Favorite Tools

I had several favorites depending on what I wanted to use them for. Smilebox, Animoto, and Vokie I liked for presentations on Morning Announcements. I could have students help put them together. I liked Glogster as I thought it would be an awesome tool for students to present their work...snd of course I loved Edmodo, Wiki and Weeby's for collabrations and displaying student work.

Week 9, Thing 23--Prezi and SlideRocket

Both tools are for presentations.  They are a little fancier than Microsoft Powerpoint.  With a Prezi your work is like on a wall and you link your items in the order you want to show them.  You can have them zoom in ,  zoom out, and rotate in any direction to spotlight the item you are viewing.  This one I'm going to give a try.  SlideRocket is an online presentation tool that is held completely in the cloud so you can access it anywhere anytime.   What was interesting was if you edited a slide that was in several presentations it would automatically edit it in all presentations so all was updated to the latest comments.  This one looked like it would be good for business corporations.  

Week 9, Thing 22

These are posters students can make online.  It's a creative way students can share information and make presentations on what they have learn.  Super!

Week 8 Thing 21--GoAnimate and Storybird

GoAnimate.com: Stripes and Longneck by dlsobien

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

This was very easy to do.  Great for having students present a story or a report.  This one is a text video.  You just type in the words.  GoAnimate added the voice, etc.  As a teacher, be sure to check out  GoAnimate4schools.  Teachers can have up to 100 student accounts free.

Storybird For Teachers is a site for  storytelling.  Students can create their illustrations, add their story and share all online.  The best is that no student e-mails are required.  It's all through the teacher's free account.  So take and look and enjoy.

Week 8 Thing 20--Animoto

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

I like this one.  Students can enter their photos and video clips to quickly produce a 30 second video to music.   Great for quick presentations...the picture transitions from one to another is very cool.  Animoto can automatically do that for you.  You can use the free account or get one of the upgrades.  I can use this during my Morning Announcement Program.

Week 8, Thing 19--Bubblesnaps

This is a sample of Bubblesnaps.  Once you create an account, you upload a picture and add bubble captions.  This is an easy activity to introduce digital storytelling.  The account stores up to 18 photos.

Interesting Tech Tool--For Announcements

This little collabrating tech tools was made at http://www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp .  There are a few other choices there as well.

Week 7 Thing 18--Taxedo

Tagxedo is a program in which the word wall can be created in a shape.  The words can come speeches, essays, blogs, etc.  Tagxedos are fun and easy to create.  If you have a challenge with trying to save the snippit code to embed your project, you would  left click on the code, hit Ctrl-A (to select all) and then hit Ctrl-C (to copy). Go to your document and hit Ctrl-V to paste.

Week 7, Thing 18--Wordle

Wordle is a word wall created on "the cloud."  Easy and quick for spelling, language arts, vocabulary and any other subject that needs a word wall created.  It can be printed and published but the program does not save it. To keep a copy of it on the computer for later use you would need to make a copy of the screen (Fn Key + F11 Key).  (Note: When I used those keys my laptop didn't seem like it made a copy of the screen.  However, when I went to paste,  it was there.)  Next you need to open up the Paint Program in Accessories and paste the photo in.  Then select Save As, name your photo and be sure to change the file to a JPEG file.  Save it and when you open it up, it will open in Microsoft Office Picture Manager.  Look for the Crop button to crop of the parts you do not want...then save for a clean sharp picture to use as you would like.  This sounds like a lot but once you do it a couple of times it will be easy.   Once your Wordle is made Randomize it to see the variety of Wordles from the same list of words.  Pretty cool.