GoAnimate and Pocketmod
During my daily travels on the web and through edtech journals, I am always finding new tools (I especially like the free ones…). Then I try to figure out which teacher can best use the new thing and come up with some ideas. Recently I sent the link to GoAnimate to our middle school TAG teacher. Her students loved it! They have created historical and political animations. One grade used it to create recycling commercials.
Another tool I ran across and passed along to a lot of teachers was Pocketmod. It calls itself the free, recylable personal organizer, but I saw it as a wonderul way to make pocket-sized study guides. The TAG students used it to create storybooks for kindergarden and first grade students. A sixth grade science class used it to create study sheets for their benchmark exams.
December 15th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Mel, yesterday and today I’ve been reading all the web 2.0 course content on blogs and came across the link to your blog. I see you post pretty much weekly. Enjoyed reading this posting. I’ll have to have a look at go animate. If you’d include a link to some of the work produced by the class you mentioned, I’m sure folks would enjoy it.
I think I’ll add a bit on the blog assignment page. One way of catagorizing classroom use of blogs would be into threse three divisions:
1. A teacher maintained blog with regular thoughts or assignments. –more or less a classroom web page.
2. A teacher initiated blog, with numerous postings which students are expected to comment on…trying to provoke thought and discussion the way the Richard III blog and Mel Walker’s blogs work.
3. Student blogs–where the student initiates and maintains the blog, fulfilling the same purpose as a journal in an English class. Practice writing, venting opinions, etc.
I think there might need to be some clarificaiton of these categories—the directions om the document centere for edublogs are intended for teachers who wish to have their students do student blogs, not for teachers who want to use blogs in one of the first two categories above.
anyway, this is way off the subject of your blog. Do you get some sort of notice when people comment on your blog>