Friday, February 27, 2015

Thing 5 - Digital Storytelling & Presentation Tools


I really enjoyed exploring the resources on Thing 5. Some I was already familiar with, and others I had never heard of. Of particular interest were the presentation tools. Both of the classes I teach rely heavily on using Web 2.0 tools to demonstrate student learning, so I was excited to try out some new ideas to use with them.

While scrolling through the list of resources, I read several of the items in the "Tools, Tips, and Resources" section and found many helpful.  I also viewed the "Power of Bunkr" demo and found it looked too advanced to use with my 6th graders. I also watched the "Don't Let the Pigeon be the Principal" and thought that was adorable! I would definitely do something like that with my classes sometime in the future.

To update my library webpage, I decided to add a Voki of myself introducing the library. You can check it out at http://www.millbrookcsd.org/middleschool/library. As part of my class's author study of Tim Green, who will be visiting our school in May, I am going to have them create a Voki of either the author himself, saying biographical info, or a Voki of a character from one of his books telling about the story. I think the kids will really enjoy this!

Another new tool that I plan to use with my classes in the coming weeks is the timeline feature on Dipity. I had never heard of this, but have been wanting to find a good timeline creating tool online that my classes could use for their author study project. I created a Dipity account and experimented with a sample timeline. It seemed pretty easy to use, although users only get 3 timeline projects for free before having to subscribe to a larger part of the service, so it will work for my class, but not sure how many students will want to go beyond 3 timeline projects...

I have played around with StoryBird and Voicethread and had a couple of students use it, but did not find them something I wanted to incorporate into my classes. One of my favorite presentation tools is Prezi. I created a simple one to use with my Digital Literacy class for a lesson on creating research questions. It serves two purposes - it serves as an introduction to what Prezi is, AND it is the tool I use for the lesson on writing research questions. It can be viewed at
http://prezi.com/hlrjblzapviq/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share
After going through the research process, each student will create their own Prezi on a topic of their choice as their final project for my 10 week course. They will love it!

Thing 5 was a lot of fun - a good mix of what I already knew and things I had never heard of. On to Thing 6...

Monday, February 23, 2015

Thing 4: RSS

Well, this has certainly been my least favorite "thing" so far - and the most frustrating... perhaps because I have very limited prior experience using RSS feeds... I'm not sure.  I don't really follow blogs, and I prefer to just visit sites that I want to be updated about, so this has never seemed like a tool that I would make use of.

As per the course activity directions however, I did sign up and create a dashboard on Netvibes (http://www.netvibes.com/privatepage/1#General) and played around on that for a while. Using the Netvibe search bar, I found and successfully added "YA Books Central" (http://www.yabookscentral.com/blog/latest ) to my Dashboard. However, I was not able to figure out how to add an existing RSS feed from a site I was on. I went to www.slj.com and clicked on their RSS feed icon, but could not figure out how to get it to save to Netvibes.

Additionally, my computer didn't seem to cooperate, or I was dealing with firewall issues, because every site I clicked on the RSS feed icon for, I kept getting error messages that no reader was installed - I didn't see an option for adding the site or blog to my Netvibes account.

Overall, an exercise that reinforced my reluctance to delve into the world of RSS... happy to be moving on to Thing 5.