Plant a seed–summer exploration for teachers and librarians

       Here are a few of my favorite websites to explore and learn with this summer.  See how they can help seed your curriculum in some way, enhance your website, or inspire you.

Animoto  — Create a quick and easy animated slideshow of your photos.  Use it with students to create visual poems, field trip presentations, progress of a plant’s growth, photos from around the world, etc.   You can even use it collaboratively by having different students in the class each add their own photo.

Slide.com — Another quick and easy slide show creator.  Very quick tool for putting together a visual slideshow with music (and no copyright to worry about since the music is on the site already).

FD’s Flickr Toys — This tool is a fun way to create visuals for/with students.  Use your own photos(upload one) or grab one from Flickr.com and add captions, make a poster, make badges,  etc. 

Etherpad —  This is a shared writing pad tool.  Start a new writing pad, then send the address of it to anyone you want to collaborate with.  Then you can both write on a document, chat about it, brainstorm together, etc.   It’s easy and no sign up for basic writing uses.  It’s not a word processor but just a collaborative tool to work on something together (which you could then put into a word processor!)

 Wordle  — A simple tool but with creative possibilities.  Paste in some text.  The site assembles the words into a collage, with the most used words larger than the least used.  Up the ante–paste in your syllabus, a poem, a study guide, keywords in your vocabulary lesson–voila–a unique visual representation.

Twitter —  Okay, so yes, everyone is raging about twitter and you may not see the point.  But check out these Teachers on Twitter  (sorted by subj. area) to see how they are using it.  Or consider researching who is professionally “tweeting” in your field.   If you teach government, for example, many government officials are now tweeting their daily legislative activities.  Who in your field is on Twitter and is posting current updates?  Wouldn’t that be excellent for students to start following and get current updates?  And it’s a way to create an online teaching community for yourself as well.

  Poll Everywhere — Coolest feature?  That students can either text their responses or use the web and it links to an already created, live Powerpoint slide that updates the responses.  Forget the costly CPS systems, and use this for quick polls!   Other good polling sites– Polldaddy and SurveyMonkey.

FreeTech4Teachers —  One of our teachers, Kris Phelps, turned me onto this site, which has excellent new tools featured constantly, and serious lessons attached to the posts.  Very inspiring!

Wetpaint — If you’ve considered blogging or wiki-ing but haven’t gotten started, check out Wetpaint.  It is a very accessible Wiki site that resembles a web page and is easy to use and edit, with a nice layout and design.

Diigo or Delicious — You at home wishing all your favorites weren’t on your computer at work?  Or vice versa?  If you haven’t started using an online bookmarking tool, try one of these out!  Install the gadget on your toolbar, and then just click anytime you find a site you want to keep track of for later.  Diigo has the added benefit of allowing you to highlight what you find with your own notes.  A great tool to consider using with students during research projects, or even just as “current events” collection areas for their class.

These are just a few of my favorites of the moment.  Find what works for you!  and if you have some to share, feel free to add them here.  Of course, it’s not the tools, it’s what we do with them to enhance learning for our students! 

 Image credits:   http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidsandilands/1283533631/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomthephotographer/207345259/

One thought on “Plant a seed–summer exploration for teachers and librarians

  1. As a preservice teacher, I really appreciate your link to the Teachers on Twitter wiki. Last week, our technology class introduced us to using Twitter in the classroom, and it is something I am very skeptical about. I will definitely be using that website to open up my eyes to the positives!

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