Development and Media

Section 1:

Media Resources

ClipArt.com This is a great site for free clipart because it actually searches many other clipart sites on the Internet. You can search the images and Clipart.com will show you previews.

SoundAmerica This site says it has over 28,000 sound files, mostly wavs. Arranged by category, with several layers, I found it easy to find what I was looking for on this site.

Artziggy.com Free gifs, some animated. Images are sorted by category, so this isn’t as nice as the searchable sites, but the page design is easy to follow.

Animation Factory With over 100,000 animated gifs and images there is plenty to choose from at this site. Arranged by categories, this site would be especially helpful to students studying a foreign language. Animated flags from many, many countries are available as well as WordArt-like animations with foreign phrases. Also check out the web text category that has many common web words and phrases (back, next) spiffed up with animations and interesting fonts.

Ditto Ditto is a search engine that only looks for images on the Internet. It will bring back previews of the images, along with links to the original site where Ditto found the image. Ditto does not always bring back kid-appropriate pictures and in some searches I’ve done many of the pictures don’t relate to my search terms. Unlike the other sites listed here, the images in Ditto are not guaranteed free or without copyright restrictions.

Partners in Rhyme This site contains free wav files arranged by categories. I found this site to be slow.

CoolText This site lets you create custom made animated text for web pages (think flaming letters and the like). A favorite of the web development classes at my high school, CoolText is a unique site.

Section 2:
Development Resources

Weather Channel Include the weather for your area on your web pages using this service from the Weather Channel. This would be helpful to a science class that was tracking weather patterns or a school newspaper that wanted to add real-time weather.

Free Guestbook This site will create a guest book for you that you can add to a web page. Just fill out the registration form and they will provide you with an web site where people can leave a message for you that will be e-mailed to you. It takes only minutes to do this and then you can link to the guest book site that they provide for you.

Timer This script lets visitors know how long they have been at your site. This might be useful if students needed to know how long they were studying on your site.

Highwired This web site lets you create sites for your school, class, activity or sport. Free and easy to use, I started using Highwired as a way for my newspaper kids to turn in articles on-line. I can give kids rights and logins so my editors can view and edit the stories they need. You can also use the calendar feature to schedule tasks and create and easy on-line calendar.

MarkWebSite This isn’t exactly a web site development tool, but it is tool cool and useful to leave off the list. This site will keep track of all of your bookmarks for you. For people who use multiple computers, this is a fantastic service. After registering, this free site is available to you once you login. All of your bookmark are on-line from wherever you are.

Section 3:
District Support

Our district provides after school technology workshops for all staff members (certified, clerical and administration). The topics include: Microsoft Windows 95/98 Intro, Microsoft Outlook 2000 Intro, Advanced Microsoft Outlook 2000, Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 Intro A, Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 Intro B, Scanning, PaintShopPro Intro A, PaintShopPro Intro B, Using the Projector, Advanced Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 A, Advanced Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 B, Internet Explorer Intro A, Internet Explorer Intro B, Microsoft Word 2000 Intro A, Microsoft Word 2000 Intro B, Advanced Microsoft Word 2000 A, Advanced Microsoft Word 2000 B, Microsoft Publisher 2000 Intro A, Microsoft Publisher 2000 Intro B, Microsoft Excel 2000 Intro The materials from these classes are also available on-line. The topics change from semester to semester.

Staff members can also request to go to technology workshops and conferences. On in-service days technology workshops such as Searching the Internet or Creating Student Web Pages are offered. For the past two summers Lake Park has hosted a section of the Moveable Feast, a week-long workshop that focuses on using Microsoft Office and integrating technology into the curriculum. Technology Newsletters are also distributed to the staff via e-mail to inform them about changes and improvements in our technology programs.

Section 4:
Problem Solving

First off, don’t forget to ask for help. If you are using a Microsoft Program, ask the Office Assistant a question by clicking on it and you might have you questions answered without leaving the program. Talk to your peers or the Tech Department.

To find help on how to use software, first check out the District In-service Page. This page contains information specific to our school and tutorials on the software that we use here.

For more information, go to Microsoft’s Education web page. Here are useful ideas for integrating technology into the curriculum as well as tutorials about Microsoft products.

For help in searching the Internet, try starting at UC Berkley’s Internet Search Page. This has links to many search engines with practical tips for how to effectively search that specific search engine.