This is a great tool that I will use both personally and in my classroom. It is easy to use. I used photoscape to edit my images, then uploaded them to glogster. I added sound from the web and from my computer and I added a voice recording using my sound recorder (found in accessories). Adding text and graphics are also easy, with many options to choose from. Once your pictures are uploaded, they can easily be moved in to the fore or background using the edit function.
I chose to make my glog using family photos from 2011. Right now my class is creating visual autobiographies on paper, in the future, we will use glogster.
Other than being hilarious, voicethread is useful! It was a bit tricky to get myself organized but I kept watching the tutorials and it started to come together. It really is three steps: upload the file, comment on it and share.
You can upload both images and videos or a webcast. In my classroom I would have students annotate work they have done. Additionally, when posting instructions on our class website...
In addition to 'My Library', there are three other tabs in Diigo which allow you to connect to others in the Diigo world. You can search bookmarks through the community and search for groups that have similar interests (I have joined two groups, one on cyber-bullying and one on using web 2.0 in the classroom); you can see what has been bookmarked by group members by clicking 'My Groups' or, the preference I set was to have updates emailed to me daily. You can also follow individuals in 'My Network'.
I feel organized, I feel connected, now, to bring it all together in the classroom... this video shows one use in a classroom setting for research..but, between bookmarking, highlighting and annotating, the options are fairly endless.
On Stephen Abram's blog stephenslighthouse.com, he provides a link to 50 ways school librarians can use google+. The list offers a brief synopsis of each suggestion with a link to further information.
Richardson (Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, p. 107) also gave me a great idea for studying clouds (which just happens to be a part of the grade 4 curriculum); it is exciting to stumble across seemingly small yet inspired ideas to enhance my teaching. After teaching characteristics of clouds, I would have students study a gallery of cloud photographs (as above) and sort them in to groups based on features.
To create the gallery I went in to Flickr and searched clouds, I clicked on the ones I liked and from the action menu chose save to gallery. On the first image I created the gallery called clouds and it was on my list of galleries for subsequent images.
To use this in the classroom I would add more images to the gallery but, this is a snapshot of the potential. It honestly took less than 2 minutes and is a great example of technology making teaching easier and not adding extra work.
Recently I was in a workshop where a small portion of the time was dedicated to picture book apps. One of the questions asked to the speaker was "where do you find good apps and how do you know they are good?" On Horn Book's blog, I came across an article which offers 8 criteria for a quality picture book app and a few recommendations. The criteria are: - Is interactive but not too interactive - Creates meaningful counterpoint between all parts of the app - Makes use of the drama of turning the page - Puts users in charge - Is easy to navigate - Provides a joyful and surprising experience - Withstands repeated use - Adds to or extends the original story.
One app I explored was Oliver Jeffers, Heart and the Bottle. This is one of the best picture book apps I have seen. It takes a beautiful heartfelt story and truly brings it to life. I highly recommend this to teachers, parents and teacher-librarians.
I then found a follow up: a look in to the process of creating a picture book app. Personally, based on the criteria from Horn Book, I do not find the featured app particularly appealing but it is interesting to learn about the process.
For reviews on book apps, I have been following Digital Storytime which reviews apps for children's books, and Smart Apps for Kids where a Dad reviews apps, with his kids, and posts recommendations and a daily free app. I like this site and am feeling very advanced for being one of the first RSS subscribers.
In Richardson's book, he sites the NetDay News fact that "the fastest-growing age group for using the Internet is 2 to 5 year olds." (Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, 2010, p. 7) For me this statistic was thought provoking. I can not decide if this is positive for society or not. I see many benefits to technology and negatives as well. How does this affect the traditional development patterns of children? Will their socialization suffer? Will some skills develop earlier and some later? What will it mean for Kindergarten students in the next few years entering the public school system? In the classroom I see that technology can be a true equalizer, allowing student to demonstrate their abilities in so many forms; I am really curious about the implications of this in society and education.
In his article Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (2001), Mark Prensky offers and amusing, insightful account of today's children.
My son is in kindergarten and he has been using the iphone or itouch since he was about 2 1/2. Some of his early favourites were matching games and tracing letters. He then moved on to variuos puzzles and math games. Now, he explores ipads with a buddy class once a week. Some of the apps they have been using are: Teach me kindergarten (general), Alphabet tracing (proper letter forms), Bugs and Buttons (patterns and sorting), and, my son's favourite, Math Ninja.
