Our Project Tech workshop yesterday was on blogs and wikis. What’s the difference between blogs and wikis? Simply put, blogs are more about connecting with people, while wikis are more about collecting information. You can use a blog to share and discuss information with others. One of the main things I’m liking about blogs is that I can find other people who are working on the same things I am and learn from them. It’s a way for people across countries and time to share […]
Category: Tools
Live posting
Welcome to our edublogs workshop this morning! http://www.edublogs.org
So what is all this stuff?
I’ve been sharing a lot of different tools with you here. Why am I excited about them? I was thinking about that this morning when I was reading about a presentation Will Richardson(who is championing what he calls the “Read/Write”web) did at a conference. He believes that what is important about all of these tools is that we can use them to broaden our students’ audiences. If you look at things that have them jazzed, most of them are about sharing with others via the […]
More about Flickr
Flickr is basically a photography site with an added piece–community. Users can share their photos, join groups of those who have similar interests, or comment on photos. Each photographer “tags” their photos with relevant keywords. That means you can easily search a keyword like China and find photographs relating to it. For educational use, Flickr allows photographers to designate photos as “Creative Commons” meaning that other people can use the photos in that area for certain uses. Some are allowed to be altered, some can be […]
Social networking with Powerpoint??
Ok, this concept blows my mind. Slide Share is a site where people can upload their powerpoint presentations. BUT it is also a “social networking” site because other people can view and comment on the powerpoints that are posted. Talk about changing an experience for your class from a student having audience of 25 in your classroom to having a worldwide audience! http://slideshare.net/ I’m thinking of all the possibilities for teachers…. Students could upload their projects here and comment on other students’ projects. Teachers […]
New search sites
In our Project Technology workshop yesterday, we talked about the trend in search sites that are using “visual” methods for searching. Ian Jukes talked about how students read screens differently and I think we’ll start seeing that trend in search engine websites. Ok, so maybe this is geeky but after all, I am a …… librarian…. A few to check out– Ask.com has a cool visual feature. Try a search on Ask. If you scroll down through the links, you see a little pair of […]
Good research sites
At the Internet Librarian conference, Gary Price, (who now works for Ask.com) talked about some helpful websites for use with students. Newspaper Archive is now free to teachers, libraries, and students and includes Newspaper archives back to 1759! www.newspaperarchive.com Exalead is a new search site which has some nice “advanced features” like searching for a phrase or helping you spell a word. www.exalead.com Click on “advanced” to see those features. Clusty is a nice site for searching as well. It has a simple screen, but […]
Using Wikis
I’m watching a presentation on how to use Wikis for different “in-house” uses, like for posting school policies, sharing curriculum materials within a department, etc. A wiki is like Wikipedia–a site where anyone can easily change, add, or edit it. Some are passworded, and some are not. A whole campus can use it as part of the intranet, or instead of the intranet, in order to facilitate communication across departments. Several presenters talked about how their departmental shared folder areas on their networks were disorganized (Darren […]
Fun with Flickr
I’m now sitting in a session on using Flickr www.flickr.com for libraries, but I see a lot of applications for schools. Some of you may already use Flickr, which is a website that allows you to post photos and “tag” them by subject, share them, etc. They showed us some tools which have great applications for schools. Most of the tools can be found at http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/ Fd’s Flickr Tools. There are tools for making posters, magazine covers, movie advertisement posters, trading cards, etc. For example, […]
Videoblogging?
I just attended a session on videoblogging and podcasting. Although it’s easy enough to figure out what video blogging is, I hadn’t really thought about it that much. David King(of Topeka and Shawnee County Library) who has a website, www.DavidLeeKing.com/etc showed some examples of video blogs that woke me up to the kinds of creative projects our students could do(and are already doing, but not all in a school environment!). This has so many applications for the classroom, as does podcasting. I have more details about […]