PowerPoint

There are several ways to find PowerPoint resources. One technique is to do a search for the topic you want and add the PowerPoint file ending of .ppt such as “Civil War” +.ppt or “Romantic poetry” +.ppt. Some people like to do a Google image search for the topic and PowerPoint such as Statistics +PowerPoint.

Another technique is to find a school or university site that hosts many PowerPoint. The Jefferson County Schools hosts a page of Language Arts PowerPoints and the Bedford County Department of Education also hosts many Language Arts PowerPoints.

There are other online PowerPoint repositories, such as:

• Slideshare is a site to share your presentations with the world or to look at the presentations of others. Once at the site, use the search engine. There are many educational PowerPoints on this site.
• Scribd is another sharing site. The search engine is not precise, When I typed in “Language Arts” I found many entries that had language or arts.
• Docstoc is still another site where you can search for your topic. Searching for Language Arts revealed about 200 entries (mostly PowerPoint but also Word documents).

Flickr

Flickr offers innumerable high quality photographs on a tremendously wide variety of topics for your classroom. For example, there are thousands of pictures of cumulus clouds. To use Flickr, type in your search term. You can refine your search by typing in multiple search terms separated by a comma such as “Peru, Inca, building.” Click on Advanced Search to go to the Advanced Search page, at the bottom of the page click on “Only with Creative Commons Licensed material” and then click on “Find content to modify.” The Creative Commons allows you to use in your classroom.

Once you find an image that you want, then copy the URL of the image into a word processing document. For example, you find the image Inca Wall in Coricancha, Cusco, and copy the URL http://www.flickr.com/photos/pedrosz/2415724385/ into a word processing document. You label the picture and indicate what you want your students to notice about this Incan architecture. You can add other picture links to the same document. For example Spanish students can use a listing of pictures about the same topic of Spanish speaking schools from a blog entry of Escuela- Hispanic School Pictures. You could save the picture, copy it into the word processing document and add written questions about it. Or, you might put it in a PowerPoint presentation.

Dr. Harry Grover Tuttle focuses on assessing and improving student learning through low- and high-tech tools.

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