Story Jumper. My first year as a public school teacher, my third grade students published a book. I remember the long and laborious process. First there was the rough draft. Then the students typed (or I typed it for them) their pages. Lastly, the students carefully illustrated page after page of the text. Many students had pages with marker smears, fingerprints, or handprints on them. None the less, the pages were dutifully packaged and shipped off to the manufacturer for the treasured books to be published. Story Jumper seems a much simplier process!
Prezi. I enjoyed seeing more about Prezi. The article we read this week with the Prezi tips was also very useful. I liked thinking about the Prezi in "frames" and adding the path at the end of the presentation.
Story Jumper. My first year as a public school teacher, my third grade students published a book. I remember the long and laborious process. First there was the rough draft. Then the students typed (or I typed it for them) their pages. Lastly, the students carefully illustrated page after page of the text. Many students had pages with marker smears, fingerprints, or handprints on them. None the less, the pages were dutifully packaged and shipped off to the manufacturer for the treasured books to be published. Story Jumper seems a much simplier process!
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Prezi. Features presented (that we may have been unaware of) were the ability to:
We did an activity on google docs. I liked how engaging the activity was. We were creating a web page for a travel site and we had specific roles for each individual to play. Since it was a collaborative document, we could each do research, add information, and stay engaged because of our individual task assignments.
We played with Google plus. It's a social networking app that allows us to video conference with several people at once, share your screen, control the other user's screen, and even video conference over You Tube. Live You Tube broadcasts are automatically saved on You Tube. It was entertaining. I can see exciting possibilities with connecting to others long distance. Dropbox on the iPad. Key features: If you make a file a favorite, it will save it on your iPad so if you don't have wifi available, the file will still be on the iPad for your use.
Google Docs. I have used Google Docs extensively so the forms are familiar to me. However, I was reminded of one important thing: You need to make sure that the email addresses you invite people with is the email that they are logged into their Google Drive with. Otherwise, they will have read only rights. We looked at Twhistory and saw a previous project about the Titanic. Then, we participated in a Twhistory activity of our own on Pearl Harbor, which I loved. It was extremely engaging. The partner activity was fun, especially as we imagined what our character might say. Keeping it to the Twitter format made sure that our comments weren't lengthy. I can really see how much fun this would be for my students. I am anxious to see the Twitter feed at #csdendorse on Sunday to see how the story plays out. I can imagine that students would be just as excited to see their own projects come to life.
The Fakebook website was interesting. We, unfortunately, did not have much time to investigate the site, but their gallery showed promise. I would really like to explore the parent site http://www.classtools.net more to discover if any of their other tools are worthwhile. Twitter in the classroom. We looked at the blog from Twhistory.org. and read a fake twitter feed about the Titanic. Groups took on the persona of different characters and created tweets as that character. We then created a fake twitter feed for the bombing of Pearl Harbor. A google spreadsheet doc was created with all of our character names as tabs. In the doc we listed the date and time of the tweet along with the actual tweet, which included our project hashtag. The instructor would then go to Socialoomph.com, add multiple twitter accounts, then copy and paste the tweets and set a time for them to be delivered.
Fakebook. We did a short look and see on fakebook. I will have to go to class tools and look around at their options at http://www.classtools.net. There seems to be many other tools that are available for students to use without the internet security issues. Wikipedia. We looked at how accurate Wikipedia is. According to Wikipedia, their site is as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. While this seems comical, there are references to numerous citations and studies that verify their accuracy. We learned about copyright issues. Several sites were explored with creative commons licensing. Some of my favorites were:
The next issue we covered was "fair use". Fair use is a guideline for use of copyrighted material for educational purposes. In order to be considered fair use, teachers need to consider the purpose for the use, the nature of the use, how much is used, and what is the effect of the use. We looked at kidblog. It seems like a great tool for students to create a portfolio of work. They can post, comment, and imbed media. The nice thing about kidblog is that you can moderate the posts. Creative Commons sites:
I really enjoyed the Haiku Deck tool. It was super simple to use and easy to navigate. I enjoyed how user friendly it was and the many ways you could share your presentations with it.
The edCanvas tool seemed very encompassing. There were a plethora of tools available for the slides. You can search multiple formats, insert videos, other media files, and include files from Dropbox or Google Drive. The downside is that you can't include text and other media on the same file. I need to review edCanvas more and try to discover all the different uses for this new tool. We looked at different presentation tools. On the Web 2.0 Cool Tools for School. There were many different tools listed. I will need to review these later. http://cooltoolsforschools.wikispaces.com/Presentation+Tools The same website had information on presentation apps too.
We discussed the Pecha Kucha presentation method. You still create the presentation in Power Point, Keynote, etc. but students are limited to 20 slides that autoplay, with 20 seconds per slide. Any presentation tool that has an autoplay with timings can be used. Slides should use mostly visuals with phrases (not sentences). The idea is to "show, not tell". When presenting, the slides are cues for the speaker, and practice is necessary. Another presentation tool we discussed is Haiku Deck. We created quick Haiku Deck presentations. The tool is simple to use, has preloaded photos that are creative commons licensed, and simple layouts. |
Notes & ReflectionAuthorErika Bradshaw is an educator with Canyons School District Archives
November 2013
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