Friday, September 30, 2011
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
26 Free Web 2.0 Tool Tutorials from Teacher Challenge
What Good is a Wiki in the Classroom?
Ideas For Using Wikis With Students from The Edublogger
- Classroom or online policies that can be developed collaboratively
- Writing a class story together
- A class dictionary of vocabulary terms that get added as they come up
- Scheduling parent meetings where parents or guardians can add their names to available times
- Sign-ups for field trips, parties, and more
- Keeping records during a science experiment
- Carrying out collaborative projects with schools abroad
- Creating a class book with each page edited by a different team
- Working on research projects with teachers and other students providing formative assessment on discussion tab
- Collecting ideas for a wiki page
- Create a collaborative story — one piece at a time
Word Cloud Resources
Many children struggle with vocabulary. Rote memorization is ineffective for the most part. Students seem to remember what they explore and use, while having fun and exploring ways to use their new knowledge. Word clouds engage students as no vocab lists can. Check these:
Wordle - generate “word clouds” from text that you provide; change fonts, layouts, color schemes; print or save them
Tagul - each word becomes a link to a website, while making shapes
Hints for Tagul from Shelly Terrell: "I use Tagul when I want to have each of the words in a cloud lead to a link with more information or to have them in a specific shape such as a heart, star, rectangle, or regular cloud. If a student has written a research paper, this may be a fun way to have them provide the links of several websites they discovered that lead to more information on a topic. You can also use this as a tag cloud for your blog like I did here. Click on any word and it will lead to one of my posts!" See the notes about customizing the links on her blog.
WordSift - clouds with more options to sort words by frequency and alphabetically; not as visually appealing
ImageChef - "Now anyone can create a custom image without any technical knowledge or advanced tools. Modify text in a variety of image templates to create professional quality images with your own personal touch. Once you customize an image, you can e-mail it to a friend directly from within the ImageChef site along with an extra text message. You can also now quickly place images so they can be seen on a 3rd party services such as MySpace, Hi5 and Blogger. Simply, register for an account, and after you personalize an image you can preview different image sizes. HTML is then provided for you to paste directly into your blog post or comment! "
Word it Out - can embed this, change the cloud shape, and differentiate the font colors; easy to customize
Word Mosaic - make word clouds that fit a shape like a circle, question mark, or star.; can embed
Tech Tools & Pedagogy– Word Clouds - from Marisa Constantinides’ - a comparison chart that lists the options for each of the word cloud tools and shows you visual examples of each
ABC ya! - visually pleasing; choose different fonts and font colors; edit your text, because this catches all common words and symbols
Clusty Cloud Creator - type in a topic and a word cloud is generated; do not get to choose the text; the words are links to searches of the terms
Tweet Cloud - makes word clouds from your tweets or from topics and hashtag
Wispy - word clouds from your own words; also generates clouds for Twitter and Facebook accounts
Word Clouds in the Classroom:
Guess the Wordle - wiki features several Wordles where students use their problem solving skills to guess the word or phrase; students may contribute and try to guess the other’s Wordle
52 Interesting Ways to Use Wordle in the Classroom from Tom Barrett
Wordle - generate “word clouds” from text that you provide; change fonts, layouts, color schemes; print or save them
Tagul - each word becomes a link to a website, while making shapes
Hints for Tagul from Shelly Terrell: "I use Tagul when I want to have each of the words in a cloud lead to a link with more information or to have them in a specific shape such as a heart, star, rectangle, or regular cloud. If a student has written a research paper, this may be a fun way to have them provide the links of several websites they discovered that lead to more information on a topic. You can also use this as a tag cloud for your blog like I did here. Click on any word and it will lead to one of my posts!" See the notes about customizing the links on her blog.
WordSift - clouds with more options to sort words by frequency and alphabetically; not as visually appealing
ImageChef - "Now anyone can create a custom image without any technical knowledge or advanced tools. Modify text in a variety of image templates to create professional quality images with your own personal touch. Once you customize an image, you can e-mail it to a friend directly from within the ImageChef site along with an extra text message. You can also now quickly place images so they can be seen on a 3rd party services such as MySpace, Hi5 and Blogger. Simply, register for an account, and after you personalize an image you can preview different image sizes. HTML is then provided for you to paste directly into your blog post or comment! "
Word it Out - can embed this, change the cloud shape, and differentiate the font colors; easy to customize
Word Mosaic - make word clouds that fit a shape like a circle, question mark, or star.; can embed
Tech Tools & Pedagogy– Word Clouds - from Marisa Constantinides’ - a comparison chart that lists the options for each of the word cloud tools and shows you visual examples of each
ABC ya! - visually pleasing; choose different fonts and font colors; edit your text, because this catches all common words and symbols
Clusty Cloud Creator - type in a topic and a word cloud is generated; do not get to choose the text; the words are links to searches of the terms
Tweet Cloud - makes word clouds from your tweets or from topics and hashtag
Wispy - word clouds from your own words; also generates clouds for Twitter and Facebook accounts
Word Clouds in the Classroom:
Guess the Wordle - wiki features several Wordles where students use their problem solving skills to guess the word or phrase; students may contribute and try to guess the other’s Wordle
52 Interesting Ways to Use Wordle in the Classroom from Tom Barrett
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Be Funky! FREE, Simple, Easy-to-use Photo Editing Web 2.0 Tool
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| What is it? Be Funky is a web 2.0 application that allows students to take any picture and transform it into a cartoon or a sketch. How do I integrate Be Funky into the classroom: Use Be Funky in conjunction with other tools such a Bubblr or software like Comic Life. Since Be Funky changes a regular photograph into a cartoon, you can create cartoon comic strips in class. Transform field trip pictures into cartoons and invite students to create a comic strip retell about the field trip. Students can be the star of their own comic strips where they create a comic autobiography. Take pictures during a science experiment and create a comic strip with the scientific process of the experiment. Tips: Be Funky requires you to have an account (free but asks for an email address). If you plan to have your students transform the pictures into cartoons, you may want to create one class account for students to use. If you want to download the cartoon picture to your computer so that students can use in other projects, take a screen capture of the cartoon and save as an image to your computer. |
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Stixy: Flexible, Shareable Web-Based Bulletin Board Called a Stixyboard
With a FREE account, you may create tasks, appointments, files, photos, notes, and bookmarks on your Stixyboard, organized in whatever way makes sense to you. Create an unlimited number of digital bulletin boards with sticky notes, to-do reminders, pictures, and even documents. customized with different colors & fonts. To-dos can be set to send email reminders. Share Stixyboards with friends, family, and colleagues.
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