As educators, it is important that we model good digital citizenship to our students. One of the ways we do this is by using images that are free from copyright. Pixabay is an excellent site filled with free photos and images to use for any of your classroom needs. The images you can find here are, for the most part, better than the images that you will find on a Google search with the “filtered for reuse” filter applied.
Sketchpad is a sweet little utility for creative projects. When the Google Drive toggle is set, the contents save directly into the user’s Google Drive and nothing is stored on Sketchpad’s servers.
Teachers can create content using sketchpad.io as can students.
Adobe Spark is a phenomenal resource for teachers. Spark allows you to quickly and efficiently create a beautiful graphic using a template, your own photos and royalty-free photos. You can also create from scratch to build your own unique images.
Further, Adobe Spark has the capacity to create and edit videos.
Adobe’s privacy policy is not suited to students, so this is not recommended as an application to be used with students.
One of the most common challenges new users to Chrome face is finding a replacement for a desktop publishing program. While there are many such programs on the market, one of the more familiar ones is Publisher.
The cool thing about the replacement – it’s WAY better than Publisher. The designs are more modern, the fonts are cooler and the layouts are not from 1995. Take a look at Lucidpress. The website itself boasts a nice layout, simple interface, and direct connection to both Google Classroom and Google Drive.
Further, there is a Lucidpress extension for Chrome, putting the power of Lucid right at your fingertips!
One of our brilliant tech EAs alerted me to the existence of Photopea today – https://www.photopea.com/ – The screen actually looks exactly like Photoshop, and while it lacks a few of the “bells and whistles” of photoshop (keyboard shortcuts, for instance), it would certainly be more than any student not enrolled in 30-level CTS courses would need!!