Twitter

I've been hearing about Twitter for a couple of years now, but it never really sparked any interest in me.  I thought it was, just as one of the articles said, people updating about what they were eating for breakfast and other nonsense like that.  However, after reading the articles and watching the videos about its advantages, I see them clearly now.  Twitter is really a great way to get different messages across to everybody all at once. It isn't like the news where they feed one message to one audience, and that's the end of the discussion.  Twitter allows a functioning discussion to take place. A discussion that evolves and changes and feeds various information to everyone who chooses to listen.

How incredible that Twitter may have saved some lives in Haiti, or informed family members about the safety of their loved ones after the earthquake hit. I found it astonishing that people's comments on Twitter after the earthquake in China was how Chinese officials actually found out about the earthquake. And these comments were up before the U.S. Geological Survey even registered it!

Besides helpful in spreading worldwide news, Twitter allows you to follow everything, and everyone, you're interested in. Instead of clicking on msn.com and reading the headlines and only the news they are feeding to me, I can use Twitter. This way I am sure to find news on the topics and events that interest me most and pertain to my life. I look forward to tweeting with you!

Glogster

Glogster is a great tool for students to use to create posters.  Glogsters are the new posters, allowing for them to be interactive. It's a great way to set up a page of resources for students to learn about a particular topic that is being taught in the classroom. It provides links to various websites, key words to take note of, informative videos, and an overall explanation about the topic at hand.  For example, I did my Glogster on Going Green.

 It includes a link to a website that informs the student how to reduce, reuse, and recycle various products and the importance of doing so. The student can listen to a song while perusing the glogster, which I think makes learning more fun for them. I included an inspirational video about how everyone's acts have a lasting impact on the environment and how rapidly the earth is changing due to global warming.  It educates the student on how they can help reverse the damage by planting trees, riding bikes, and using our resources without depleting them.  The glogster also has a list of books from the library with the Dewey decimal codes so that the students can easily locate them. The water drop links to a website detailing how to recycle and reuse water. The gift tag links to a UConn website that describes how we can conserve water and electricity. The orange thought bubble links to a site that describes 50 ways to conserve energy, including activities as easy as changing lightbulbs to compact fluorescent light bulbs. The globe links to General Electric's Ecomagination site describing programs around the globe that are contributing to energy conservation and committed to going green. The solar panel connects to energy.gov, providing more information about the benefits of solar power. The 'go green' footprint links to a carbon footprint calculator that allows students to calculate their own impact on the earth. And finally, a video about how one can reduce their carbon footprint. So many different resources on one page! Glogster is an amazing tool to use in the classroom.

Free Rice

Not only is the game Free Rice fun, educational, and extremely easy, it feeds hungry people with every mouse click.  All you have to do is match a vocabulary word to its meaning, and voila, the game donates 10 grains of rice to a starving people. In this case, I was clicking to feed people in Sahel, Africa. During the game, you can choose to actually read about the starving people in this country, and see the latest news and pictures related to their hunger crisis.

Games can't get any more informative and educational than this. Free Rice teaches students first and foremost that starvation is a real, grave issue around the world.  However, we can help. And we can help by playing these games nonetheless! This game teaches social studies, math, vocabulary, and empathy all at the same time.  Free Rice is addicting because while playing you feel like you're really accomplishing something great.  I earned 300 grains of rice. While this might not seem like a lot, I'm only one person playing the game for 10 minutes. If a lot of people got together and played this game for a long, long time, imagine how much rice could be donated to Sahel. I love this game. Play it!!

World Without Oil

For someone who never plays games, I think World Without Oil is a great game for everyone. It's realistic and relevant to our current times. This game teaches students how to survive in a world during an oil shortage. It allows them to learn in depth about the oil shortage in the U.S. and the effects of this shortage on our lives now, and the potential dangers for the future. Supply, demand, and price become more than just vocabulary words in this game. The students are immersed in it, and hence learn what these words really mean for the U.S. economy and themselves. This game encourages students to reflect on a personal level on how an oil crisis would change their lives. They begin to lead their lives as if there were really an oil shortage presently going on. This forces them to change things about their every day life, and perhaps see the importance of our natural resources and the potential danger overusing them could have on our country. World Without Oil shows students how much oil they use, and not just for gas for their cars, but for other aspects of their lives, and shows them how important a resource it is.

In conjunction with this game, watch 'Jane McGonigal: Gaming Can Make a Better World' on YouTube. She explains how by playing games such as this one, we can actually begin to solve real world problems. She explains it in detail, and it's fascinating!

