Emelita Pineda-Internet Tools Review

 

        Crayola for Educators is a website that offers at-home learning, projects, and lesson plans, and teacher professional development. The brand has grown since 1903 with its portfolio of innovative art tools, crafting activities, and creative toys that give kids the power to express all that inspires them as they explore, discover, play, pretend, and dream.

One of the resources available for educators, creatED gives practical, art-infused teaching strategies and insights to schools and districts which also deepen creative thinking in schools. This program is available for K-8 schools as it focuses on building creative capacity and embedding project-and-inquiry-based learning integrated across the curriculum and across grade spans. creatED activity kits and learning resources for K-8 educators also help meet curriculum standards on STEAM and literacy. There are also Family Engagement, STEAM Education and other Learning Sets that prepare students and families with academic and life skills through creativity.

In terms of literacy lesson plans, Crayola provides a variety of these geared towards different content areas. The lesson plans include lists of supplies needed, detailed directions, standards, and even modifications to accommodate all skill levels. A set of safety guidelines is also provided for educators to follow during the lesson plans.

Overall, Crayola for Educators is a recommended website to use specially to emphasize the importance of art in all content areas. The role of art in teaching encourages meaningful engagement and interaction for students who otherwise would need a different outlet of expression when it comes to their assignments. This website may initially put off educators in the secondary levels, but upon more exploration of the site, there are many lesson plans that can be adapted to teach students at the higher grade levels.

GIMP: This is a freely distributed program for photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring. GIMP is an acronym that stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. This program is available for graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, and even scientists. It provides sophisticated tools to enhance productivity. GIMP is a cross-platform image editor available for many operating systems including macOS and Windows. I found this internet tool useful across all curriculums aside from Art classes because students can use it if they had specially designed projects that involved images.

One of the features of GIMP is a customizable interface. GIMP allows the user to customize the view for each new task such as changing colors or icon sizes. GIMP also has a full screen mode where the user can edit their work while previewing it. Photo enhancement is also another feature of GIMP that includes fixing perspective distortions, using corrective mode in the transform toolbox, and using the channel mixer to get a black-and-white picture to stand out. Other features of GIMP include digital retouching, hardware support, file format support, and supported platforms. Overall, this website is recommended for students in the upper middle and high school grade levels as it takes several manipulations and following directions in the tutorials to help them with their assignments.

Learn Out Loud: The goal for this website was to provide audio and video learning content on the Web. Since 2005, this website has grown by expanding audio and video learning on the Internet through audio book downloads, podcasts, YouTube, Free college courses, and many other resources. These are just some of the best features of this website, and their goals include helping to turn anyone’s “dead time” (time spent in exercising, doing chores, etc.) into “learning time,” a time for personal and professional development available through mobile technology. This tool is very useful in promoting learning as students are encouraged to choose a specific audio book to listen to, especially if there is a break such as the two weeks of winter break or even during the summer.

Learn Out Loud has curated over 50,000 of the best audio books, podcasts, free downloads, and videos that anyone can learn from. There are over 10,000 audio books, courses, documentaries, lectures, interviews, speeches, and more in their most popular sections of their site which is found in their Free Audio & Video Directory. The website also has a podcast directory with over 7, 000 selected audio and video podcasts.

One of the most important sections for educators in this website is the educational audio book

downloads from all the major audio book publishers and a lot of smaller publishers and individual 

authors, and there are over 30,000 of these. The other most important section of this website is the kids’ 

audio books section featuring over 2, 000 audio books, podcasts, and free videos for kids and teens to 

learn from.