Animoto
According to the Hueytown High Library, “Animoto provides a creative alternative way to view and listen to slideshows. Created by film and music producers, you upload your photos, choose some music you like from their huge range of styles and artists, or use your own music or voice, and you get an impressive slideshow.” The benefit to educators is that it a 30 second slideshow with 12-15 photographs is FREE. There is a help resources link, a help request and a feedback forum. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-apaZXsQrQ&feature=related
Classroom Application:
> This is a great way to introduce a new topic to the class. It captures the students’ interest by feeding them a brief pictorial preview. For world geography, a continent or country’s physical features can be introduced. It can also be used as a compare/contrast essay starter showing two different cultures, cities, or types of economy.
Professional Growth/Personal Use:
Animoto was very user friendly and although I have a teacher account, which gives you more options, I have not used it yet. I see myself using this tool not only for my classroom, but a way to present pictures to my family in a fun way.
What can you do with the following?
- A computer with decent processing power and memory, including generic peripherals likes keyboard and mouse.
- A good Internet connection, preferably broadband.
- A sound card that is working properly.
- Speakers or earpieces.
- A microphone.
- The Skype software, which is freely downloadable from www.skype.com
- One or more persons to communicate with who are Skype users as well.
(http://voip.about.com/od/voipsoftware/a/whatisskype.htm)
You can communicate by voice and video with anyone in the world!
Classroom Application:
It would be great to be able to set up classrooms around the world so we could Skype with students from various countries/continents as we travel around the world. As with any technology, we have to rely on it working! Finding out about lif
e in another country takes on a whole new meaning when it comes from students actually living there. In addition to the general information students would obtain, they would also be practicing their interviewing skills and public speaking.
Professional Growth/Personal Use:
Maintaining contact with family members through Skype has been very rewarding. The ability to carry on daily conversations with family far away is wonderful.
This is a simple way to take a list of links, submit them in a links box and ShareTabs will “tabify” them into a single link with multiple graphic tabs from your list.
Classroom Application:
A great way to introduce various sites that you want your class to focus on. It helps keep them away from Wikipedia.
Professional Growth/Personal Use:
I have found limitations with this application. You are limited to the names you can use as the URL for the ShareTabs. Also, once created, if you want to add to your ShareTabs, you have to recreate the entire list – starting all over again. The second drawback was when it came time to create their bibliography the entire URL was not available for their use to copy & paste. Students had to hover over the ShareTab and copy the URL by hand onto a piece of paper.
Wordle
The ability to create a “word cloud” by typing text in a box provided is fun. The more you type a single word, the larger that word becomes or you can place a colon (:) after the word you want to emphasize. If you want two words to remain together, place a tilde (~) between them. Once the words have been entered, it’s a matter of customizing through color, layout, and font.
Classroom Application:
A Wordle can be used to display new vocabulary, present a new topic, a way to bullet important points, a prompt for a presentation or a way to present a foreign language. This tool is easy to use. The most complicated part is having to use screen capture to place it in a document.
Professional Growth/Personal Use:
I would not use this application other than to present something to my students. The PowerPoint on use of this application below gives a nice tutorial of the application.
This is a web-based photo sharing and printing service owned by Hewlett-Packard. Once an account is set up, prompts guide your uploading, previewing, and forwarding picture viewing to others.
Classroom Application:
I would not necessarily use this site for my classes. Having a place for students to upload digital pictures might come in handy if there were a “team” project requiring photographs.
Professional Growth/Personal Use:
I use this service rather than Flickr or Picasa. My entire family Snapfish. It’s a wonderful way to share special family moments! The ability to publish photo books, mugs or cards is a great bonus.
This is an Internet website specializing in publishing video clips posted by users. The ability to search for topics is very helpful. According to the Youtube website:
Join the largest worldwide video-sharing community!
