11.5 things - Thing #2

I like Wordle much better than Wordsift. The resulting pictures are much more interesting and you can manipulate them in more creative ways. I can see using Wordle as a hook to get the students to pick out the most important concepts in a new unit and as a way for the students to present their vocabulary definitions more creatively. I do like the fact that the WordSift words become hot links but I think that is not worth the lack of creativity.

Glogster is very beautiful. I could never be that creative/professional on my own. I want to try to summarize a unit or concept with Glogster on my own and then have the students do some as well. It also seems like a great way to introduce the procedures for a science lab. I think it would be great to have the students turn in an online poster. I wonder how much it costs to print them?

VoiceThread is fun. I want to post some pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and have a discussion about what the students are seeing. I need to explore how easy it is to set everything up. Also fun for talking about family pictures, as seen in the demo.

Animoto seems really awesome. I want to learn more about sharing videos and what level of access we already have at school. I know some teachers have used them with the students already and the work is really excellent.

I'd like to see more of Voki but I couldn't get a good connection to watch the featured teacher video.

Bookr is really easy to use and to publish. I don't like the fact that you can only put one picture on a page or the fact that your book is automatically shared with everyone. Students could use Bookr instead of PowerPoint or KeyNote or PhotoStory. But I like that you can do other things with those tools in addition to photobooks. Bookr seems pretty limited.