#Made4Math: My classroom so far & Study Maybe signs

So far I have done some pretty good revamping of my classroom. I am a huge Star Wars geek and now my room shows it. Last year I was moved into my room 1 week before learners arrived. I barely had pencils in place and hang some pictures. Now, it is time to personalize.

Before I personalized my room: (click pictures to embiggen them)

and and

Please excuse the desks, the custodians haven’t cleaned yet so I have them all stacked for them. Um, 5 days before teachers arrive, I think they need to get a move on! See those 4 pieces of paper in the corner in the last picture? Those are learner quotes that I loved and saved. More on those in a sec.

Now:

a close up and

I used the Star Jedi font to make the signs. The sign on the upper left of the board says, “The Wall of Awesome”. That is a place where only learner quotes and awesome things they create is to go. Those quotes I had buried at the back of the room now have a front and center home. Now they reflect the importance they have to me. Buried at the back says learners = unimportant. Not the message I wanted to send. I have all the rest of the room, that is their place. The fabric is, of course, Star Wars, and the border on the side is Star Wars crepe paper streamer. I wanted it to be very colorful, and it is.

My website is no longer handwritten as an afterthought on the board, and the file I have with hundreds of quotes now has a good use. Every day I will put a new quote on the board.

Okay, now some signs.

On Friday, Sarah posted this on twitter:

Which linked to a picture of:

Now I am totally excited about that and need to make my own. I have no clue where to get the images though so I do the research and find the site: http://someecards.com. Sweet. The Like and Twitter logos are easy. Here are the searches I used. Twitter and Facebook Find the one you like, download.

With the ecard, I ended up with 2.

or

Hmm, which one should I use? hmmmm

But it wasn’t just make and copy it and save. I had to work it a little bit.

First, make the ecard you want. That was hard. Lots of images to choose from, and you choose the color as well. My school colors are teal and black, so I tend towards teal when I have the choice.

Next, use a screen capture tool like Snag-It or Snipping Tool (built into windows 7). Copy and paste into Photoshop. [warning copyright violation in next sentence] Use the clone tool to erase the website and copyright info to make it cleaner. Finally, increase the pixels from 400 or so that the website creates normally to 1200 or so.

This last step is VERY important. Photoshop (and other image software) will increase the pixel size without pixelating the picture. If you don’t do this, you will permanently have a small image. Not cool. Full images of everything are available if you click them. Feel free to download and save.

And that, my teacher friends, is my #Made4Math contribution for today.