Throughout the week I was able to visit everyones Web2.0 tool project pages in the class wiki. All of them were very interesting to learn about and I enjoyed tinkering around with the tools. Three of the tools that I tried were:
Google Earth-
I enjoyed the tour put together of Wisconsin. What a great way to get acquainted with Google Earth. Google Earth would be good for a variety of things in the classroom especially when it comes to Social Studies. It is just amazing to me that you can show students places from all over the world. It is also nice for students to see local areas of interest. A lady I teach with uses Google Earth to aid her in teaching about different landforms in her Science class. The opportunities are endless with Google Earth!
Flickr-
I thought Flickr was really easy to use. I believe that most kids would easily be able to upload pictures without any problems. I loved the idea of taking pictures of objects and having students create poems that go along with the photos that the students posted on the their wiki page. I thought the students who created the wiki page came up with a lot of uses for the classroom-especially the idea of a virtual field trip by using either Flickr or You Tube. Flickr would be so great to use with class presentations where students may want to upload pictures form home. This eliminates students bringing in pictures to class or emailing pictures as attachments. Flickr allows you to share the photos with others without having to email them back and forth. I found taht Flickr was similar to Shutterfly. I use Shutterfly quite frequently for my personal photos.
Online Polls and Surveys-
I like the idea of online polls and surveys. I thought the website survey monkey was a little tricky to navigate around. I personally would rather make a survey or poll in Google Apps using the forms. I thought that was a much clearer way to create surveys or polls. I do like the idea of incorporating polls and surveys in the classroom. I think having tools that allow students to create surveys is great. Then not only can students create the survey, but they could also graph the results or analyze them in some way. I especially like the idea of giving students a classroom survey to help critique ones own teaching. Using polls and surveys as a means to gather what students already know and what they do not know is a great way to incorporate them into the classroom.
I enjoyed using all of a the new technology tools this week and am looking forward to incorporating them into my classroom in some way!
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The nice thing about Flickr is that you can make the photos private and only share them with friends or family, so students don't have to share their photos with the world if they don't want.
ReplyDeleteIt's fun to think about how the students can create projects with GoogleEarth and GoogleMaps. I created a quick one with some of my own photos to show a trip to Scotland (http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=115934268178190256431.000457a6e6c5908197ee5&z=6). I'm sure the kids could do it even better than I did.