Animoto

I love Animoto! It was extremely easy to use. All you had to do was upload pictures, add your own text, and choose a song, and you have a professional-looking video. I think it's great that this program really creates a wonderful, animated video with your material.  It looks like you spent a long time creating it yourself.


Animoto has an abundance of songs to choose from for your videos, which makes it easier when it comes to copyright issues. Since they have their songs organized by category it makes it very easy to find a song that suits your video. 


I really enjoyed using this tool. Below are the two videos that I created.


Technology and classrooms:
http://animoto.com/play/arVIiKubuWN7OswG2JP9rw

Technology and me:

http://animoto.com/play/K2ejqixGT1v9fczi9e0uVg

Audacity

Audacity was intimidating. It wasn't the easiest tool to use, and I had to delete my recording and start over a few times because I couldn't figure out how to go back and fix it (even with a page of instructions in front of me).  For someone who doesn't work with music or audio, Audacity was confusing and had too many buttons to choose from and lots of options.  Who needs to zoom into a voice recording, anyway?

That being said, I can see how useful it could be to people in the music industry, allowing them to pinpoint each sound exactly, adding and deleting where they see fit. Audacity allows you to manipulate the recording, by cutting and pasting, deleting sections, and even allows you to pause for a breath or a new thought.

With more practice, maybe I could see some use to Audacity in the classroom. Allowing kids to play around and be creative with their recordings could be fun and educational. Children love to sing and record themselves and post videos to YouTube and Audacity could be a great program for them to edit their music, as long as they know how to use it.

VoiceThread

I think that voiceThread is a great web 2.0 tool. I love how the topic of discussion is at the center of the screen, and is surrounded by everyone’s comments.  This is a great tool for discussing a topic or, in this case, a video. It’s nice how you can just click once on the first comment and it will play through and start the next person’s comments right away.  You can kind of just sit back and enjoy a discussion among classmates.

Like blackboard, I think this is a great tool to facilitate discussions and I can see this being used in classrooms.  This could help students who are shy and less likely than others to answer a question or reply to a post.  VoiceThread could enable them to be more open and more comfortable to join in the discussion than they would normally be in a classroom.

I like how everyone can upload a picture of themselves if they so choose.  This personalizes the discussion more and allows you to put a face to the name of the person speaking at the time.

Also, VoiceThread is fun and very easy to use. It is a user-friendly tool and I found it extremely easy to record my comments and upload my picture.  The video and sound quality are also very good, lending to the actual feel of being in a discussion with other people.

Wiki

I liked working on the wiki activity because it wasn’t a very complicated or complex tool to use.  It’s very straightforward and has a user-friendly platform.  I didn’t really know what a wiki was before doing this activity.  It’s interesting to see how easily someone can go on and change information that I have provided about Gossip Girl.  As long as I enter them in as a writer, they can change anything, and I find that fascinating.  I will definitely think twice about the reliability and the source of the information I find on Wikipedia. 

I think wikis can be extremely helpful for group projects in a classroom.  Students don’t even have to be together in the same room to work on their projects.  They can all log in from home and make changes to the wiki and share information with one another that way.  Using a wiki could help save valuable time when working on a joint project.  It can also just generally increase people’s knowledge about certain topics.  If one student knows a, b, and c about something, and they share it on a wiki, and another student knows d, e, and f and posts it to the wiki, that’s six facts that maybe another student didn’t know about the topic before glancing at the wiki. 

Also, I think it’s cool that I can say that I now know how to create a wiki!

iGoogle & Wordle

I think iGoogle is an excellent tool for teachers to use to encourage creativity in their students.  Each student can have their own unique home page by adding whatever features they want, while at the same time allowing them to become more familiar with computers and with the iGoogle program.  I added the New York Times and Facebook gadgets to my homepage because I am regularly checking those websites. In addition, I added an inspirational quotes and pictures gadget so I can get inspired every time I log in. This program also proves useful to keep track of assignment due dates and class schedules, which could prove useful to students of all ages.  I think a drawback of this program is the limited amount of options presented.  There doesn't seem to be an abundance of choices for various gadgets, colors, fonts, etc., which could inhibit students' creativity potential.

Wordle is such a fun tool! I like how it brings my words and aspects about me to life.  This would be useful in a classroom in many ways.  I think this could help students get to know one another at the start of a new class.  If each student created one and shared it with the class, it would give everyone an opportunity to get to know who they are and what they are interested in, including the teacher.  I think Wordle could also help when doing book reviews. The students could write the title of the book, or the name of a character, then all of the adjectives and nouns they can think of that correspond to it.  This is another great activity for students to create something that is unique to them, by changing fonts, word directions, and colors.