My Beauty Best Teacher

Let me ask you a question: how many times a week do you get on Google or Yahoo! and use the search bar? It seems that I am always searching for something! Until a few months ago, I thought there was nothing more to conducting an internet search than just to type in a few words and get the results. But, as it turns out, there's a search engine company called Swagbucks that allows you to get rewards every time you conduct an internet search through them! How cool is that?!

I stumbled onto Swagbucks through Facebook, actually. A couple of my FB friends posted statuses about it, and I finally got curious enough to check it out myself.

Basically, you sign up for an account at Swagbucks, and you have an option to install a search bar (that's connected directly to your Swagbucks account) into your internet browser. Any time you use Swagbucks, you have a chance of earning reward points.

I don't earn reward points every single time I use Swagbucks to conduct an internet search, but I figure if I'm going to be searching anyway, I might as well give myself a chance to get some rewards while I'm at it! There are other ways to earn reward points other than just conducting internet searches: you can take part in their daily polls, you can take surveys, or you can purchase their daily deals. Basically all I do is conduct internet searches (which earn me anywhere from 0-16 reward points) and participate in daily polls (1 point for every answer). I think the surveys are a hoax -- I don't want the companies to get my personal information, and I'm not interested in sitting through 20- and 40-minute long surveys. But you can earn some pretty hefty points through participating in them (I think I saw one survey that would give you 250 points if you completed it!).

The rewards can be pretty cool, depending on how many points you've earned. I think the rewards that interest me the most are the gift cards, but there are rewards in virtually every category: books, movies, clothing, jewelry, electronics, school supplies... you get the picture. You do have to earn a fairly substantial amount of points to earn a nice reward, but isn't that to be expected?

As a teacher with a couple years of experience under my belt, I can personally attest to the fact that teachers can spend a lot of their own paycheck on their classroom. I think it's because we care so much and want our students to have the best of everything. I think you could use Swagbucks to help you get things for your classroom -- all it costs you is a little bit of internet searching or poll-answering!

You could use Swagbucks to purchase supplies for your classroom or for individual students:

A $5 Amazon gift card currently costs 450 SB

A set of 4 skinny dry-erase markers currently costs 349 SB

A 26- or 39-week subscription to the Wall Street Journal currently costs 3,400 SB

 You could also use your SB reward points to purchase things for your classroom store or for a school raffle to earn money:

Modeling Dough currently costs 279 SB

A Spongebob puzzle currently costs 429 SB

A $10 gift card to Fandango currently costs 1,175 SB

A $25 gift card to one of the above restaurants currently costs 2,949 SB

And I've noticed that Swagbucks runs sales on select items at random times. I've seen gift cards on sale before, but they're basically the only thing I keep my eye on at this point, so I'm not sure about the other items. In any case, Swagbucks seems like a great way to earn some things for your classroom or school without spending more of your own money!

I recently redeemed my first prize -- a $5 Amazon gift card -- and am pretty pleased with the results. It takes about 10 business days to receive your gift card code, but it's free, so I really can't complain!

I won't say that searches conducted through Swagbucks get you the same results as a Google search -- they don't -- but if you're searching for something that's fairly popular, you'll find it with a Swagbucks search, no problem. I keep the search bar installed on my browser window so that I'm not tempted to use Google, instead. As far I know, you can download the search bar to any browser window an unlimited number of times, so you could install it onto all your home computers and, if your IT crew will let you, install it at work, as well. If you have computers in your classroom, you may consider installing the Swagbucks toolbar onto those computers, as well (so long as students aren't tempted to redeem prizes for you!). Swagbucks has a strict policy against searching just to earn points, but if you're going to be searching anyway, you might as well make it a Swagbucks search!

Have you heard of (or do you currently use) Swagbucks? What are your thoughts on this service?

If you're a frequent blog-hopper, I'm sure you've notice the cool signature that appears at the end of every post, right? There's a super-simple way for you to get a web-signature, as well! This particular tool doesn't give you the option of adding a graphic, but it does generate a handwriting-esque graphic that you can put at the end of your blog posts or e-mails. (You could even send it to VistaPrint and have them make a signature stamp for you!)

The application you can use to create your own web-signature is a website called My Live Signature. And when I say it's easy, I mean it's super-duper-easy, folks! If you're intimidated, please hang on, because I promise that you can do this!
When you go to the homepage of My Live Signature, you are given 3 options in the middle of the page: proceed, login, and register. The website recommends that you register with them and then login to create all of your signatures, but it's not necessary; I don't have a login with them and I've been able to use everything just fine! So I always just click "proceed."
From there, you're taken to the "create a signature" page. You have 4 options: use the signature creation wizard, draw a signature on the screen, use a scanned image, create a personal font. Of course, you're welcome to choose any option you want, but just an FYI: I always choose "use the signature creation wizard." I find it to be the least-amount of hassle and the quickest way to get the job done.

You're prompted to enter your name into a text box. Once you've submitted it, My Live Signature gives you 120 different fonts to choose from. They're all handwriting fonts, and you can choose the one that looks the most like your personal handwriting. After you've chosen, click "next step" at the bottom of the screen.

You then must choose a size for your signature. If you're going to be putting it onto a stamp, you might want to have a fairly large image size so that the stamp comes out very clearly. If you're looking to create a blog signature, you may want to go for a smaller size (like 5 or 6). If you're looking for an e-mail signature, you might want to choose size 3 or 4. In any case, it's up to you, and when you've picked your appropriate signature size, click "next step" at the bottom of the screen.

Now you can change the color. You can change the background color (or choose to make it transparent, which is always nice, because there's not that annoying white box around it when you try to insert the image) and the actual signature color. Then click "next step."

Now you get to choose the slope. The slope is how slanted your signature will appear in the image. You can tilt it a little bit for a fun and quirky image, or you can keep it absolutely straight for stamps and/or e-mails.

Done! Your signature is ready. You can post it to any of your linked social networking sites or download the signature straight to your computer and bypass posting it anywhere for now. To download it, just right-click and save it to your computer -- just make sure you remember where you save it to so you can find it later!

You have a beautiful signature for the web or other places and it took all of 10 minutes to make (if that!) with help from My Live Signature. Let me know how your signature turned out!