Bubl.us A really cool brainstorming application, Bubl.us is a quick and easy tool for having students plan out projects, share ideas with each other/the teacher and print individualized graphic organizers as proof of pre-writing activities.
Voicethread is a site which allows someone to post pictures and videos online for a selected community to view and comment on from any location in multiple different ways (meaning commentators can record actual voice messages in response to images, write text which corresponds, or even draw pictures on top of the pictures to highlight certain characteristics of the image). This site could be used for a number of different purposes, but I find it an ideal way to have students respond to muti-media materials in creative and highly interactive ways.
Flickr, an enormous database for images, flickr can be used in conjunction with voicethread to search for and import images to be commented on by students and teachers alike. I envision that this could be a great tool for inquiry based lessons where the students find their own personally meaningful materials.
Delicious is a quick and easy way to publicly bookmark interesting websites. By linking this in with my edublog, I can find interesting articles I would like my students to read and respond to and leave the link on my home page.
Diigo will be used in conjunction with delicious in that once students have the link, they can make the page their own. I mean this in the sense that they can leave extra notes on the web page, or highlight (literally) certain segments of text to point out parts of interest or other noteworthy characteristics about the bookmarked page. I can see this being one of the more useful and fun applications to use in class if the students are introduced to it in a thourough way and scaffolded through the first few projects, there is no limit to the kind of interesting projects students could do with it. I have in mind projects where the conventions of certain genres of writing can be identified and explained in a practical visual way.
youtube, not much explaining necessary here. I think this is a tool that all our students should be versed in by an early age, not only for the personal uses they may be able to get out of it, but to have a public venue from which their work can be viewed which gives their projects more excitement and value.
Wetpaint, one of Don's favs, this site allows for the building of a private online learning community in which members can post and share information as well as congregate and communicate quickly and easily. This would be an ideal "home" site for a classroom which will have daily/weekly/monthly class calendars as well as links to all the other sites/applications used in the classroom.
edublog
A blogging site designed for teachers and students, this application provides more security options and more administrative control than typical blogging sites. If I am teaching in a class where students have daily access to their own laptops (which I will in the coming year), Edublogs would be a wonderful organization tool and a very cost effective way of having students do daily writes or keep up with journals from school or home. By not using actual physical paper, not only will the school be saving money, the students will not have the "I lost my notebook" excuse, and teachers will be able to keep dated, referenceable copies of the documents written for class.
Wikipedia, probably the most obvious of the sites that should be used, I think this revolutionary site is important because students will most likely be coming back to this again, and again, and again throughout their school career. If the democratic benefits and faults of this site are to be understood, I think students need to get their hands dirty, create their own pages, criticize others and see how information is added to/gathered from this source and how it can be either useful or erroneous. It is essential that the students can discern between these two...
Wordle is kind of a cool site that creates word clouds based upon text that you import into the application. Not a whole lot to it as far as I can see, but may be helpful in continually adding onto in order to to give students a more visual picture of the themes/topics covered in a class.
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