Image credit: Jen Deyenberg

Tomorrow is the last day of school before winter break for many students. If you’re looking for a good elementary school or middle school activity for the last day before break, consider having students create and send digital greeting cards. Here are three tools students can use to create and send digital greeting cards.

Animoto offers video themes for every season. Their holiday themes include “starry night,” “wonderland of snow,” “eight days of lights,” “pop-up pandemonium,” “gifting gifts,” “spirit of December,” and “wrapping scraps.” To send a video greeting card through Animoto just select one of the themes, upload images or choose images from the Animoto gallery, select a soundtrack, title your project, and then let Animoto mix it into a beautiful video greeting. Students can share their video greetings through email, Facebook, or by embedding it into a blog.

PicMonkey is a great image editing and collage creation tool. They’re currently offering a variety of holiday themes that students can use for their collages. Your students could create a holiday collage and share it via email or post in on your classroom blog.

Its A Message is a neat site for sending digital greetings that uses Google Maps Street View as its basis for generating location-based greeting cards. To send a greeting through Its A Message start by specifying any location. Its A Message will then take you to that location in a Street View display that has been enhanced for the holidays. For example, the imagery of Portland, Maine has been drawn with lights and snowflakes. After settling on a location click “share your message” to customize what appears on the screen and to send the greeting to friends.