Free Collaborative and Private Photo/Video Sites for Teachers and Parents

Those special events where everyone seems to have a camera flashing such as field day, classroom performances, and field trips offer a special opportunity for teachers and parents.  It gives everyone a chance to grab those candid shots and capture great moments on film, but often there is difficulty sharing all those photos and videos in one place.  Email works to a point, but often this is cumbersome and has limitations with file sizes.  Worry no more.  Today’s post will make video and photo sharing easy while keeping those treasures private and safe.

Drop.io is another great site for parents to upload photos quickly for teachers to access.  Like Troovi, the teacher would create the drop.io site, set a password, and send the link to parents.  Parents simply upload their photos, video, and files to the site and the teacher can download them instantly.  Again, images can be uploaded to the site in high resolution, large files, but video might need some condensing.  Another bonus is if parents have a smart phone, they can simply send their camera images to the drop.io site during the event.  Online Tech Tips has a great tutorial on Drop.io.

 

DropShots is another great site that allows for private photo and video sharing, but the limit is 500 photos and 2 minutes of video.  One bonus over many other sites is the images are 1500x1500 pixels when viewed online, but the negative is everyone must register to use. 

Flickr will also allow you to create a group shared photo space, but it is blocked from many school filters, so you’ll need to check your restrictions.  The teacher will need to create the shared space, lock it as private, and set a password before inviting parents into the group.  One benefit is the unlimited file space and the ease of incorporating the many Flickr supported products such as BigHugeLabs, Bookr, and MixBook with the images.  You could assemble an end of the year digital scrapbook quickly by using the images everyone uploads to the Flickr private group.

Shwup is another great site that is probably the best bet yet, as it allows for free photo and video sharing without a registration or limit.  With Shwup, teachers create the account and send invites to parents via email.  Parents have the option of either uploading on the site or simply hitting reply to the email with attaching files.  Talk about easy.  An added bonus is their “muvee” feature.  When all photos and videos are uploaded, Shwup allows the teacher to make slideshow movies at the site.

 

StashSpace is a video hosting site that will allow you to privately share videos for free up to 60 days with parents. It’s a fairly easy interface and will allow users to connect camcorders directly to their website for uploading.  I can guarantee this will be an internet bandwith killer during upload, so I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have a robust connection.

Tonido is a different spin on photo sharing and I really think this is a better tool for teachers who team-teach either in middle school teams or in elementaries where students may rotate among classrooms.  Tonido (Toe-Knee-doe) is an open source (aka free) software that basically creates a small web server on your computer.  It allows you to share files between computers without having to upload any files to a website.  Once one teacher drops a group of photos, videos, music, etc in the Tornido program, files are instantly viewable by the other teachers.  This would also work to link your home computer with your school computer.

 

Troovi is by far my favorite photo sharing site, mostly because of it's ease of use and it's generally not blocked.  It does require some file management on the teacher’s side, but it’s very easy to handle.  With Troovi, parents can upload any file size image without a login.  With no file size limit, images are high quality and high resolution.  The teacher simply emails the sharing link to parents, and everyone is good to go.  Troovi’s free limit is 100 images but there are no ads or searchable features to find questionable material.

Best Sites to Find Public Domain Images and Sounds for Student Projects

Now that more and more classrooms are publishing student work for digital storytelling, podcasting, or through wikis and blogs it is becoming increasingly critical students follow the copyright and fair use guidelines.   To help you and your students, I’ve created another freebie post – free images and sounds for student projects.  Yes, there are multiple websites out there for public domain images and sounds, but I tried to pull those that are safe for student searching.  You will find glorious photo landscapes, character illustrations of fairy tale characters, tornado sound effects, and more. 

In addition, the links do have suggested curriculum units that could be supported through the use of the websites.  Hopefully, that will guide your search.

I encourage you to place your favorite resource links on your own classroom website for students to access easily.

Public Domain Images

4FreePhotos is another site that offers quite a few artistic high quality images.  Many of these would be great for backgrounds.  Supporting Units: transportation, food, landforms, geography, art, aircraft, plants, penguins, Spring,

Florida’s Educational Technology Clipart Clearinghouse is a true clipart and line drawing gold mine.  You definitely want to tag this site as over 46,000 images are in the database.  Supporting units: mythology, math diagrams, money, fairy tales, alphabets, animals, historical figures

Karen Whimsey Public Domain Images is a phenomenal public domain gem of clipart, diagrams, sketches, and more for the classroom.  Supporting units: ancient civilizations, world religions, musical instruments, art, silhouettes, vintage fashion, fairy tales, folk tales, Native Americans, explorers, Civil War, geography, food, alphabet, Spanish, art, architecture, Shakespeare, plants, holidays.

