February 15, 2011

Homework Challenge Through Technology (Part 2)

Here are more tools to jazz up the homework we give!!

Dvolver is a tool to create online animations. You choose the characters, write the dialogues, add some music and publish it.You can get a link or embed (place) it on your blog/website. Children can create their own dialogues, write dialogues between two different characters. They can watch a Dvolver animation and they can write their own dialogues or they can vocalize the characters as they watch the animation. Children can watch the animation and write an ending or a beginning for it or answer some open ending questions.

TalkingPets is a site where you can make the pets talk using text-to-speech application. You can choose different voices and even accessorize your pet. If you want, you can upload your own pet’s picture and make it talk. Children can make the pets talk about their likes and dislikes, what they like to do or they can listen a pet and answer his/her questions.

ScrapBlog is a similar site to MixBook. You can create your own storybooks with your pictures, videos, text, shapes, stickers. You can change the background and customize your book. You can also create cards, invitation and slide shows. Children can create their own family, holiday, best friends albums using their pictures and using text or videos to give information about them. They can make a book of a traditional story or create their own stories customizing it. Children can also visualize a story that they have read or they can create posters or projects using this tool.

BubbleJoy lets you create and design video greeting cards by simply using your web cam. You choose a background and film yourself talking via web cam. When you finish, you can share it with others. Children can create their own video greetings for different occasions such as birthdays, Valentine’s day, Easter, Christmas or Mother’s day. Children can create their own stories that are related to the theme they have chosen. Children can keep a diary and talk about their one day.

PhotoPeach is a tool to create slide shows and online quizzes on your slides. You upload your photos, add your text, choose your music and create your slide show. You can get a link or the code to place it on your blog/website. Children can create their own quizzes or answer the questions of a PhotoPeach quiz. Children can create their own slide shows that tell a story of theirs.

Bubblr lets you create comic strips using photos from Flickr. You search for photos and add bubbles to tell your story. Children can create their own comic strips that tell a story. They can create their presentation about their holidays, birthdays, friends, families. If children have their own Flickr accounts, that would be much better. They can add bubbles to their own pictures and make their pictures talk. Children can add bubbles to the pictures of the words they have learnt.

Bookr is a tool to create an online book using pictures from Flickr photos. You can add as many pages as you want. You can get a link to place it on your blog or website. Children can create their own stories using their own pictures from their Flickr accounts. Children can be asked to write scripts for the pictures that the teacher has created on Bookr. Children can read the Bookr story and write an ending or a beginning to it or even find a title for the book. Children can retell a story ,write biographies for famous people or give recipes to each other.

Jing is a tool to take a picture or narrate what you see on your computer. You can easily get a link or the embed code for the video to place it on your computer. Children can narrate their presentations on different topics such as biographies, a journey using Google Earth. Children can record their voices while they are surfing on internet, searching for things, they can narrate how they solve a problem or how they finish a digital game. They can read aloud to improve pronunciation skills. Teachers can narrate tutorials, do pronunciation activities, give feedback to their students’ work.

Fotobabble is a tool to create talking photos. You upload your picture and record your voice using your microphone and publish it. Children can create postcard for different occasions, record their voices to leave messages or they can sing songs. Children can create a short story or read a poem.

Toondoo lets you create your own comic strips. You can change the background, draw your own character or choose one from the gallery, place objects on the background and move them around the scene. You can get a link or upload them to your computer as a picture and use it on Word or PowerPoint. Children can create their own comic strips on different topics, they can create a comic strip using a famous person. Children can write in the bubbles on a ready comic strip. Children can retell a story on a comic that has recently happened to them. Children can leave comments to each other’s comic.

These tools can help you to spice up your content by integrating technology into the homework that you prepare for kids. This is a good challenge for us and for our students as well.

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009

Here comes Jane Hart’s growing list of tools for learning professionals. You can also contribute to this list by sending your top 10 tools for learning. I’m the 106th contributor on the list.
Here is my top 10 list:
1.Wikispaces: Collaborative wikis are my very first favourite on the list. You can create your own social workplace and collaborate with your colleagues to create any projects you want. I have been using my wikispace as my e-portfolio. Also, we have a wikispace that we exchange our ideas at school with my colleagues for more than three years now. Here is the video of Common Craft “Wikis in Plain English”
2.Twitter: : This is the micro-blogging site that you simply answer one question “What are you doing?” using not more than 140 letters. People are tweeting about latest events,new blog posts,new sites and I have been having more fun and I learn a lot more than I thought I would. Here comes CommonCraft’s “Twitter in Plain English” video.
3.Animoto: The easiest and the best site to create slideshow. You can easily narrate your pictures with text and music. Here are the examples of animoto slideshows that our 2nd and 3rd grade students created.The first one is about “Responsibilities“, the other one is about “Traffic Signs“.
4.Ning: is another social networking site that you can use to collaborate with your students or your colleagues.
5.Wordle: This is a nice site to create word clouds from the text you provide. Why not give a try? You can see my wordle of top 10 list at the beginning of this post.
6.Secondlife: This is the 3D world that you can interact with all other people all over the world. I am a new user on Secondlife but I had the chance to have a walk, dance, chat and even go to British Council’s island and travel around the island on the Loch Ness monster. There are so many online sessions that are being held on Secondlife and what a pity that I couldn’t attend any of them.
7.Voki: You can get your talking avatar using voki. You customize your character and record your voice with a microphone. Here is a voki that a 6 year old EFL student created.
8.Voicethread: Here comes my favourite podcasting & digital storytelling tool. You can create voice group conversations whether it is video, audio, documents or pictures. Here are two examples of voicethread.”Little Elephant” and “Traffic Rules“.
9.Glogster: is an online poster where you can create your page using vidoes, audios, pictures, links and animated stuff. I have been using my glog as an introduction to my e-portfolio.
10.Pimpampum: There are different applications that you can use in your classes. My favourites are Bookr (You create your e-book using Flickr pictures and adding your text), Bubblr (You can create your comic strips using Flickr pictures and bubbles), Phrasr (You can find pictures from Flickr that match with your words)
When we think the internet not only as a place to look up stuff, we’ll see all the benefits and the fun part of it.