Tool #6 - Wikis

I have been concerned lately while inviting students to create digital projects about how to help educate them about copyright and giving credit to their sources. I LOVE the wiki of copyright friendly sites! It is a great source to use when helping students use and create mulitmedia. We need to make sure we encourage students to use information responsibly.
I also loved seeing all the things posted by Mrs. Abernathy's Fifth graders. It seems like her class must be self-contained, and she keeps them very involved in uploading and creating items to use in their blog and wiki. What a great melding of technology with the learning that is obviously taking place. I love all her resources and links, too. I will go back there to use some of the websites as we study historical eras during the year.
I have started a wiki, and have attempted to use it for posting reading responses. It was difficult for me to manage or know how much to REQUIRE or leave as an OPTION. I think I will try again this year to have this as a place for both sections of my class to post and extend their book discussions.

Tool #5 - Social bookmarking

Two new really nifty sites that I found by searching "Web 2.0" in diigo are:
Web 2.0 Guru
and The Teacher Chronicles
Both of these sites had so many resources to explore, try out, and use in the classroom. Some I had heard of through 23 Things, my librarian classes, and 11 Tools, but some are still new to me!

I already had a delicious account that I use with my students and had been wanting to set up another bookmark page for some of my websites for school and library resources. So this time I tried diigo. It is definitely more powerful and a little more complex than delicious. I joined 2 groups after searching "fifth grade" in the Community section. One is called "Digital Storytelling" and the other is "Learning with Computers". I think I will enjoy my "professional" social bookmarking site! this will allow me to keep adding to my students' account on delicious.

Tool #4 - MWE Reader

I was already using a Google Reader to track some personnal and professional feeds. I recently installed an RSS Reader app on my iTouch so I could access them on the go. So for this tool I experimented by setting up a second Google Reader account with my SBISD email to keep track of more teacher websites and fellow MWE teachers. I added 5 MWE teachers and the 11 Tools blog. I might try out other Reader sites as well to be able to separate what I am keeping track of better.

Tool 4 - Google sharing

iTouch Presentation
I want to share a project I am working on through my internship to tell others about what I learned about using the iTouch in the classroom. So I am working on a presentation on Google docs to be able to share with the district librarians and pilot campuses.

Tagxedo Blog Creation

I just learned about another image generator and thought I would share a cloud I created using the words in my blog.

To try it yourself go to Tagxedo! It's fun and has so many options.

Tool 3 Part 2 - Word Sift

I inserted the first part of the Declaration of Independence into the Word Sifter. The image generated showed the most frequent words in the text I selected. There is no way to save this image other than as a screen shot (that I found), so this would be a teaching tool. I would use it as an introduction to a topic of study where I would decide the content, or possibly as a review where the students develop it by suggesting vocabulary words to add. I especially like the other parts of the page, such as the visual thesaurus and images of the most frequent words. This would be great to help our ESL students!

Tool 3 Part 1 - My Glog

I made a personal Glog first with pictures from my family's Disney trip in 2008, but it did not save because I did not make an account first. So, this is my "school" glog about Colonial Day in Fifth grade.
Glogster is a fun site to make a different kind of visual. I think students would enjoy making these instead of traditional posters to share information visually. It could still be used as a "prop" to help their presentation, however it would be a digital version on the ACTIVboard. I could see students posting these into a class blog, Ning, or Wiki so they could all be there for easy access during presentation day!