Yesterday we covered organizing information online, digital citizenship, Google Sites (my favorite website design site), other search tools, widgets, website evaluation, and safety and netiquette.
First off I have to say that I LOVE LiveBinder. It's beyond simple to use and I can already think of 1000 uses for it. I was planning on making wikis for information to help learn a foreign language, but now I'm making LiveBinders. I already made one for German which you can view here. I'm already planning on making one for French and Spanish...I figure if I have all three of them I'm pretty much covered for the languages taught in most high schools (except for the occasional Italian, Latin, and Japanese...which I can always make later).
I learned more about Google Sites, which was great because I learned how to organize my pages easily rather than the strange way I did in the site I made for LIS 511. I'll definitely be using it again.
We barely got into the search engines but I'll play around with them later. Clusty in particular looks good.
The widget thing looks neat but kind of confusing, I'll have to look into it later.
The digital citizenship portion had some really good information in it, especially the stuff about copyrighting was extremely interesting and pertinent. It's all still a grey area but I'm going to make sure I look for the creative commons license.
I had already learned about some of the web evaluation websites but some of the links will definitely prove helpful in the future.
The netiquette and safety parts were great because there have been so many issues with cyberbulling, texting, sexting, etc.. for awhile now. Many of the tools she gave us I will definitely use when I'm teaching my classes about internet safety. I particularly liked the Brain Pop and the link that had what all the abbreviations stand for...half the time I don't know either!
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
7/19/10 What we did in class this past Monday.
Outside of the day we learned all about the crazy Google functions, this was my favorite day of the class. We covered digital storytelling, animation and cartooning, and glogster/wix.
I especially liked the digital storytelling. Voicethread and Photostory are fantastic resources with a million uses. One of the teachers I observed used Photostory with her elementary students, grades 3-5, with a poets and poetry unit. The kids seemed to love it just as much as I did!
We didn't do much with the animation although we saw several videos that showed you the results you can get from animating your own segment. I'm actually in charge of animating our group's final project so I'll get to explore those sites more on my own.
Unfortunately, Glogster was on the fritz when we tried to use it on the 19th and the 20th so I'll have to try that out myself another time. We did use Wix, which was awesome. I loved the themes and the options and it was very easy to use, and looked really professional when I completed it. I'll definitely use Wix again...although if I'm working with younger kids I may use Glogster because it seems to be better for a younger audience. You can see my Wix at my wiki.
So overall, a pretty awesome day and I learned a lot!
I especially liked the digital storytelling. Voicethread and Photostory are fantastic resources with a million uses. One of the teachers I observed used Photostory with her elementary students, grades 3-5, with a poets and poetry unit. The kids seemed to love it just as much as I did!
We didn't do much with the animation although we saw several videos that showed you the results you can get from animating your own segment. I'm actually in charge of animating our group's final project so I'll get to explore those sites more on my own.
Unfortunately, Glogster was on the fritz when we tried to use it on the 19th and the 20th so I'll have to try that out myself another time. We did use Wix, which was awesome. I loved the themes and the options and it was very easy to use, and looked really professional when I completed it. I'll definitely use Wix again...although if I'm working with younger kids I may use Glogster because it seems to be better for a younger audience. You can see my Wix at my wiki.
So overall, a pretty awesome day and I learned a lot!
7/16/10 What we did in class on that day
So I completely forgot to blog after class the last several classes so I'm writing down my thoughts on what we learned now.
Today we learned about image generators and web presentation tools. I really liked playing around with the image generators, especially the motivational posters creators. I've always enjoyed the sarcastic ones so I created a sarcastic one about a recent trend that I find highly entertaining. We also made a wordle and a ALA READ poster, which was pretty cool, but I didn't really like the themes in the READ poster so if I made one eventually, I might try to just play around in photoshop...provided my school had it.
Learning about the different presentation tools was interesting...but actually creating one was definitely not. Anne and I got 280slides.com and it was an absolutely horrible presentation tool. The software never really worked properly, it kept freezing whenever I tried to add images (which is what our presentation's central focus was). We eventually gave up and tried SlideFlickr.com which was equally useless, as you could only post it on facebook, twitter, myspace, or the like. When I tried posting it on twitter it did not work at all and again we gave up after trying everything we could think of. If you're interested in reading more about our horrible experience, I wrote a blow-by-blow in my wiki for the class over here. I might need to add you to the wiki so you can view it though, I think I set it on private. My ALA READ poster, motivational poster, and wordle are over there too.
That's about it for 7/16!
Today we learned about image generators and web presentation tools. I really liked playing around with the image generators, especially the motivational posters creators. I've always enjoyed the sarcastic ones so I created a sarcastic one about a recent trend that I find highly entertaining. We also made a wordle and a ALA READ poster, which was pretty cool, but I didn't really like the themes in the READ poster so if I made one eventually, I might try to just play around in photoshop...provided my school had it.
Learning about the different presentation tools was interesting...but actually creating one was definitely not. Anne and I got 280slides.com and it was an absolutely horrible presentation tool. The software never really worked properly, it kept freezing whenever I tried to add images (which is what our presentation's central focus was). We eventually gave up and tried SlideFlickr.com which was equally useless, as you could only post it on facebook, twitter, myspace, or the like. When I tried posting it on twitter it did not work at all and again we gave up after trying everything we could think of. If you're interested in reading more about our horrible experience, I wrote a blow-by-blow in my wiki for the class over here. I might need to add you to the wiki so you can view it though, I think I set it on private. My ALA READ poster, motivational poster, and wordle are over there too.
That's about it for 7/16!
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