PicLits - Using Pictures to Inspire Creative Writing

PicLits is an excellent site for finding creative writing prompts. PicLits aims to provide inspiration for writing short stories. PicLits tries to reach this goal by providing users with images upon which they can build their writing. To get writers started, PicLits provides a list of words which can be dragged and dropped into sentence form. If you don't want to use or don't need a word list, you can select the "freestyle" option to begin free-form writing.

Applications for Education
The idea of PicLits is not to write a full story within the images, but rather to use the images as the inspiration for longer pieces. In that regard PicLits could be a good source of inspiration for the reluctant writers in your classroom.

ClassTools SMS Generator - Text Messages Between Historical Figures

Last week I wrote about three ways that students can create social media profiles for historical and literary characters. Writing that post reminded me of the Classtools Fake SMS Generator. You could have students use the Classtools SMS Generator to create simple conversations between historical characters as way to get them to think about those peoples' lives and the conversations that they might have had. In the following video I demonstrate how to use the SMS generator.

Slides from my CECA/CASL Presentations

Yesterday and today I had the privilege to speak at the CECA/CASL conference in Connecticut. It was an honor to be invited back to speak at a conference in my home state. Thank you to everyone who came to hear me speak. It was a pleasure to meet many of you throughout the conference and I hope that we meet again.

For those who are curious about what I spoke about at the conference, the slides from all of my presentations are embedded below.

VR, Certificates, and Google Earth - The Week in Review

Moose Tracks

Good evening from Maine where it was a beautiful fall day. It was a perfect day for playing outside which is what we did to celebrate our youngest daughter's first birthday. I hope that you had a great Saturday too!

Tomorrow I will be speaking at the CECA/CASL conference in Connecticut. I will also be there on Monday. If you're attending too, please say hello.

And if you're wondering about the picture, it's a moose track that my dogs found on a walk this week. It's one of the biggest tracks I've seen in all of my twenty years exploring the Maine woods.

Here are this week's most popular posts:
1. 250 Google Tools Tutorials for Teachers
2. Virtual Reality Book Tours
3. How to Send Personalized Certificates via Google Forms or Google Sheets
4. How to Design a Custom Certificate in Google Slides
5. How I Found a Google Earth File of 550+ Ancient Greek Places
6. A New Vertical Ruler and New Margin Settings in Google Docs
7. How to Set Start and End Times for Videos in Google Slides

Now Booking 2019 School Visits

If you would like to have me work with your school this year, please send me an email at richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com or click here for more information.

Book Me for Your Conference

I’ve given keynotes at conferences from Australia to Alaska for groups of all sizes from 50 to 2,000+. My keynotes focus on providing teachers and school administrators with practical ways to use technology to create better learning experiences for all students. I like to shine the light on others and so I often share examples of great work done by others as well as my own. Send an email to richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com book me today.

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

Practical Ed Tech is the brand through which I offer PD webinars.
TypingClub offers more than 600 typing lessons for kids. 

Storyboard That is my go-to tool for creating storyboards.
Book Creator is a great tool for creating multimedia books.
Kami is a great tool for annotating and collaborating on PDFs. 

University of Maryland Baltimore County offers a great program on instructional design.

Seterra offers a huge selection of geography games for students. 

TED-Ed Explains Why Students Should Read Classics

A few weeks ago TED-Ed published a lesson titled Why Should You Read Edgar Allan Poe? It now appears that lesson was the first in a series of lessons designed to explain and encourage students to read some classics. Since the Poe lesson was published TED-Ed has published similar lessons about Don Quixote, Waiting for Godot, and The Canterbury Tales. All of those video lessons plus the Poe lesson are embedded below.

Why Should You Read "Waiting for Godot?"


Why Should You Read "Don Quixote?"


Everything You Need to Know to Read "The Canterbury Tales."


Why Should You Read Edgar Allan Poe?