As I said in my last post, I want to show some sites I found while surfing the net. They all deal with the topic that we are interested in: ICT inside the classroom. So let's start!
Edudemic
This is an enormous website that is full of articles related to the use of technology for educational purposes. Several writers are constantly providing new stories, ideas and tools and also teachers act as contributors by sending their own discoveries. To give you an example, if you happened to enter now, you would see at the very top the most read articles, they are: How an Amsterdam school uses Facebook Timeline in History Classes, 10 free Web 2.0 tools and how to easily use them in your classroom and A social learning network you may not know about. These topics are really interesting as they give us ideas to put into practice on the go and inside our own classrooms. I highly recommend this website and suggest that it should be added to your RSS feed.
Madame Techie
Well, this is a lot more personal. It is a teacher's blog and everything is related to her learning and their students. Nevertheless, we can think of it as an useful way to see how a tool actually worked (and if it worked) with students. There are a lot of web 2.0 tools recommended and several reflective posts. From the latter, the ones that I liked the most were those dealing with the importance of using ICT, how to make a friend of technology, how to overcome technical difficulties and that we should always have an alternative plan for our lessons. She has not written for a while now, so we could take her blog as a finished book and browse through it to see what is worth reading.
Edublogs Teacher Challenges
This website is quite interesting. It works as a course that you attend during 30 days. They give you tasks, you give them a shot and publish what you accomplished in your own blog. The challenge that guided me to the website is the one called 'Free Tools Challenge.' They provided one tool a day and gave information about how to use it inside the classroom. Everything is really well explained; from the reason why using a particular tool, how to get started with it and obviously how to implement it. I am not going to start any challenge soon but I have in mind that there is this site where a lot of information on how to introduce this tools to my future lessons is present. Check their lists of challenges and see which ones fits your needs!
miércoles, 26 de septiembre de 2012
viernes, 7 de septiembre de 2012
Alien: Assembly Required and Little Bird Tales
Today I have learned that there is no Google search with more results and links and paths to continue browsing than searching "web 2.0 tools in the classroom". There are so many bloggers talking about this, so many tools and so many websites that we might feel that we don't know where we are actually heading.
In my search today, I chose to look at the sites that are not ranking at the very top according to Google to see what they offered. Although I came across extremely lousy tools (like most tools provided at classtools.net), I also found some that are really interesting and which I didn't know about. Here they are:
Alien: Assembly Required (hosted in pbskids.org)
This tool is quite specific and its scope is really narrow. It gives us the possibility of creating an alien species. We can choose between a handful of heads, torsos, hands, legs, parts of the face and other accessories. What we create will be inserted in a predefined story about a rabbit and a space ship that might or might not be useful to us. It is a good way of practising numbers, colours and parts of the body in a simple yet fun way. The creator is extremely easy to use and allows us to remove the parts we don't want, insert new ones and even click a "random" button and get one from a set of aliens that are already created.
Conclusion: Even though it is a one-trick pony, it is a good pony at what it does.
Rating: ●●●●●●●●○○ 8/10
Little Bird Tales
What we get here is an easy way to create a story told by the students using their voice, their written production and their drawings. The tool is completely free and only requires that we sign up. The editor is quite powerful and lets us produce the story in real time, i.e. we do not need to collect the material (drawings, recordings, sheet of paper with the story) and only then put everything inside a file. The tool's editor has an embedded recorder, a word processor and a graphics editor, so that we can do everything inside the website. It is worth saying that we could do this in Microsoft PowerPoint for example, but the need to import files from other software and the more business-like interface should be enough reasons to prefer a tool that is specifically designed to carry out the task we are approaching.
Conclusion: A powerful tool that can produce marvellous results if used correctly.
Rating: ●●●●●●●●●○ 9/10
I won't ask you to create a tale because it is a process best undergone with students, but I would like to see some aliens created and what their teaching purpose would be, I provide mine below:
In my search today, I chose to look at the sites that are not ranking at the very top according to Google to see what they offered. Although I came across extremely lousy tools (like most tools provided at classtools.net), I also found some that are really interesting and which I didn't know about. Here they are:
Alien: Assembly Required (hosted in pbskids.org)
This tool is quite specific and its scope is really narrow. It gives us the possibility of creating an alien species. We can choose between a handful of heads, torsos, hands, legs, parts of the face and other accessories. What we create will be inserted in a predefined story about a rabbit and a space ship that might or might not be useful to us. It is a good way of practising numbers, colours and parts of the body in a simple yet fun way. The creator is extremely easy to use and allows us to remove the parts we don't want, insert new ones and even click a "random" button and get one from a set of aliens that are already created.
Conclusion: Even though it is a one-trick pony, it is a good pony at what it does.
Rating: ●●●●●●●●○○ 8/10
Little Bird Tales
What we get here is an easy way to create a story told by the students using their voice, their written production and their drawings. The tool is completely free and only requires that we sign up. The editor is quite powerful and lets us produce the story in real time, i.e. we do not need to collect the material (drawings, recordings, sheet of paper with the story) and only then put everything inside a file. The tool's editor has an embedded recorder, a word processor and a graphics editor, so that we can do everything inside the website. It is worth saying that we could do this in Microsoft PowerPoint for example, but the need to import files from other software and the more business-like interface should be enough reasons to prefer a tool that is specifically designed to carry out the task we are approaching.
Conclusion: A powerful tool that can produce marvellous results if used correctly.
Rating: ●●●●●●●●●○ 9/10
I won't ask you to create a tale because it is a process best undergone with students, but I would like to see some aliens created and what their teaching purpose would be, I provide mine below:
A multi-coloured alien that would go in a line-up with 3 or 4 more creations to cover all the colours taught. Here we already have red, purple and green. We can also also compare it with the rabbit that always appears together with our alien. Do they have the same number of fingers? What about ears?
In the next post we'll be looking at a website and to two blogs that are related to the use of ICT in the classroom. Get ready!
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