- Search and browse millions of commmunity and partner videos
- Comment, rate, and make video responses to your favorite videos
- Upload and share your videos with millions of other users
- Save your favorite videos to watch and share later
Classroom Application:
While I myself have not created a video and uploaded it to Youtube, I love the resources that are available on it. I have shared everything from driving in India to the glass walkway over the Grand Canyon with my students through Youtube. What I
haven’t done yet is peruse the videos in Teachertube. This will have to be a summer project.
Professional Growth/Personal Use:
My use of Youtube has primarily focused on searching for classroom use videos. One of the best postings on Youtube for explanation purposes I found are the "In Plain English" videos.
Blogger is a free publishing tool from Google for easily sharing one’s thoughts with the world. Blogger makes it simple to post text, photos and video ... according to Blogger.com, “this is a Google publishing tool focusing on helping people have their own voice on the web and organizing the world's information from the personal perspective.”
Classroom Application:
According to SupportBlogging.com, blogging helps students find a voice, creates enthusiasm for writing and communications, engages students in conversation and learning, provides an opportunity to teach students about responsible journalism and it empowers students.
I have not used this in my classroom yet. I worry about the privacy factor and therefore would rather use Moodle. A very important step prior to using a blogging like tool with students would be setting strict rules on both publishing and
responding.
Professional Growth/Personal Use:
I created two different blogs, one for me personally and one for students to view (although I did not give them the link). I chose to test out various applications using my blogs. Writing does not come easy to me, so I find blogging difficult. As I have posted this blog, formatting remains a challenge. While it is nice to have input from others, you have to be dedicated to the process of reading comments and responding. The one powerful feature of this capability
is the ability to deliver and receive information as world events are unfolding (like Twitter).
This was an interesting way to have a discussion with a select group of people. According to the Chatzy website, “Chatzy is a free private chat service which you can use to communicate with people you already knowor people who visits your blog or website. With Chatzy you can create a chat room and send out email invitations very quickly and easily. No registration is required.”
Classroom Application:
I have not used Chatzy for classroom use. I can understand however that an online class discussion allows for many people to participate in a discussion(where some people might be too shy to speak up in class and only one person can talk at one time). While students are carrying on a discussion, they can “listen” to what others have “said” and respond to all. One rule a teacher from “Teaching History with Technology” came up with was utilizing discussion questions – once posted, no talking, just typing. (http://www.thwt.org/historychats.html#whychat)
Professional Growth/Personal Use:
The use of Chatzy for our technology class made it easy to post a question or share interesting information with the whole group. This would be the only time I could see this application useful.
Diigo
Classroom Application:
I would have to take some time to explore the use in my classroom. I see it being used in upper grades more.
Professional Growth/Personal Use:
I loved this bookmarking software, although I have not taken advantage of all its capabilities. Using Diigo made it very easy to keep tract of specific websites for our class. In the beginning, I created sticky notes and highlighted information on the web. As with any of these sites, the more it is used, the easier it becomes to use it.
According to VoiceThread, it is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate pages and leave comments in five ways using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). Share a VoiceThread with friends, students, and colleagues for them to record comments too. (www.voicethread.com)
Classroom Application:
I have not used VoiceThread with my classes, although I imagine having students draw pictures, writing a poem and then reading it would be a nice way to uses the slide show.
Professional Growth/Personal Use:
I see myself exploring the possibilities of VoiceThread by viewing many of the posted presentations.
This is a WEB 2.0 platform that creates a digital poster that can be kept private or shared with the public. The user can upload pictures, videos, text and audio. The final product is very much like a scrapbooking page.
Classroom Application:
I introduced glogging to my class and they all seem excited about it. They are creating a poster on an Asian country. The rubric includes specific facts along with the requirement of four pictures. Students were anxious to complete their research so they could begin the glogging process. Unfortunately, a slow network hampers the process!
Professional Growth/Personal Use:
I have only begun use Glogster myself and hope to learn many features from my students. After demonstrating this site, there were questions I had about the use. I haven’t figured out yet how to display the screen other than previewing a print job.
