I just returned from the Michigan Association of Computer Users for Learning (MACUL) Conference. I enjoyed presenting with Gina Loveless & Terri Waklid on middle school technology-enhanced social studies lessons and the MDE Curriculum Integration Project. Click here to download our presentation.
I most enjoyed Steve Dembo's presentation "The Top 10 Free Web 2.0 Tools." I may need to work a few more web 2.0 tools into my agenda for the Walled Lake web 2.0 usergroup! Of the ten tools he highlighted, four were new to me and I learned new things about all the rest. His top 10 tools are:
- Bloglines - a Feed reader/aggregator & also one of my favorites.
- Delicious - A social bookmarking tool & another one of my favorites. I learned that you can use delicious in new ways, such as: creating memory games, adding comments, making trading cards, and finding photos with creative commons licensing.
- Flickr - A photo sharing website. I learned to spell words with images!
- Picnik - a photo editing website - a simple Photoshop-like tool.
- Jumpcut - a video editing website. I want to check this one out before using with students.
- Gcast - Easy podcast-creation tool
- PBWiki - a wiki made for education
- Wikispaces - another wiki made for education
- Google Docs and Spreadsheets - Great for on-line collaboration. Can save as Word or Excel documents. I see this as coming in very handy for compiling data for science experiments and creating a class database.
- VYEW - Cannot wait to try this out for staff development! It works sort of like WebX.
I agree. What a great conference. We have a lot to learn, a lot to share, a lot of great resources. Now we have to figure out which are the best for us and for the students.
ReplyDeleteThere is just more and more good stuff everyday (and a lot of not so good stuff). I love the way that things can "go viral" that I am interested in learning about through the real and virtual connections I make with people.
ReplyDeleteI am defintely a "try it and see" kind of person and sometimes I jump into things with the students without a real understanding of what I want them to get out of the experience. I am happy that so many things currently available are user friendly and I don't have to spend as much time teaching the how instead of discovering the why.
Hey, I went to try out the "Spell with Flickr" thing but I cannot figure out how you got it from the programming site to your blog page. I see all sorts of code that you can copy and paste where? There was no link that said "save this word" and I did not understand the programming.
ReplyDeleteThis comment is also a test to see if you get notified when comments are posted to your blog.
FYI-I was having trouble with internet explorer at home and uploaded the new version of firefox which has nicely integrated del.icio.us. That means I also imported my bookmarks from home so I have lots of new entries on del.icio.us. I spent some time editing the tags and that has helped me learn how to navigate better to. I have not played with grouping tags yet but Ill let you know how it goes.
Happy Easter
Gina
Gina, You copy/paste the code into the HTML area of your blog entry (there is an HTML tab you need to click on). Let me know if this does not make sense. Also, I'm glad you are having fun with del.icio.us!
ReplyDelete