartoon stories.

AlfaTyping offers great, free typing lessons for kids. 

MasteryConnect offers a series of apps for identifying standards. 

Discovery Education & Wilkes University offer online courses for earning Master's degrees in Instructional Media.

PrepFactory offers a great place for students to prepare for SAT and ACT tests.

The University of Maryland Baltimore County offers graduate programs for teachers.

Boise State University offers a 100% online program in educational technology.

EdTechTeacher is hosting host workshops in six cities in the U.S. in the summer.

SeeSaw is a great iPad app for creating digital portfolios.

Lesley University offers online education programs for teachers. 

Southeastern University offers online M.Ed programs.

Sketch Nation Introduces Kids to Programming Ideas Through Game Creation

Sketch Nation is a free service that students can use to create their own simple video games.

Through the Sketch Nation platform students can develop their own games by selecting a game template then customizing it to their preferences. To develop their customized games students draw backgrounds and characters. Alternatively, students can import pictures to use as backgrounds and characters. In the advanced editor students can customize the actions within a game.

Sketch Nation works on iPads, on Android tablets, and in any modern web browser on your laptop.

Applications for Education
Sketch Nation isn't as robust as platforms like Scratch, but it does provide students with a nice introduction to some of the concepts of programming and game design. Click here for examples of teachers using Sketch Nation in their classrooms.

Thanks to David Kapuler for sharing Sketch Nation.