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:

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!