Kerpoof

I've really been enjoying viewing everyone's blogs and seeing what there was out there.  To make our blog connections more meaningful, I wanted to see if there was a new website that I could find that no one had mentioned yet.  Through the different search engines we learned about last class, I came across Kerpoof.  This website it free to use and seems to be a very interesting site.  It definitely gears towards students' creativity and states that it is best used for grades K-8.

There are several links on this site that are geared toward teachers.  There is a tab "For Educators" (seen in the picture above as an apple), "Lesson Plans" (seen in the picture above as lined paper), and "Teacher Tools" (seen in the picture above as a hammer).  As I said above this site is a free site that requires children's parents e-mail address in order to use on their own, but there is also a free educator account that you can create where you can add your students for free.  In order to have the educator account you must sign up for the free site and then tell Kerpoof your educator e-mail address.  Currently I am waiting to be approved by this site as an educator, but the free, general use site is very interesting.

There are six activities that the students can access.  They are Spell A Picture, Make a Movie, Make a Card, Make a Drawing, Make a Picture and Tell a Story.  I perused each of the activities and they are pretty easy to grasp and fun to use.

This is a picture of the Spell a Story activity.  In this activity you choose a background and then spell (either on your keyboard or on the screen using the mouse) pictures you would like to add.  So for example, I typed in the word "horse" and little clouds appeared with pictures of a horse.  I selected the horse I liked and it popped into the screen.  I have to say it was a little traumatizing when I typed in the word chicken and was shown different food dishes of a chicken and no feathery friend, but that is immaterial.  This would be a great tool for primary students or possibly even ELL students.

This is a picture of the Make a Picture.  This allows you to select a background and add pictures to that background.  With each picture the students can enlarge, rotate or add comic-like text.  It was fun to play with, but more importantly can be used educationally.  While I was wandering around the site I looked at the lesson plan page (I will go into detail with this later).  There were lesson plans linked with this activity used to make persuasive advertisements or used to illustrate poetry.  Yet another amazing thing about Kerpoof... it gives you lesson plans to use with their activities for various grades.  THANK YOU!

As I said there Kerpoof can be used by teachers to help enhance their lessons or classroom experience.  The lesson plans are professionally put together stating standards such as NCTM and ISTE.  Not all of the objectives are standards recognized by me, but all of the lessons they have listed seem to align with HCPSS curriculum goals and objectives.

In my next post I hope to explore the teacher page and see what options I can use.  Until next time...