More Web 2.0 Tools!

While looking for some resources for a digital storytelling workshop I came across a website called Glogster. Their tag line...Poster Yourself. Basically you take the tired old poster board presentation and turn it into a multimedia presentation. It's pretty cool, but all the prep needs to be done ahead of time.

I decided to create one to see how easy it was and it was! I did learn a few lessons along the way:

1. Type all of your content before you start. I was typing on the fly and uploaded a picture. The web page seemed to freeze while uploading so I hit refresh. Big Mistake! Everything I had typed was erased!

2. Be succinct! You have a variety of text boxes to choose from, all of different sizes. I chose a tag style and didn't have much room to type information. When typing you get a scroll bar, but it doesn't remain after you are done editing the text box.
***Correction: After looking at some student examples I found that you do get a scroll bar, but it doesn't show until you move your mouse over the text box.

3. Don't Refresh! As mentioned above, you lose all your work. Your images, audio and video that has been uploaded stay in their respective sections, but your text disappears along with all the elements you added to the page. I noticed that when uploading items, the page didn't refresh to show that the item was uploaded. To get around this I had to switch tabs. For example, when I uploaded an image, I had to switch to the Frames tab, then back to the Images tab to see if my image uploaded.

Lessons learned, I was glad to finish my glog and publish it. I was concerned about having to stop in the middle, but when I registered for an account to save my glog, I saw that you can go back and edit them later.

Accounts. Yep, everyone needs to have an account. But, they have an educational section where teachers get master accounts and can register their students. You can register up to 200 students and none of them need an email. Best of all, if the teacher sets up a virtual classroom students can only see the glogs by other members of their group and can only communicate with group members. There are additional features that will be added as part of the EDU 2.0 in the near future.

Here's my glog about the Apollo 11 mission.

Alright, you can embed these glogs into pretty much anything, but in the case of my blog post, it doesn't fit. It is embedded as a full size glog and is way to wide for the post area. So, I've just added a link or you can click the image. Enjoy!

This is definitely something to have students use instead of the old poster board or report and simpler than creating a digital story or multimedia project with Scratch or Flash. This is quick, easy and customizable and will engage your students!

A Compensatory Model of Education

This blog post, by Liz B. Davis, is one every educator and educational policy maker should read: Putting Gladwell's Compensatory Model into Practice or NECC 09 Keynote Part 2.

What message are we sending to our kids when we punish them for trying? For taking chances? For being creative? Imaging life if Benjamin Franklin had been content with wearing two pair of glasses, never creating bifocals, or Thomas Alva Edison never attempted the incandescent light bulb, or Alexander Graham Bell turned his interest elsewhere after a failed attempt to send voice over wire?

We use to have a try, try again attitude, but that seems to have given way to a get it right or fail attitude. How can we expect innovation, progress or creativity from our students under this get it right or fail educational system? How can we expect teachers to promote these qualities when their job rests on whether their students get it right?

I have always believed that we have a greater potential to learn from our mistakes and risks than we do from the structured lessons taught in the classroom. What we learn from experience becomes integrated into our being, while prescribed lessons are often lost due to lack of scaffolding or prior knowledge.

As a tech enthusiast I am always trying new things, playing with them and figuring out how they work. I make plenty of mistakes. Take my first foray into web site design. I had an idea in mind and planned it out on paper. The plan was to create five different sections and have each section color coded. I made a page for each section with a menu related to that particular section. Over time I created multiple pages for each section, every time inserting the menu image and creating multiple hot spot links. After creating 20 or more pages I thought (I'm sometimes a bit slow to learn) there's got to be a better way. Then I remembered templates from a crash course in Dreamweaver. Although it took time for me to figure out a more efficient method I was able to learn from the experience and apply what I learned years later when I set up my first wiki. Needing pages for different classes with the same information, I used the template feature to save myself time.

As a tech coach I want my colleagues to realize that they aren't going to break the computer or mess it up and that experimenting is necessary! I want to encourage them to dive in and see what happens because the more they do the more they will see that technology isn't so scary and that so many technologies and tools are very similar. As they become more comfortable, they will be more willing to use different technologies in their classroom. And, hopefully, they'll model that try, try again attitude while encouraging their students to take risks and make mistakes.

Bottom line...without mistakes, risks, or errors we wouldn't be where we are today. Why, then does the educational system discourage this in our students?

Flickr Slideshow

I have managed to embed a set of my Flickr photos using a fairly simple code that is pasted into a Text/HTML gadget. With a set of directions or a helping hand, I think teachers can add one to their blog too! It did take a bit of tweaking to get the size right, but it's pretty good. I do wish it would keep going, but it doesn't .

This would be a great way for teachers to share photos of the class (assuming the students have a media release form on file and it's within district guidelines) or photos of things the class has done.

Comiqs Project

One of the Web 2.0 tools we looked at was Comiqs. I had a sample, just for fun, comic I created.


A Cat's Life from tranquilbriez on Comiqs

Here it is! Again, it was just a matter of copy and paste!

Animoto Test

As part of this whole blog sampling I am embedding various items and projects from my workshop to see which tool works best. You can see my EduBlog entries, too!

This is an Animoto video I created as an example for the workshop.



What I love about Blogger...that fact that all I have to do is copy the embed code and paste it into my post. Voila! It just works! Just like my new Mac...everything just works, no wrestling needed!

Blog Sampler

Last week I taught a series of workshops for teachers on how to use Web 2.0 tools in their classroom. As part of the workshop we looked at using blogs as a professional learning tool, classroom communication tool, and how it can be used by students.

In the presentations I suggested WordPress as a great blog tool, having used it myself (albeit rarely) while my co-presenter preferred Blogger. Although my co-presenter preferred Blogger, she had recently signed up for an EduBlogs account. She shared that with us, but didn't like the ads that showed up. Later in the week she commented that after changing templates there were no more ads.

Most of the workshop participants chose to use Blogger because it synced with the Google account we asked them to create. Having never used Blogger, I learned it right along with them. What I liked about it was the gadgets you could add and how easy it was to embed all the different types of media we found and created.

Doing all of these project with the participants made me want to add some of the same content to my existing blog. So, I created a new post and added an image. No problem. Then I created a new one about the Animoto videos we created and tried to embed it. I copied the embed code and pasted it into the blog post. Nothing happened. After some searching I found that there were only certain widgets (gadgets for you Blogger types) that allowed for insertion of a video. All I could do- for free that is- was insert a link. I could 'upgrade' my account to add videos. But, as an educator looking for free and easy technology, I wasn't happy with that, so I went in search of better answers.

After some searching I found a blog post discussing how VodPod could be used to upload files and media, then its widget could be used to embed them into a WordPress blog. Great! A free method, but it wasn't very user friendly. All of this got me thinking about how a tech-shy teacher would react to using WordPress blogs. I'm thinking they'd give up pretty quickly. That being the case, I needed to find another blog that would be easy to use and suit a classroom's needs.

That brings me to Blogger! I've also created an EduBlogs blog, which is designed by and for teachers and students. So far my tests on EduBlog have gone well and embedding items has been easy. Now I'm adding Blogger to see which is easier, offers better options and will best suit the classroom.

I'll keep you updated and appreciate any other blog suggestions!