Ed Tech Ideas

Paragons of the Week is a reoccurring post highlighting resources that I find to be worth mentioning. I come across 100s of useful tools for educators each week. Below are the top 3 “paragons” that I found this week that I feel teachers might dig. To view previous Paragons, click here.

1. Audio Owl

Audio Owl makes the world’s public domain audio books available for browsing in a visual and easily searchable way. You can search for a specific title, or use the genre list to visually scan through hundreds of titles. Books may be previewed directly on the site, or you may download them directly into iTunes, or as zipped mp3 files. The downloads are broken into chapters, which is useful for teachers using this as a listening station.

2. Flickr Poet

Found this site thanks to Kristen Swanson. Flickr Poet allows users to enter a poem and then click “show story” and the site pulls photos from Flickr and places them with all the words in the poem. The results are sometimes strange (I typed in the roses are red poem and for the word red, the corresponding photo was Steve Jobs wearing a red scarf), but students enjoy seeing their words come to life. There’s no print, save, or share feature, so you would need to do a screen capture, but the simplicity of the site and the fact that you don’t need to register is something that I love.
Update/Caution: Some of the images that Flickr Poet produces can be less than child-friendly.

3. Search-Cube

One of my 4th grade students was using this site while researching for a biography assignment. Search-Cube is a visual search engine that presents web search results in a unique, three-dimensional cube interface. It shows previews of up to ninety-six websites, videos and images.