Jane Hart, is Founder of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies website (C4LPT) where she writes about all kinds of helpful websites and online tools.  I’ve followed her blog Jane’s e-Learning Pick of the Day for several years now and so I was very honored when Jane sent us a message yesterday saying she had selected Poster-Street.com as an e-Learning Pick of the Day.

Read the review on Poster-Street (janeknight.typepad.com)

Follow Jane on Twitter (twitter.com/c4lpt)

Finding good fonts is hard – finding good free fonts that are easy to read can be even harder! Here are three fonts that we think will work well for various types of posters and flyers and any of your print related projects.

Sweet and Readable

If you’re looking for an alternative to the omnipresent Comic Sans (something cute and child-like that resembles handwriting) we recommend the Bookworm font available for free on the website Natashaisneat.com. Bookworm is an adorable font that would work well on classroom flyers and posters. It’s readable and cute at the same time.

Cute and Whimsical

The KissmeKissmeKissme font is a fun and whimsical font that works well as the title on a flyer,  newsletter or poster. While having a whole page of this to read might be ‘a bit much’ this is sure to be a hit with students. Available for free download on dafont.com.

Cool and Comic

The Komika Poster font works well for creating posters aimed at middle and highschool students. It’s also great for students trying to make their own comic strips or presentations because of how readable it is.

Clean and Clear

Similar to Century Gothic, this sans serif font called Quicksand is perfect for use on blocks of text and is available for free download on FontSquirrel.com. It’s clean lines make it very readable and easy on the eyes.

Elegant and Classy

While not as legible as the rest of the fonts in this post, Scriptina is a beautiful feminine font that  makes you think of wedding invitations and fancy schmancy parties, and so we thought we’d  include it here. Available for free download from FontSquirrel.com it would be perfect for use on  flyers, cards and posters designed for bridal showers and gala dinners.

Got any other favorite free fonts? Please share them by leaving a comment.

I just came across this website while searching for free PowerPoint templates. The site has hundreds of PowerPoint templates in many different categories including art, education, technology and business. Templates can also be searched for by tags, by doing a keyword search and even by color.

I found many of the templates to be of high quality and they included a wide variety of styles and designs from cute to casual to sophisticated. While not intended for printing, I believe many of them would also work well as backgrounds for posters printed on A4 or 8” x 11” sheets of paper.
Better yet, just like poster-street.com, there was no registration required to download the PowerPoint templates. You simply have to click on the ‘download’ link under each template (the site is rather ad-heavy, so be sure to click on the right button) and then save the zip file to your computer. Once you unzip or extract the file, you’ll see a folder similar to the screenshot below that contains all the graphics. Be sure to click on the file that ends with the .ppt extension.

Caution: I noticed the use of images of popular movie and game characters. I cannot vouch for how kosher this is and whether the templates follow special licensing agreements. Personally, I would stay away from using anything with Mickey Mouse or Mario just to be safe!

Graphs make great posters! Check out some of these free online graphing tools and create your own posters with information from your classroom (or office!)

Collect data from your students about their likes, background and/or hobbies and make a beautiful visual display that will also help them remember the different graph types. Create bar graphs, pie charts, line graphs, histograms, scatter plots, box plots and even stem and leaf displays. For early elementary students you can even use clip-art to create pictographs.

Here are a few online tools to get you started.

1. NCES Create-a-graph

2. ChartGo

3. Online Chart Tool

4. Pie Color

5. Hohli Online Charts Builder

Kid-friendly warning: While the Create-a-graph tool is from the National Center for Education Statistics and is targeted at students, the others are aimed at businesses and a couple of these tools are ad-supported.

Wordle , if you haven’t heard of it already, is a great free online tool that takes a piece of text and then creates a beautiful tag cloud out of the most used words. This can be extremely useful if you’re looking at analyzing a speech, a poem or even a student essay to explore which themes and topics are most prominent. It also can help you create some great decorations for your classroom wall!

Here’s how you can do it:

1. To start, go to wordle.net and click on the link that says ‘Create your own’ on the home page.

2. Type in or copy and paste a piece of text. This can be anything from information about your students (favorite things, places they’ve visited, countries they’re from) to a poem by Robert Frost or a speech like the Gettysburg address. Click Go.

3. Wait a few seconds (the java applet can sometimes take a little long to load) and then text, watch as Wordle creates beautiful displays of the most frequently used words. You can keep clicking Randomize to see different styles.

4. Once you see one you like, just click print – it’s that easy! If you’d really like to do something extraordinary, try creating many different “wordless” and then stick them on a colored poster board or a long sheet of butcher paper.

Here’s one that I created out of the Jabberwocky, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872 by Lewis Carroll.

Graphic organizers are a useful strategy when teaching students to brainstorm, organize or analyze information. Many teachers are combining the technique of mind mapping or concept mapping with the use of interactive whiteboards to create lessons that are both interactive and engaging. Mind maps can also be a great way to create quick educational posters that will help reinforce certain strategies for your students.

Here’s a sample poster that we created using Gliffy.com – a free online diagramming tool.

You can also use PowerPoint to do this, even though it might be a little harder to keep branches and circles together. There are also commercially available software that many schools have access to.  But if you don’t have Inspiration or Kidspiration in your classroom, there’s no need to despair. Check out this list of free online diagramming tools. Now that will get the job done.