I have been taking an e-class through my education department and have learned about Google sites. Now – I’ve had a wiki for a few years that I’ve used with my classes and homebound students. I think the Google sites are much easier and more intuitive to use for beginners; but they also have enough ‘bling’ for a more advanced user’s wants.

Several uses that have been listed on my class’s discussion board for Google sites outside of student use with projects included professional collaboration. Administrative schedules could be posted. Announcements could quickly be uploaded and updated. Documents via google docs could be updated in real time thus saving multiple versions of a document floating around in email-world.

On-line, real-time collaboration between rooms, schools, and countries just keeps getting easier and easier. What are you waiting for?

Click on the “click here” button to see new possibilities. My thoughts for this in my classroom would be to use this when kids need a break from the usual routine, when things are getting stale, on early out days and class periods are short, and so on. Once you see how it works, you could also make your own options with your own curriculum and choices for how/what type activities and let kids draw from a hat. Then give them 20 or so minutes to get set, do whatever researching they need to do, practice, and then have them hit the stage! This would be lots of fun and the kids may not even realize they are learning as well as doing a little teaching.

Come see the quick (FREE) wordle I created with the tweets that were generated during this mornings presentation by Ted McCain at the Special Education Teacher Leader Academy in Charleston, WV.

This tools is great to use in so many ways in the classroom – and extremely easy. Check out the gallery for some more inspiration.

Here’s how I did this – all the tweets had the hash mark and tag of #SETLA somewhere in the tweet message. This was agreed upon at the beginning of the conference so we could easily search them out later on. Then I went to the twitter homepage and searched for #SETLA and had returned all the tweets with that tag. I cut and pasted them into Word.

The way that Wordle works is returning a graphic with the most commonly used words in the chosen text with different sizes and colors. I didn’t want the usernames of the tweeters to show up so I used the “find and replace” feature in word for each username and replaced it with an empty space. Then I highlighted, copied and pasted it into the Wordle website and clicked on “GO”. If I liked the created graphic, I could publish it or print it. If I didn’t like it I could change some of the colors and options as well as click ‘randomize’ for a completely different look. If a couple of particular words showed up that I didn’t want, I went back to the Word document and again, used find and replace to delete that undesired word. Copy and paste again back into Wordle.

Like it? Publish it!

If you would like to play a game that an online teacher has created with various Wordles, go over to Guess The Wordle.

Photo Story 3 is a free download for Windows XP and greater computers. It is a program that is very easy to learn and show others how to create their own digital movies, narrate them, set them to music tracks, and publish them for others to view. Students can create their own videos for just about any topic you can think of. Turn them loose with a couple of digital cameras and see what they can come up with. Don’t have any digital cameras? Use Flickr to search for photographs relating to the topic and have students use those.

Here are directions on how to download music to Photo Story 3 from a CD as well as general Photo Story directions. (The directions on downloading music were created by Melissa Given.)

There are some ideas and websites listed below for inspiration.

The following activities are just a few samples from TeachersInTouch.
* Learn how to create a farewell, end-of-year video file that will be remembered long after the streamers are cleaned up and the DJ has gone home. Using still images and text, you can create a video file complete with music and narration using Microsoft Photo Story.

* What I should have done in the holidays – Students always write a recount of what they did in their holidays. Here is a way to make their recount dynamic and more meaningful. Using Photo Story 3, students narrate their
recounts making their everyday recount come to life in visual and audio multimedia.

* In this activity, students create a Photo Story video file using still images, text, narration and sound files to advertise and promote sun safety. Throughout this lesson, students will gain an understanding and appreciation of their home climate and its affect on skin.

* Waltzing Matilda – In this activity, students are asked to analyse the meaning behind a well known song or quote. Students create a visual audio story using Microsoft Photo Story and synchronize it with a PowerPoint presentation detailing the song lyrics along with their own interpretation.

Websites with examples:

Digitalcamerasined – a wiki with resources on using digital photography in general in the classroom along with Photo Story 3. Lots of great ideas!

ReadWriteThink - Here is a website that has a lesson plan and activities using Photo Story 3 and/or Movie Maker from the ReadWriteThink site.

But here’s one way to play at least a little bit with one of the great “old” toys. Remember Mr. Potato Head? I even had Mrs. Potato Head and had a blast playing with them. As I got older I thought that their “storage compartment” was hysterical and even now kind of wish that my “storage compartment” would be so easy to unload! LOL!

ANYWAY presenting....Mr. Picassohead – Fun site that would be great to play with on a Smartboard/Whiteboard – have a couple of students create a “head” and then have a writing activity based around the emotions expressed by the face, or a poem about how the head came to look that way, or a story about this alien who just happened to show up in our class…………

You could also just flip through the gallery for some inspiration for that writing assignment. Here is the one that I created in about 3 minutes.

And guess what? You also sneaked in some learning about a particular artists’ style. shhh…don’t tell the kids you did that…kind of like extra vitamins in the milk shake…:)

This is an on-line, graphic, collaborative way to brainstorm. Take a look at a sample screen shot:

Bubbl.us is stripped down to the necessary buttons and features. It states that one of its main goals is simplicity – such that a 6th grader can figure it out in 10 seconds or less.

And guess what else I found for you? A teacher who actually uses this program with his class, assigns them to create “mindmaps” and then also requires them to post the maps to their blogs!! What an inspiration to me this teacher is! Be sure to click on that link and spend some time scouting around his and his students’ efforts.

With second semester beginning – I can always use a bit of excitement and inspiration to get my enthusiasm back up, I think this could well help with the winter classroom “blahs”.

Basically this is a site that allows viewers to record their thoughts about whatever you post for them to look at. If you give them a picture to use as a writing prompt, the students can record their though verbally with only the use of a microphone! Or if you don’t have microphones, they can type in their responses. Viewers can listen/read all other submissions too!

To check out some inspiration for the classroom, click on the tab that says “classroom” and then click the box labeled bell work.

Talk about great feedback and a reinforcement tool students can use to recall what they learned about a particular diagram or issue. I am excited about this!

Here is the VoiceThread that i created quickly using a few pictures from our latest vacation.

So – the first hurdle is getting students to at least have a working relationship with words and sometimes that’s easier said than written…er…done…

One tool that could hook their interest could be the Comic Creator. This site gives students several pre-made backgrounds, characters, and props in order to tell their story. Students could retell the plot of The Tell-Tale Heart or come up with an alternate ending to The Pit and the Pendulum. You could create a weekly strip using students for the characters and make a bulletin board with them or add them to the class newspaper. A couple of draw backs to this particular site are the choices are rather limited and printing is only in black & white. However, it’s a good start.

KABAM! is another comic strip site but this one has pre-created strips with story lines. The cool thing about this site is the stories have to do with typical teenage issues and the creator is asked to help finish the story and as a reward for answering correctly, they get to create their own stories. Excellent site for students to have access to if they have some extra time on their hands.

Another excellent tool for students to learn how words can interact is the acrostic word puzzle. Acrostic puzzles are ones that use the letters in a word as the first letter in other words that describe the first word. This can get kids to really exercise their brains in thinking of adjectives, adverbs, strong verbs to help spice up their poems. Once finished, kids can print them out and then decorate or mount on paper to show off to friends and you.

Once kids learn to have an enjoyable passing acquaintance with words, stringing them together into sentences and paragraphs can be less painful for all involved – hopefully.