Jigsaw puzzles can be a lot of fun. The Smithsonian offers images from the NMAA converted to puzzles that feature winter and New Year's themed artworks to challenge yourself ! Try your hand at this snowy oil painting.
From Richard's blog: "Scholastic Story Starters is a great tool that students will enjoy using to create short, creative fiction stories. Scholastic Story Starters offers four story themes; fantasy, adventure, sci-fi, and scrambler. To create a story on Story Starters a student picks a theme, enters his or her name, chooses his or her grade, and spins the big wheels of prompts. The student can spin the wheels until he or she finds a prompt he or she likes. After the prompt is selected the student can write his or her story using the letter, postcard, notebook, or newspaper format provided by Scholastic Story Starters. When the story is finished it can be printed."
================"Learn how to get to the edit view, where to find all of Mentimeter's key features, and how to start designing your presentation. It also shows how your audience can vote and participate by going to menti.com and putting in the code."
================="Google announced this morning it's expanding its two-year-old digital safety and citizenship curriculum for children, "Be Internet Awesome," to now include media literacy — specifically, the ability to identify so-called "fake news" and other false content. The company is launching six new media literacy activities for the curriculum that will help teach kids things like how to avoid a phishing attack, what bots are, how to verify that information is credible, how to evaluate sources, how to identify disinformation online, spot fake URLs, and more."
"Since 2014, photographers have shared their work on Pexels and helped millions of creatives power their personal and commercials projects. Graphic designers, journalists, bloggers, web developers, social media managers and more have told their stories using the 504,828 photos contributed by our talented photographers."
"Today, social media use is nearly universal among teens. While notable shares say they at times feel overwhelmed by the drama on social media and pressure to construct only positive images of themselves, they simultaneously credit these online platforms with several positive outcomes – including strengthening friendships, exposing them to different viewpoints and helping people their age support causes they care about."
==============
"Instagram Stories is a pretty popular feature, and it's a great storytelling tool. Users can capture important moments of their lives in photo or video and string them together for others to watch one by one. [... But, ] we don't need the app to create the experience!"
"Kapwing gives people the tools, content, and inspiration they need to express a creative vision in video. Kapwing serves the people sharing a video with their friend, the content marketers who need to edit a video efficiently, and the creators who entertain the world. Freelancers, artists, students, and influencers use Kapwing to craft digital stories without the software getting in the way. Our product principles:
- Record your entire desktop, an application, current browser tab or just your webcam
- Embed your webcam anywhere in your recording, and narrate with your microphone.
- Our extension operates within your browser. No bulky software download required.
- No internet connection required until you upload your video to Google Drive or YouTube.
=====================
"Every day, we're amazed and delighted by the incredible diversity of games, stories, and animations that children create and share with Scratch. This August, we'll be launching a new generation of Scratch, called Scratch 3.0, that aims to expand how kids can create and share, and how educators can support student learning with Scratch. This new version will include new images, new support materials, and new programming capabilities — and it runs on a wider variety of devices (including tablets)."
"When it comes to viewing icebergs, this is one of the best places in the world. From May to August, these 10,000-year-old glacial giants are visible from many points along the northern and eastern coasts, especially on clear, sunny days. They come in every shape and size, with colours from snow-white to deepest aquamarine. Despite their arrival from the Arctic every spring, and their disappearance only months later, our awe of them remains new, year after year.