Library of Congress Photo Archives is a site every teacher should bookmark.  With over 1.2 millions images in this database, your students can certainly gather a wide variety of images for their history projects.  Each image has different licensing, so look closely.  Supporting units: famous Americans, presidents, civil rights, wars, inventors, authors, and just about any historical American event

NOAA Public Image Library is a wonderful resource for science themed drawings, maps, graphics, diagrams, and photos.  The database is extensive.  Supporting units: animals, volcanoes, weather, biomes, landforms, oceans

PD Photo is another great image site and does offer a wide variety of images. Supporting units: geography, landforms, food, space, plants, ocean, grammar, animals

Photos8 is one of my favorite public domain image sites.  The images are high quality, high resolution, and offer an artistic approach.  I use many of these for backgrounds in Glogsters and PowerPoints.  Supporting units: geography, landforms, world religions, art, food, insects, plants, grammar (using images to represent parts of speech)

Pics4Learning is a great website full of photographs donated by amateur photographers and teachers to help all of us improve our curriculum.  Supporting units: biomes, animals, art, food, world religions, fractals, holidays, space, landforms, geography, Native Americans, colonial America, Civil War, ancient civilizations, mythology, presidents, World War I, World War II

Public Domain Photos offers a vast collection of clipart images and high resolution photos.  Supporting units: geography, landforms, US regions, flags from around the world, animals, space, ocean, plants, insects, food, vehicles, desert, 

Public Domain Sounds

MusOpen offers free mp3 files of classical instrumental and vocal music.  Definitely bookmark this one. Supporting units: music, composers, history, and background sounds for multimedia projects

PublicDomain4U is full of vintage recordings.  Supporting units: jazz, blues, country, folk songs, World War I

Sound Jay has become very popular in our district this spring for our video and podcast projects.  With a well designed layout and excellent choices of sound and music, you can’t go wrong. Supporting Units: weather, business, FACS, and backgrounds for podcast projects

Soungle has an amazing amount of sound effects for student projects.  These save as .wav files, which work great in most audio and video softwares such as Windows Movie Maker, iMovie, Audacity, and Garage Band.  Supporting units: weather, emotions, dance, animals, water, and special effect sounds for podcasts.

Some would suggest www.freeplaymusic.com but their licensing does not allow the use of their music used in podcasts or on blogs without a prior agreement. 

Ode to Poetry – Websites to Generate Student Poetry Online

One of my favorite units to teach is poetry.  The playing with words, the cleverness of students, and the discovering of new ways to describe a simple object always gives me a thrill.  I mean really.  How often does one get to use words like hanker after to replace want or quick on the uptake for clever?  I love it, but yes, that’s the English teacher in me along with a dozen word games on my iPod Touch.

Today’s post is another freebie to help you with your own poetry units.  I’ve pulled a list of poetry generators online along with a few ideas that might help spark a little creativity in you. 

Poetry Forms (Fill in the Blank Poetry)

Giggle Poetry’s Fill in the Blank Poems is a simple tool that allows students write the last line to a poem.  Probably best for grades 3-5.

Instant Poetry Forms – All language arts teachers should have this site tagged, as it is one of the best resources on the web.  Scroll down on the left to preview the poem templates.  Students fill in the blanks with their own content and click “Create”.  I recommend using this site throughout the year, not just during poetry units.  As you read literature, study history, describe nature, or create a holiday gift, students can utilize this site for multiple curriculum units.

Poetry Splatter is a fun interactive fill in the blank poem tool.  Choose the type of poem you wish to write, click splatter, and the tool will toss suggested words.

Read Write Think Acrostic Poem is great for younger students.

Read Write Think Diamante Poem gives students a chance to explore diamante poems with this easy fill in the blank tool.

Read Write Think Shape Poems Tool allows the student to choose a theme for the poem (sports, nature, school, or celebrations) to fill in his content.

Write a Song-Poem from PBS is meant for older students.  Simply type in lyrics and the interactive will create a melody for the song.

Magnetic Poetry Online Options

Haiku Magnetic Poetry Tool is an easy tool that allows students to drag the magnets into a Haiku format.

iSnoop offers a rather large magnetic poetry area to play.

Magnetic Poetry and Magnetic Poetry for Kids provide you with their virtual kits online. 

NetVerse Falling Words Magnetic Poetry never gives you writer’s block as the magnets literally fall from the top of the page.  This is also collaborative in real time so multiple students can access it simultaneously and edit the page.

Read Write Think’s Word Mover is a basic magnetic poetry tool except you can add your own words and print.  Great for a quick activity with students.

Shadow Poetry offers the ability for students to email their completed poem to the teacher making it easy to grade (students will have to retype the words in the form, however).

Shakespeare Magnetic Poetry – Tis true! Your students can imitate the Bard, himself, with magnetic poetry.

Shocked Poetry is unique as it allows you to choose a theme (love, dogs, coffee, mad scientist) before beginning. Once you begin, you can add in nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. to help spark your imagination.  It’s a great site to use an interactive whiteboard.

Online Poetry Generators

You must know that I do not promote poetry being made for students to turn in for an assignment, but I do like how some of these can get a student’s wheels turning.  Goodness, I like to play with them just to see if they can give me a giggle.

Metaphor Poetry Generator is a site to enhance your figurative language unit.  It offers three poem generators along with other teacher resources.

Poem Generator is actually a great site to help teach grammar and does take a bit of student effort to use.  Choose the sentence structure and the parts of speech to generate the poem.

RoboPoem is simply fun.  Students write a few sentences or a paragraph in the text box.  Choose the number of syllables you want per line, and the RoboPoem generator does the rest.  It even inserts rhymes where needed, but don’t count on the poem making much sense.

Tech Poetry Ideas

PimPamPum’s Phrasr is really a fun tool that pulls images from Flickr to visualize your students’ poems.  Simply type in a phrase or short poem and press start.

Self Portrait Poems is a lesson that I did a few years back where students described themselves and then took digital photos representing the poem.  It’s an easy project that utilizes digital photography, poetry, and PowerPoint.

Also I found this video on TED that features a poet telling his story using emoticons.  What a wonderful video to share with High School Poets.