Weebly : more than just a funny sounding name !

Kelly Breiner and Deborah Lazar introduced their "Stem Cell Controversy" Weeblyquest at this year's NICE mini-conference.
Click Here to view and see more examples and tutorials.

Field Guide For Change Agents

Check out this SlideShare Presentation: Inspiration from Educon

Field Guide For Change Agents

View more presentations from Ben Hazzard.

From the Economist: Time Spent on Social Networks

Steve Dembo's NICE presentation on Web 2.0 Tools

Top 10 FREE Web 2.0 Tools for Educators
http://prezi.com/hpcbrgrfmzeq/

What is web 2.0??:

--Entirely web-based -No need to install anything
--Platform doesn't matter
--Interactive - act of creation
--Plays well with others - content is portable; mixes/matches with others

Steve's Top Ten for Today

1)Wallwisher--add sticky notes to a wall; double click to open a sticky --aggregate ideas! immediacy factor. No need to set up an account. Use it to get feeback; share group reflections; Classroom students leave remarks while watching a video; students comment on themes - then collaboratively organize them. Also ask for feedback on a topic via twitter.
You can add a YouTube video. You can add web links. You can pre-approve students comments.

2) delicious - tasty bookmarks!
Bookmarks saved online and get to them anywhere. Social aspects...you can search others' delicious bookmarks. You can see how many have bookmarked a site, how people have tagged a site & who has bookmarked it & when! Can also combine others' tags to narrow your searches. Erika Eich suggested we use delicious book marks instead of webpage/categories.
Can create an rss feed to someone's bookmarks; you can subscribe to the feed. You can put this feed into your google reader and updates will be automatic.
Scuttle is a version of delicious you can set up behind a fire-wall.


3) edu.glogster.com -- open platform for creating multimedia posters Has huge library of images/audio to put on posters. Librarians can aggregate booktalks with this software. Teacher can set up accounts. Account set up will be changing soon.
Can embed audio (to give students instructions), can embed video.
Poster can link to articles. Students watch video, take a quiz. Great way to allow students to demonstrate what they have learned. Can be used as a classroom news letter. Could use for library pathfinders!

4) wordle - word clouds created automatically when you import text. Idea - you can give weight to different words
Name the biome (based on viewing the word cloud)! Put State of the Union address and create wordle so that we can see what Obama has emphasized. Can use for different languages.


5)edmodo - (like Twitter, only designed by an educator!) Doesn't have randomness of Twitter. This is a closed community that you can set up for a classroom. You can set up some parts for others to see outside.
Easy links to attach files and urls. Can mark things with assignments/due dates. Developed by Jeff O'Hara, --educator to be interviewed on ABC Channel 5 later this week. (Can embed Chalk interface into your Edmodo) Very cool feature. I really need to try this one!!

6)ipadio - drop dead easy way to do podcasts. Phonecast live to the world, any phone, anywhere! Is amazingly easy. Use your phone to dial in, totally free, and do your podcast. Enter your PIN number.
Record, hit # and podcast is posted. Works on landline or cell phone. Also transcribes your podcast into text! Can get embed codes to put on your blogs.


7)kidblog.org drop dead simple. It's a WordPress product. Maintains editorial layers for student protection. Teacher registers and then creates student accounts. Student logs into classroom site with his own url. Cannot create own theme. Light weight yet robust system. There is an approve/disapprove function which works well for middle school students - moderation function. No frills super safe blogging for kids.

8) Voicethread Group conversations around videos, docs, images! Very interactive--multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate pages and leave comments in 5 ways - using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). Share a VoiceThread with friends, students, and colleagues for them to record comments too.

9) Poll Everywhere - Live Audience Polling; classroom response. Polls and voting; audience response system. Ask your audience a question. They answer using SMS text messages, Twitter, or the web. See real-time results in your web browser or PowerPoint. This worked well as we all texted our responses to Steve about our favorite Web 2.0 tool.Poll Everywhere is free for people who need to collect 30 or fewer responses per poll.

10)prezi This was the zooming presentation software used by Steve to show all the tools. They are expanding it to have an educator version and also a "re-use" feature which allows others to borrow your work and mash it up! I have used this great new product when I did a Facebook presentation last fall at ISLMA. Something to teach our students who are bored to death with PowerPoint.

NICE Mini-Conference Stevenson High School 1/30/2010

Today at the NICE conference Erika Eich, Julia Kessel, & Judy Gressel presented classroom uses for Photo Story. Examples featured were Chinese Language stories and Photo Story Book talks for a sophomore independent reading project.

Click here to view PhotoStory Resources, including copyright friendly and copyleft sources for pictures and sound.

PhotoStory 3 is a free download from Microsoft and is a very simple light-weight program for creating digital stories.

More ideas for classroom uses. See suggestions below.

Science class - phases of a cell; scientific processes

History - annotate/narrate a famous picture from Civil Rights era

Spanish language - practicing four skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing. We will certainly add other suggested ideas.

Introduction to your school -- Let students take pictures of people and places around the school. Import the pictures and let students narrate (from their written script), add some music. Use for Open House.

Fieldtrips -- Take pictures during a fieldtrip, import them into Photostory, have the children sequence them, write a storyboard to go with the show, have the children narrate. Once the show is finished, you can run it during Open House or for guests.

Interviews of parents, people in the community, siblings, school personnel, etc. Oral history projects would be great!

Family Interviews -- Students interview a grandparent or other relative, then use pictures taken during the interview, or family photographs, to create a pictorial version of the interview.

A Tale of Two MLA Bibliographies

Mark Sample, a professor of Contemporary American Literature and New Media Studies in the English Department at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia recently asked his blog readers to weigh in on whether they prefer URLs to be included in MLA bibliographies for websites. A whopping 74% agreed with him that website URLs should be included. (Take the poll).

I agree with Mark that eliminating URLs for articles coming from databases like JSTOR is just fine as long as the journal name, volume and issue number are there. I would also agree that the exclusion of URLs from websites seems misguided when many web sites offer stable, concise permalinks.

I will continue to train our Jr. theme research students to use URLs for websites as one way of distinguishing database materials for "born online" materials. Unfortunately the new MLA format uses "web" as the source whether it's a database or a website. This does not help students who don't recognize the difference.

Visit 140 University

I just started following Jane Hart on Twitter. Apparently I am her first follower. the 140 University is just one part of Jane Hart's Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies (C4LPT).
Extend your education via Twitter or Facebook

140 University Description:
Twitter and Facebook are great places to discover and share new things. 140 University is a free service that provides you with classes in the form of knowledge nuggets and related links to web pages, videos, etc - in less than 140 characters. Explore the classes that you are interested in!

On Twitter

* To receive the classes: follow @140university
* To comment on the classes or share your own class (in the same format: tweet to @140university and we will re-tweet

On Facebook

* To receive the classes: become a fan of the Facebook 140 University page
* To comment on a class, use Facebook's Comment functionality.
* To deliver your own class: leave the details in the Discussion Area and we will re-post it.

Open to all - classes are delivered 4 times a day, 7 days a week
Classes are organized by subject area and archived.

Some of these "classes" or "knowledge nuggets" seem to be a compendium of trivia. Perhaps they will be a gateway for delving into a topic in more depth.